Marketing Book

Preface to the fifth edition
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of which mass production, mass consumption and modern marketing are major manifestations. It
would seem, therefore, that ‘postmodern’ must refer to the nature of society that has or is likely to
evolve out of the ‘modern’ state. To establish if this is or is not the case, I invited one of the most
widely published and cited authorities on the subject – Stephen Brown – to contribute a chapter on
the subject. Its positioning immediately after my own attempts to define modern marketing is
deliberate.
It would be facile to try and summarize Stephen’s chapter. However, in my view it provides
one of the clearest expositions of what postmodern marketing is or is perceived to be. (It is also
written in his own distinctive and entertaining style.) Whether or not you are converted to this
perspective of marketing, it is important that you are aware of its defining characteristics as with
the more traditional views contained in Chapter 1.
Chapter 3 is also new and deals with a topic – relationship marketing – that has been widely
referred to in earlier editions (and in this edition). Several pages were given to the topic in my own
introductory chapter in the fourth edition and are retained in this edition. However, relationship
marketing (RM) has evolved to become the dominant paradigm in marketing and it is now
deserving of an entry of its own.
While there are many distinguished authors that might have been approached to contribute
this chapter, the choice of Lisa O’Malley and Caroline Tynan was an obvious one. In 2001, I had the
good fortune to act as an external examiner for Lisa’s doctoral thesis, supervised by Caroline. The
other examiner, Christian Gronroos, is recognized internationally as one of the founding fathers of
relationship marketing. Both of us were very impressed with Lisa’s review of the RM literature and
the new chapter is based on this.
As the authors make clear, relationship marketing has evolved over the past 25 years or so as
a reconceptualization of the transactional model of marketing, based upon the application of the
marketing mix to the marketing of mass-produced products to large, homogeneous consumer
markets. This model was seen to be inappropriate in industrial or business-to-business markets,
and also to the marketing of services, and a new approach based on the creation and maintenance
of relationships began to emerge. Accordingly, ‘The purpose of this chapter is to begin to describe
how the rich body of knowledge that is relationship marketing has come into being, what its major
underpinning theories are, what defining moments occurred, and what might shape its future’.
In my view, it accomplishes this in a clear and scholarly way. Plainly, having evolved from a
number of different, albeit complementary, research traditions, relationship marketing is not a
single monolithic concept – ‘Indeed, relationship marketing is less a coherent body of knowledge
and more a collection of loosely aligned understandings’. To know what these are, how they have
developed and how they might be applied in practice, this chapter is ‘must’ reading. And, for those
wishing to dig deeper, the References are an invaluable resource in their own right.
A new section and author have been added to Chapter 7 – ‘Business-to-business marketing:
organizational buying behaviour, relationships and networks’. The new author is Sheena Leek of
Birmingham Business School and the new section is entitled ‘Relationship management and
networks’. The latter addresses the sets of relationships that have come to be termed the ‘network
approach’. Issues of relationship portfolio analysis are also examined, although it is acknowledged
that practitioners will need to use insight and judgement in selecting from a growing number of
theoretical models. Several additions have also been made to the recommended reading list for
those wishing to pursue these issues further.
Chapter 10 – ‘Market segmentation’ – first appeared in the third edition. As the author, Martin
Evans, points out in his introduction, while many aspects of segmentation have remained constant
there have been significant changes in practice. Information technology and new techniques have