Where marketing has gone wrong?
The purpose is this article is to discuss about marketing, its application, its relevance and critically evaluate the relevance of western knowledge to a country like Sri Lanka.
Marketing is a word used widely in the modern world with the development of businesses. When we look at Sri Lankan market, it is visible that after the year 2000, there was a rapid growth in the field. This happened mainly because marketing as a subject was introduced in Sri Lanka into the university curriculum and other private educational institutions. Therefore people started learning marketing as a subject and those who worked in the marketing professions also started looking into getting formal qualifications as they also felt the requirement of paper qualifications for their job promotions as well the threat they felt from fresh marketing graduates and other marketing qualified candidates. With all these marketing became a buzz word. In other words marketing became a fashion among students and marketing employees. By the year 2000, students’ main focus after advanced level exam was moving into the accounting stream. We could see this focus was moving from accounting to marketing during last 15 years. With this growing demand for marketing, educational institutes also started marketing degrees and different marketing related diploma programs to attract this student base. In this sense, marketing in Sri Lanka is in an infant stage still because before the year 2000, it was just existed in informal level. Academics also had to learn marketing from western scholars and they had used all those books and other publications in their teachings. On the other hand, even in western countries, marketing developed as a formal subject during early 1980s. Anyway it was a new subject for the world. Because there was not a chance to see the results and reconfirming theories and concepts taught under marketing due to its short time horizon. It is now only we can see the results of the marketing applications during lasts decades. Sri Lankan businesses are seen competing in the market place using their valuable and long-built brands. Marketing managers, brand managers and product managers are seen performing, some are not performing, and all are rotating their jobs jumping from one company to another company, in most cases joining with competitor organizations. Amidst all these, still we don’t have a properly developed global brand and we can see only some global brands are dominating as most powerful global brands. But when we look at Sri Lankan companies that are better known about their marketing dominance can be seen not enjoying the businesses development but they just compete with their competitors all the time. It is never ending competition. Senior managers who possessed over 10 years marketing experience into marketing can be seen slowly moving away from their jobs and starting their own enterprises or private consultancy. It seems there is a problem in marketing or its applications or somewhere else.
MARKETING
There are many definitions for marketing and American Marketing Association define marketing as Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large (July 2013)
According to this definition, marketing is about delivering value to its customers, clients and partners, so marketers’ at large practice this and the result is every marketer produce some value to their customers and creating competition among all competitors. To face this situation, marketers try to produce a different or better value propositions than their competitors. In marketing techniques further it talks about some concepts like 4Ps and 7Ps, promotional mix, integrated marketing communication and STP (segmentation, targeting & positioning)all these talks about delivering a greater value to their customers. Marketing is going in hands with competition. Again competition was concepts discussed immensely by many scholars and Michael porter was one of them. He discussed about the nature and the degree of competition in an industry and found five forces exists in every industry to hinge its competition: the threat of new entrants, the bargaining power of customers, the bargaining power of suppliers, the threat of substitutes and jockeying among current competitors. Marketing is a subject goes with competition and it is about engraving a position in consumer’s mindset with a difference from its competitor. Competition start with comparing themselves with others. It is about being better than others. In marketing, positioning is differentiating your product than others. Therefore marketing always deals with comparison and competition.
WHERE HAS MARKETING GONE WRONG?
Think of a pyramid business which is socially criticized but is still in practice in different formats in Sri Lanka. It always criticize due to its nature of gaining somebody excessively and losing somebody for sure for others’ gain. It is a sort of gambling. In current marketing applications, what happened was the results in the long run was same. One win and others loose with greater frustration and pressure. That is why companies are not enjoying at all their business successes in the long run, with more and more success, more and more new projects and innovations emerge. With these various projects and innovations in one hand and continuous competition and retaliation from their competitors, companies and their managers get sucked. Even no body accept this openly, this is the bitter truth in the society. As a matter of fact this situation, we can see, lot of motivational training programs, stress release programs, meditation programs and mentoring programs are conducting. This is like giving a pain killer to a toothache. Temporary cure will happen but not a permanent cure, in the long run the situation get worse, this is what we are experiencing today. Once a business make a sort of race, there is no solution, only one will win other placed in an orderly manner after the winner with some disappointments. But western thinkers failed in understanding this reality. But in Asian countries we had a traditional knowledge and our own systems that gave us a long lasting solutions, and minds get naturally refreshed or cured. Now we can see westerners started researching our traditional knowledge to find solutions for their human issues.
Now time has come to look at our own traditional knowledge and screen out things that are coming from outside to the country and develop our own thinking systems and knowledge base that we had long time ago.
References https://www.ama.org/aboutama/pages/ Definition-of-marketing.aspx By, Nilantha Perera, Senior Lecturer in marketing, Department of Marketing Management, Faculty of Commerce and Management Studies, University of Kelaniya. (You can contact the writer through: nilantha.roshan@gmail.com)