In recent years , marketing has perhaps experienced the most disruption amongst all professions , to the extent that many pundits have in the past actually pronounced the death of marketing as we know it and asked the practitioners to wake up and accept that the world has changed .
In the same vein some CEOs have come to the conclusion that marketing is too important to a company to be left in the hands of the marketing department and have spearheaded the move to make marketing a companywide activity , meaning the CEOs own the marketing function .
This perspective was perhaps best exemplified by Steve Jobs , although he was a technology engineer , what made him an apple icon was not his technical ability , which was massive , but his marketing ability that got thousands queuing at stores to be first to get the latest Apple product .
Steve Jobs strategy was to create technically superior products that had esthetic appeal . This meant that he began with the consumer in mind and designed products that not only delivered on promise , but were also a delight to the eye .
The products were not cheap as the company charged a premium because they had built superior products which then created a huge brand equity and a loyal cohort of satisfied consumers that used apple products and created a cult following of customers .
We however don ’ t perceive Steve Jobs as a marketer but as a computer geek and perhaps there-in lies the confusion as to what marketing really is . Did Jobs excel in his role because he was a great developer of software and products or because he was a greater marketer ?
It is also true that the marketing profession is most porous in terms of admitting and accommodating every type of business person and since the profession has not found a credible way of limiting entrants and especially quacks then the whole profession is vulnerable .
From a purely common sense platform it is actually intuitive to reason that you only have a business if you have a product or service to market and the business succeeds or fails if you succeed or fail in your marketing effort , all other things being equal .
So we are left in a bit of a dilemma as to whether marketing is dying or dead or whether the profession has at last been embraced into the core of business and has become integral to the operation of business . Has marketing become business as business is marketing ?
So the profession that is under condemnation seems to have confounded the doomsayers , it has not died , as professed , but has morphed and molded itself around a new paradigm and instead of a funeral we may be at the cusp of a glorious rebirth .
Before we get into the debate of where marketing currently is , we need to step back and recap on the evolution of marketing to better understand the reasons why respected observers would be of the opinion that marketing is dead .
Conventional wisdom among marketing scholars has classified the evolution of marketing into definable stages for ease of reference and also to enable them to point out the skill sets that were necessary to drive the consumer society that existed then .
We will be looking at the American marketing evolution which is not to say other countries did not have their marketing models and which may have been and perhaps are superior to the American one but the Americans documented theirs better .
Back then it was the saying that when America sneezes the world catches a cold to signify the type of influence that the world largest economy had on the world business scene but we have to remember that American influence on African business was not direct .
We begin with the period that the Americans chose to term as the production orientation period that was launched by the industrial revolution which actually kicked off in Great Britain and many of the technological innovations and improvements had a British origin .
The textile industry was what really triggered the industrial revolution and it soon spread into Europe where the spirit of innovation and commerce gave birth to many industries that were necessary for creating and growing a mass market .
That was also the time that the British Empire was being built and the challenge then was really to get the raw materials that were needed to sustain the massive production capacity that the industries