Ever since economic surpluses were generated through efficient production systems, marketing, as a social activity, has been assuming proportions of relevance. The ever-changing behavior of human beings is the prime reason for the dynamism in the discipline of marketing. Marketing, after World War II, has been changing faster than ever before and trends thereafter have been of great interest for an observer. Borrowing, lending, modifying, redefining and more, have been happening. The author here attempts to portray some of the trends that may drive the discipline of marketing in the era to come.
Recently, the author of this paper had to make a presentation to a group of faculty members on the trends in marketing. It was very difficult for him to precisely mention "these are the trends in marketing". The reasons for such a predicament largely rest with the discipline of marketing. Marketing is an opinionated discipline as opposed to other academic disciplines like Physics and Chemistry. Each individual may have his own theory which would be very different and often diametrically opposite from the views of another individual on the same aspect. Yet both may be termed as valid by an observer using appropriate logic. Therefore, the trends are not necessarily standard and uniform across the people who comment.
Additionally, as marketing is concerned with people, we see that there is a significant non-universality in the practice of marketing. This is because of the fact that man is a social animal and one of major profiling bases of a human being is the platform of culture that significantly varies across global geographies. It is not to say that everything is localinstead, the attempt is only to appreciate that there is a significant localization within the large global entity. Therefore, to understand the trends, the destinations and the pathways of marketing, a visit to a couple of definitions of marketing would be of immense help. While marketing practice is as old as the civilization of mankind, the theory of marketing is very young and one of the early definitions of this young discipline goes as follows: |
