Fear,Negative Campaigning and Loathing: The Case of the UK Election Campaign

Fear has for some time been used in marketing communications particularly in social and health marketing. This paper explores how fear was used in the General Election Campaign and uses Aristotle's concept of rhetoric as a basis for understanding how messages are conveyed to the electorate. It argues that fear appeals are resonant with one particular type of voter but alienates other segments.     

The future of marketing: brightest star in the firmament,or a fading meteor? Some hypotheses and a research agenda

Excellent marketing has always emanated from a deep understanding of consumer needs and expectations, combined with their right to be informed, protected and their right to quality of life. Evidence for this fundamental bedrock of marketing is provided. The problem is that in 2009 "marketing" just doesn't mean "good marketing", or even "honest marketing" and is widely seen as "mismarketing" in practice, largely the result of marketing's demotion to promotion and puffery. Evidence is provided for this view. The paper then makes some suggestions about possible new initiatives/directions for the discipline. These are:

? the name marketing itself

? making the discipline truly professional

? making marketing fully accountable for its expenditure

The accountability issue, however, is, in the author's view, the principal way to rescue the discipline from demise, so the bulk of the paper concerns this issue and sets out an agenda for research.     

Branded lives: The production and consumption of meaning at work

Over the last number of decades, as a result of regulatory, technological and changing consumer dynamics, many service organisations operate in an increasingly competitive and dynamic external environment. These changes have led to service companies trying to both recruit and retain profitable customers. In order to compete effectively, do companies focus on transaction and relationship marketing activities only or on the balanced delivery of both? Apart from a small body of work (Brodie et al. 1997; Coviello et al. 1997; 2002), the literature has treated transaction and relationship marketing in an isolated and non-integrated fashion. In particular there has been limited consideration of the pertinent issues facing service organisations trying to integrate these two perspectives in practice. This article describes an in-depth study of a service organisation's transaction and relationship marketing activities. In this study theory was used in the development of a conceptual model. This model was used as a framework to guide the study and data collection using one retail bank case. The data were analysed in relation to the transaction and relationship marketing focus and activities of the bank. The findings indicate that resource investment in some aspects of transaction and relationship marketing activities, in practice, was unbalanced compared to the resource investment in a wide range of support activities. The study has implications for research and theory and to those attempting to deliver both transaction and relationship marketing in the context of dynamic and competitive environments.     

No Space – New Blood and the Production of Brand Culture Colonies

This paper explores implications for marketing education curricula of developments in marketing practice. Research from a variety of sources is drawn together and suggests that many marketing graduates are not being well equipped for 'the new marketing'. Marketing curricula should be reconsidered with respect to the nature of the learning outcomes, skills and knowledge that are required by graduates. Specifically, a range of marketing research and information issues are raised, together with implications of the new marketing metrics and the nature of marketing's wider role (via alliances and partnerships) in Knowledge Management strategies. This is furthered by the need to revisit the marketing concept itself in terms of its wider social responsibilities.     

Book Reviews

In a world of limited resources, marketing managers tasked to deliver shareholder value face decisions about how to maximise the returns on their marketing portfolio. Risk is less often considered. In finance the picture is very different; financial portfolio management is concerned with both risk and returns. The central innovation in this paper is the application of modern portfolio theory (MPT) to the management of marketing portfolios in food retailing and in drinks manufacturing. The authors develop a model that calculates an efficient frontier of marketing portfolios that maximise overall return within certain risk constraints, first for a simple two-segment marketing world and then for a more realistic multi-segment portfolio. However, marketing portfolios differ from financial ones in the sense that the allocation of marketing spend affects the returns from the portfolio. Therefore, a second innovation, an extension of MPT to take account of marketing spend allocation decisions, has been developed. Using this model, marketers can determine the risk and the returns of marketing investments, helping them select an optimal portfolio. This would go some way to ensuring that marketing contributes to shareholder value creation, currently one of its major challenges.     

Marketing the Police – from a Force to a Service

The British police service is a highly visible public sector organisation that in recent years has come under mounting pressures from different stakeholders, including successive Conservative and Labour governments and also an increasingly demanding public. In this setting, various business and management models and concepts have been applied to contemporary policing, but only limited research has been undertaken to date on how marketing has been adopted and utilised across the police forces of the British Isles. This paper explores the context of modern policing and suggests why the police are now being compelled to address marketing more seriously than hitherto. It draws on recent empirical work conducted across the police service and situates this within the existing literature on internal marketing. The paper concludes that marketing is underdeveloped across the police service and argues that police forces should develop their internal marketing as a precursor to successful external marketing.     

