An Analysis of the Fundamentals of Marketing (part 1)

A Functionalist Approach to Marketing

by

Charles Lamson

Bell (1966) discusses marketing’s debt to systems theory, in particular to cybernetics, ‘the

science of control and communication in the animal and in the machine’, first developed by Norbert Wiener. This focuses attention on marketing as part of a social system. Generally, the approach used in this book I am analyzing entitled Fundamentals of Marketing is managerialist, focused on the perspective of the firm rather than that of the customer. Both firms and customers are considered in relation to the environment in which they seek to survive. The view is that firms can best survive when they seek to ensure the survival and satisfaction of the customers on whom they depend. This approach enables the following concepts to be explored:

• The role played by marketing in helping firms control and successfully adapt to the environment by means of a focus on customer needs. 
• Customer orientation plays a key role in the satisfaction of organizational goals, usually profit. 
• The behavior of firms when competition is intense and survival is the goal.
•  A focus on competitors including the destruction of a competitor may best ensure the continued existence of the organism (Bell, 1966). 
• The role of marketing in its wider social and environmental context.

This functionalist approach follows the managerialist focus of the marketing ‘mainstream’ orientation. It helps to understand why marketing has a paradoxical orientation both to the customer and to warfare; however, it also enables looking outside of the relatively narrow context to those wider issues which are the concerns of macro-marketing, social marketing and ‘new’ approaches such as relationship marketing. The approach taken by the writers of Fundamentals of Marketing is to focus on traditional marketing while incorporating aspects of relationship marketing and internal marketing. 

This book concentrates on the traditional marketing activities.

*SOURCE: FUNDAMENTALS OF MARKETING, 2007, MARILYN A. STONE, JOHN DESMOND, PG. 25*

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