Impact of Indian value system on marketing: An analysis

Abstract

Marketing as an academic discipline has core schools of thought, where it is seen as either a philosophy or as a function. While the marketing concept is embedded in management thought when it is considered a philosophy, marketing is seen as a department, in the same way as accounting or personnel, where it is a function within a business. The nature of marketing theory, or whether marketing theory is actually possible, has been debated for over four decades (Saren 2000). The debate was strengthened by a scientific approach which was based largely on empiricism, along the lines of the social sciences (Bartels 1951, Alderson & Cox 1948) and tended to ignore the human nature of marketing as marketing managers crafted it. In contrast, the marketing management school viewed marketing from a manager's perspective and took an opposing view that rejected the positivist notion and its empirical roots. A scientific approach to marketing sought a generic structure, which it is argued is not possible since no two situations are ever the same. It is unlikely that there would be replicable findings when posed a simple unambiguous question since by their very nature, markets are diverse and not all competitors have access to the same information, and even if they did, managers are unlikely to create identical marketing plans. The scientific school cannot verify a generic approach to marketing. An independent relativist approach was put forward by Anderson (1983) which saw no meeting of the mind between scientists with different worldviews and persuasions (Kuhn 1962). According to Saren (2000), eventually Hunt moved to a realist position, which saw pure empiricism counterbalanced by an acceptance that perceptions may be illusions, and that some perceptions were more accurate than others. Hunt (1971) concluded that no single philosophy dominates marketing.