Precis

ARAM, JEFFREY R. MARKETING MANAGEMENT

June 4, 2016

Precis 1: The Changing Role of Marketing in the Corporation

The article was authored by Frederick E. Webster, Jr. who is a Jon Underwood Distinguished Research Fellow in Marketing at the University of Arizona and the Professor Emeritus of Management at Dartmouth College. The author intends to provide readers an outline of how marketing evolved in the organization especially marketing management and demonstrated how customer relationships progressed to be the key strategic resource of the business today.

The author started the discussion by highlighting the history of marketing and marketing management. In the early approaches of the study of marketing, 3 schools emerged that focused on commodities, institutions and functions. Marketing was viewed as a set of social and economic processes rather than as a set of managerial activities and responsibilities. This changed in the 1960’s where relevance and realism to the study of marketing function was defined.

Marketing management in earlier studies was considered a decision making or problem solving process where authors described as relying on analytical frameworks from economics, psychology, sociology, and statistics. In the mid to late 1950s marketing was suggested to be the principal function of the firm (along with innovation). The author also covered the economic models and other fields in science to further explain how marketing is used to improve problem analysis, identifying variables and relationship that exists in market transactions. He also discussed the evolution from arm's-length transactions and traditional hierarchical, bureaucratic forms of organization and how it moved to more flexible types of partnerships, alliances, and networks with stronger focus on long-term customer relationships.

The later part of the article focused on the shift in marketing strategy from being transaction driven to...