Functionalism
by
Charles Lamson
The functionalist approach was a major development in marketing and is the approach which
has been used for the design of this book that I am analyzing, Fundamentals of Marketing. The functionalist approach differs from the
functional approach mentioned in an earlier post in that it develops a systems approach to marketing,
whereby behavior is considered to be systemic and goal-driven. The functionalist approach
derives in large part from the theories of the biologist Charles Darwin. Within this view
the goal of marketing is to effectively match firms’ supply with household demand.
Functionalism is important because it views firms and households as organisms which must
find some point of equilibrium (homeostasis) in relation to each other and the environment
on which they both depend. This ecological view forms the basis of several approaches to
the study of marketing, including the managerialist approach, which considers those activities
which are best suited to ensuring the successful adaptation of the firm to its environment:
macro-marketing, which focuses on the macro environmental impact of marketing, and green
marketing, which seeks to bring the activities of firms into a new and more harmonious
relation with the environment.
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A Managerial Approach The writers, Marilyn A. Stone and John Desmond, of the book Fundamentals of Marketing take a traditional managerial orientation to the study of marketing. This began at Harvard University in the US in the late nineteenth century but did not really become significant until the 1950s. According to Sheth et al. (1988) this was because there was excess capacity in the US after World War II when it was becoming harder to sell what was being produced. The development of the managerial approach is important in that it is partisan. Other schools of thought do not take sides between households and firms but study each in its own right. By contrast, as its name suggests, the managerial perspective views the subject from a manager’s point of view, which influences the sorts of questions which marketers ask. A major concern to managers is to understand consumer behavior. In order to gain the necessary insights into such behavior marketing research techniques were developed.
Marketing Orientation and the Marketing Concept
The appropriate orientation of the firm to the household is an important issue for those
who take the management perspective. Prior to the 1950s the idea that marketers needed
to create customers for mass-produced products was the norm (Drucker, 1955: 52).
However, during this period this notion began to be supplanted by a new idea, that
of customer orientation. This deceptively simple formulation warns the marketer that to
be successful in ‘competing successfully in the quicksilver of modern markets’ they
should ‘not so much be skillful in making the customer do what suits the interests of
the business as to be skillful in conceiving and then making the business do what suits the
interest of the customer’ (McKitterick, 1957: 78). In some respects this formulation is
paradoxical as, given consumer sovereignty, the firm should ideally have no long-term
interest other than that of acting in the customer’s interests. This paradox may be answered
by Levitt’s famous ‘marketing myopia’ (1960). In Levitt’s view managers in firms confuse
false (short-term) desires with their real (long-term) interests through being blinded
by a belief in the power of their product, technology or production process, or through
the perceived need to get rid of ‘product’. Levitt argues that such thinking can only ever
hold true in the short term as in the long run consumer sovereignty would prevail.
McKitterick’s formulation of customer orientation has clear political and moral implications.
The political implication is that if business attended to its long-run interests there would
be little need for state regulation. This is tied to the moral dimension whereby managers
are told that by acting selfishly they ultimately damage the long-run survival potential
of the firm. In this way the marketing orientation seeks the internal regulation of the
firm on the justification that managers will seek to come to believe that it is in the firm’s
interests to adopt a marketing orientation.
Over the years the idea of the marketing orientation has been subject to elaboration,
e.g. by the creation of a range of definitions of the marketing concept. The current definition
of the marketing concept offered by the British Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM)
defines marketing as ‘the management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and
satisfying customer requirements profitably.’ This definition could be described as wanting in that it fails to focus on the long-run interests of the firm. It can be contrasted with Kotler’s
more completed definition: ‘The marketing concept calls for a customer orientation backed
by integrated marketing aimed at generating long-run customer satisfaction as the key to
attaining long-run profitable volume’ (Kotler, 1972b: 54).
*SOURCE: FUNDAMENTALS OF MARKETING, 2007, MARILYN A. STONE AND JOHN DESMOND, PGS. 29-30*
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