Marketing
Issue No. 27 - February/March
A champion of marketing
by Dr David Corkindale and Dr David Corkindale
Before looking ahead I want to reflect on the wisdom and foresight of a great advocate of marketing, Peter Drucker, who died, at 93, near the end of 2005.
It was Drucker who first asked managers to decentralize their operations and treat their employees like humans — in the 1940s. The concept of “knowledge worker” is his coinage, from the 1950s.
He virtually created the discipline of corporate social responsibility, in the late 1960s.
Just as the Berlin Wall was being knocked down in November, 1989, I happened to be in London and visited a major bookshop. In the Management section there was a new Peter Drucker book, published earlier in the year. Flicking through it I saw a sentence that read “When the Berlin Wall comes down this year or next…” He must have written that a year beforehand! No one else was publicly forecasting that so confidently, and he was right, as usual.
Drucker’s influential epithets advocating marketing, some dating back more than 50 years, are:
- The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.
- Business has only two functions - marketing and innovation.
- The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.
Many businesses invested in marketing and marketing as a degree course blossomed. However, accomplished business people like Dave Packard of Hewlett Packard have subsequently said, “Marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department.”
Is this attitude correct nowadays?
During 2005 there have been many articles questioning the role and worth of marketing; marketing departments have been reorganized and downsized. Is this the future?
Marketing decline or cycle?
One of the more well-informed articles commenting upon the state of marketing, The Decline and Dispersion of Marketing Competence1, is the result of an extensi...