Entrepreneurial Marketing in the Public Sector: The Lessons of Headteachers as Entrepreneurs

This article argues that headteachers of primary schools have been at the forefront of the marketing/entrepreneurship interface since attempts to introduce competitive market forces into the maintained education system. It examines primary school headteachers' marketing strategies and compares them to those of owner managers of small firms. Case studies of ten schools illustrative of a variety of provision and market conditions provided the empirical data over a five year period. The headteachers shared many of the marketing problems of owner-managers of small firms. Headteachers found that the most effective marketing strategies consisted of: i) marketing to improve relationships with existing parents, staff and governors as an essential precursor to any external marketing effort; ii) parental involvement in the school which improved the likelihood of word of mouth recommendations; and iii) influencing such recommendations by marketing to improve parental and other involvement in the school. As word of mouth is also the most important source of new business for small firms, there are opportunities for lessons from the public to the private sector.     

The Past,Present and Future of Relationship Marketing

In the light of the redefinition of 'marketing' by the AMA in service/relational terms, and a recent review of the current vector of research in marketing (Littler and Tynan 2005), it seems an appropriate time to provide a substantial review of the past, present and likely future of what has become known as Relationship Marketing, together with an extensive list of key RM literature. This paper will take a reader through the origin, development and current state of RM research, with notes on the future of the research and practice of RM. The paper concludes that RM is here to stay, whether or not it is recognised as the dominant logic/paradigm of marketing.     

Eventalizing the marketing concept

This paper “eventalizes” the marketing concept and in doing so will highlight the value of detailed cross-source analysis in historical research. But more than this, it will not simply call upon canonical sources in relation to debates surrounding the marketing concept for the reason that non-canonical sources – that is, periodical material or out-of-print texts that very few people have read or have acknowledged as central contributions to the field – may contain references to debates that have long been written out of the historical record and could encourage us, as marketing scholars, to adopt a more sceptical stance toward what we take for granted historically and neglect to subject to critical scrutiny. This argument is illustrated via the demonstration that marketing scholars and practitioners were well aware of the benefits that accrue from a customer orientation and were encouraged to orient their organisations in this manner by the growth in industrial production facilities stimulated by World War I. This growth meant that production output could be maintained at levels far in excess of consumer demand, thereby necessitating that organisations register and act upon consumer requirements. These themes continue to gain prominence until World War II when there was a brief return to a production orientation. At this point, business and marketing practitioners adopted a critical stance with regard to certain types of consumer research. There are multiple reasons for this. Firstly, the U.S. government became the major purchaser of industrial and consumer goods. Secondly, business practitioners were sceptical of the value of market and consumer research as a result of the failure by pollsters (who were utilising sophisticated statistical techniques) to predict the outcome of the 1948 U.S. Presidential election. Given the conflation of market research with polling research in the popular press and business community, business practitioners were unsure about the validity and usefulness of market research. In equal measure, environmental factors including rising levels of competition, employee specialisation, product diversification and organisational decentralisation would contribute to the (re)emergence of themes associated with the marketing concept.     

What Is and What Is Not Social Marketing: The Challenge of Reviewing the Evidence

This paper describes our experience in undertaking a review of the effectiveness of using social marketing to tackle nutrition problems. One of the biggest challenges was identifying programmes which could be genuinely defined as 'social marketing'. Here we describe how we applied and tested a framework for identifying and assessing legitimate social marketing research. Implications for both social marketing theory and practice are discussed.     

From Cattle and Coke to Charlie: Meeting the Challenge of Self Marketing and Personal Branding

Since the late 1990s, self marketing and personal branding have become increasingly popular as subjects of self-improvement books, Web sites and consultancy services, especially in the USA. To date, little of this interest appears to have permeated the discipline of marketing, either in terms of formal research, textbook contents or academic curricula. This paper examines the theoretical basis of self marketing and personal branding, identifies some of the conceptual, practical and ethical problems it poses for the discipline, and points to some of the challenges facing higher education in attempting to create a curricular framework within which marketing professionals can learn how to market and brand themselves effectively.     

Impersonal vs. Personal Exchanges in Marketing Relationships

Considerations about the future of marketing discipline bring to the surface an important question of marketing relationships management. The aim of this paper is to analyse the phenomenon of marketing relationships as a paradigmatic shift in the marketing discipline. Through the critique of marketing management approach we are searching for the theory that will help to transcend the action oriented marketing philosophy. Our discussion is rooted in the social exchange theory and the two fundamental processes of human exchange interactions – the process of friendship building and the process of power relations. Through the application of the analysis of the processes of interpersonal relations we discuss marketing relationships and extreme types of marketing perspectives: power relations, intrusive selling, conventional marketing exchange and marketing relationships. Conventional (transactional) marketing management and marketing relationships fundamentally at odds with one another, resembling the old Chinese concepts of yin and yang. We conclude that managers are facing the problem of "schizomarketing disorientation", when entering into different marketing processes with different segments of customers.     

