Wednesday, December 29, 2004
Pay attention to marketing
In 1937 Ronald H. Coase published "The Nature of the Firm," a brilliant analysis of why organizations and their managers exist. That article also provides the economic rationale for today's "downsizing" and "outsourcing," and Dr. Coase eventually received the Nobel prize in Economics for the body of work that followed.
However, the theme of this web log comes from Dr. Coase's reply, in 1997, when he was asked whether he believed we are "embarking on a golden age of economic expansion." "I think we could be," he said, but he added a note of caution. "Whether we'll mess things up is another thing," Coase said. "There are more wrong ways of doing a thing than right ways."
I have been teaching the subject of marketing to college students for 34 years. Marketing managers and their organizations pursue their goals individually, but the collective social consequences of their decisions influences how we think about ourselves and others.
Marketers seek to achieve their goals by providing goods and services that people want but in doing so they also influence what we want. Everyone who grows up in our modern consumer societies develops beliefs and attitudes that are strongly affected by what we learn as consumers and the object of marketers' attention.
In short, marketing and our reaction to it is creating the future we all will live in. The implication of Dr. Coase's note of caution is that if we don't individually and collectively think about the implications of marketing decisions, we are likely to be creating a future that is less satisfactory than what would could otherwise achieve. That is, if we don't actively manage the direction our society is taking it is more likely to turn out badly than well.
Two examples of marketing's effect on our present and future are: violence as entertainment and an obsession with body-image. Young people today grow up inundated by vivid images of violence in publications, in cinema, on television, and in video games. It's hard to believe that exposure to all the violence doesn't have some negative impact--insensitivity to the plight of others, for example. The fact that females are so much more likely than males to suffer from eating disorders is hardly surprising given the heavy promotion of slim, carefully lit and made-up women in images retouched to eliminate even the slightest blemishes.
Marketing does matter; it is largely responsible of our extraordinarily rich standard of living, but it also can lead to less desirable consequences. Therefore, it is important that we take note of the current state-of-the-art of marketing practice and to ponder the extent to which we are (or are not) creating a future we want to live in).
However, the theme of this web log comes from Dr. Coase's reply, in 1997, when he was asked whether he believed we are "embarking on a golden age of economic expansion." "I think we could be," he said, but he added a note of caution. "Whether we'll mess things up is another thing," Coase said. "There are more wrong ways of doing a thing than right ways."
I have been teaching the subject of marketing to college students for 34 years. Marketing managers and their organizations pursue their goals individually, but the collective social consequences of their decisions influences how we think about ourselves and others.
Marketers seek to achieve their goals by providing goods and services that people want but in doing so they also influence what we want. Everyone who grows up in our modern consumer societies develops beliefs and attitudes that are strongly affected by what we learn as consumers and the object of marketers' attention.
In short, marketing and our reaction to it is creating the future we all will live in. The implication of Dr. Coase's note of caution is that if we don't individually and collectively think about the implications of marketing decisions, we are likely to be creating a future that is less satisfactory than what would could otherwise achieve. That is, if we don't actively manage the direction our society is taking it is more likely to turn out badly than well.
Two examples of marketing's effect on our present and future are: violence as entertainment and an obsession with body-image. Young people today grow up inundated by vivid images of violence in publications, in cinema, on television, and in video games. It's hard to believe that exposure to all the violence doesn't have some negative impact--insensitivity to the plight of others, for example. The fact that females are so much more likely than males to suffer from eating disorders is hardly surprising given the heavy promotion of slim, carefully lit and made-up women in images retouched to eliminate even the slightest blemishes.
Marketing does matter; it is largely responsible of our extraordinarily rich standard of living, but it also can lead to less desirable consequences. Therefore, it is important that we take note of the current state-of-the-art of marketing practice and to ponder the extent to which we are (or are not) creating a future we want to live in).
Murph 2:34 PM