Introduction: Marketing in the Contemporary Organisation'

This book aims to provide an overview of the latest developments in scholarship and practice in marketing and, importantly, make clear links between the two. We have selected key topics that are currently impacting on the way marketing is researched and practised, and we use these to explore newly emergent marketing ideas and applications. By locating these topics in their wider global, social and economic contexts, we also raise a series of theoretical concerns surrounding the interrelationships between marketing, society and culture. We do this against the backdrop of marketing’s rele vance in the contemporary organization. During a discussion of current business opportunities with CEOs from fi ve major UK companies Brown noticed that ‘The term “marketing ” was mentioned only a couple of times in an hour of intense exchange. Yet customers, clients and competitiveness were on the executives ’ minds throughout the discussion ’ (2005, p. 3). Marketing’s perceived lack of relevance is worrying. Many commentators have blamed this decline on an inadequate conception by both academics and practitioners of what marketing actually is. Thus, before we go on to give an outline of our topic selections, we review some of the current debates about the nature of the marketing role in contemporary organizations. This review provides a background context for the specifi c topics that follow. First, however, we highlight some of the problems with the defi nition of marketing.