Reclaiming or rebranding marketing: implications beyond digital
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COMMENTARY
Reclaiming or rebranding marketing: implications beyond digital Thomas Ritter 1 Received: 14 September 2020 / Accepted: 30 September 2020 # The Author(s) 2020
The domain of marketing Ted Moser’s interesting views on the changing role of marketing raise a fundamental question of timeless interest: What is marketing? Ted offers three central observations. First, we need to move beyond the division between “digital” and “analogue” to think about marketing as a whole, of which some parts are digital, and others are not. Second, Ted argues that marketing is taking territory from sales, which implies that marketing does not restrict itself to general communication, market-offering presentations, and lead generation. It often completes the buying cycle and, thereby, generates sales. Third, marketing is undergoing a necessary transition. While I recognize and agree with these arguments based on my own work, we need to ask whether it is, or was, meaningful to divide marketing into different parts and assign them different labels. In other words, we need to think about what marketing is. There is a distinction between a functional view of marketing and a capability-based view of marketing, which is also known as the distinction between “Marketing as a function (big M) in relation to marketing as a process … (little m)” (Marketing Science Institute Research Priorities 1996, p. 6, in Moorman and Rust 1999, p. 180). While the former is an organizational design issue (i.e., what activities should be placed in the organizational unit called “Marketing”), the latter relates to the substance of marketing—the activities and processes that constitute marketing. As an organizational capability, marketing’s position in firms has grown stronger, driven by consumer individualism, social media connectedness, and the availability of data. As a function (i.e., a job and department label), marketing is facing a life-threatening implosion—marketing departments are becoming smaller * Thomas Ritter [email protected] 1
Department of Strategy and Innovation, Copenhagen Business School, Frederiksberg, Denmark
and moving further away from the top of the organization. When former marketing activities are allocated to other departments, their label changes too. In other words, small m is exploding, while big M is imploding. If this trend continues, the term “marketing” will be devalued and eventually disappear, at least from the strategic landscape of organizations. Alternatively, this trend could be reversed and marketing could take back important activities, potentially supported by digitalization, as pointed out by Ted. While there is no universally agreed, timeless definition of the marketing domain, I prefer to divide the domain into four complementary processes (Ritter and Andersen 2010): market learning and market interacting (based on market sensing and market linking as proposed by Day 1994) plus market prioritizing (e.g., Homburg et al. 2008; Wetzel et al. 2014) and market shaping (e.g., Mele et al. 2015; Storbacka and Nenonen 20
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