Successful exporting to the Arabian gulf region: A survey of Bahraini consumers

This paper details the emerging need for relational skills in marketing. The challenges of fostering relational resources within marketing practice and pedagogy are then discussed. Next, the paper explores the value of experiential learning approaches in education and considers different experiential models for fostering relational resources. An African Drumming circle was chosen, because it offers exciting opportunities to explore relational principles both through the actual lived experience as well through the active exploration of the metaphor. The paper concludes that the drumming circle offers an interesting access to experiencing the movement from being an individual actor to collaborating as part of a wider network of actors. Thus, insights are generated at the level of lived experience as well as at a more metaphoric one. The paper therefore serves to foreground the role of pedagogy in Relationship Marketing     

Some Attitudinal Predictors of Home-Shopping through the Internet

Economic and political imperatives of the 1980s have seen governments turn to private sector managerial techniques, practices and orientations to enable them to deliver services more efficiently and effectively. Among these is marketing which has received increasing attention as governments have looked to privatize, corporatize or simply introduce some level of “user‐pays” principle into their operations.

Despite the ambitious claims of the marketing discipline, the transposition of marketing to the public sector has not proved to be without problems. This paper reviews why such a transposition might be difficult. It also reviews the claim of marketing to be an appropriate discipline at all for widespread application in the public sector.

The paper concludes that marketers should be cautious as to the extent to which their discipline can be transposed or modified to assist governments identity, plan, deliver and evaluate services more efficiently and effectively.     

Critical approaches in undergraduate marketing teaching: investigating students' perceptions

For some years now, marketing educators have been exhorted to adopt more critical approaches in teaching and learning. Such approaches are purported to bring numerous benefits to students, including improved appraisal skills, self-awareness, and enhanced abilities to deal with the uncertainties and ambiguities of marketing practice. To date however, there has been very little empirical study of how students respond to critical approaches, and whether they perceive any of the proposed benefits themselves. This study addresses the gap by investigating the perceptions and experiences of students on two modules, both of which take similarly designed critical approaches. In practice, students were found to perceive the modules as more labour intensive and intellectually challenging than others, due primarily to the volume and depth of required reading. The task of being critical was itself perceived as difficult, due to the need for a different mindset, and for students to have confidence in their own ideas. However, overall evaluations of the modules were positive, and students identified a number of benefits and personal rewards from their experiences, at least some of which matched with those proposed in the literature. The paper discusses factors influencing students' perceptions and concludes with some practical recommendations.     

Marketing UK Towns and Cities as Shopping Destinations

This paper reports the results of research into the range of actors involved in the marketing of urban places as shopping destinations and the processes by which this marketing activity is planned. The paper highlights the differences between the process of marketing planning in this context (at the interface of the public and private sectors), as opposed to processes in private sector organizations from which the majority of current marketing theory was developed. It suggests various implications as to the characteristics of what Ashworth (1993) has termed a 'special type of marketing' to be applied to urban places.     

Internal Marketing in the UK Retail Banking Sector: Rhetoric or Reality

The article sheds light on the relationship between internal marketing rhetoric and its practice within the UK retail bank sector and addresses a deficiency in the current internal marketing literature particularly in terms of implementation. A practitioner view is explored through data generated by in-depth qualitative interviews with thirty-five branch managers and twenty-one employees. The study produced some interesting findings structured in the form of relationships which highlighted the distinct nature of the internal marketing practice within the specific sector. This article sheds light on the six emergent relationships. The examination of the relationship between the rhetoric and practice of internal marketing within the UK retail bank industry raises some criticisms regarding the motives behind the adoption of internal marketing and the current implementation approach adopted by these organizations. The study’s conclusions can be used as an outline agenda for future research aimed at strengthening internal marketing’s legitimacy in the academic literature and highlighting its contribution to practitioners.     

Internal marketing: a qualitative study of culture change in the UK banking sector

This paper discusses the findings of a qualitative study carried out in the UK retail-bank sector on the implementation of Internal Marketing (IM). While the overall aim of Internal Marketing is the creation of a unified culture around the values of customer service, employee empowerment and service quality, the evidence suggests that Internal Marketing is perceived and enacted in ways that at times contradict such managerial rhetoric. The paper sheds light on what internal marketing is (its underlying principles within the organisations studied), the ways in which the banks studied use it in order to change their organisational culture as well as the difficulties encountered in implementing IM as a culture change agent. It concludes that the implementation of Internal Marketing in the banks under the study is problematic and does not result into a unified organisation culture. Indeed, implementing Internal Marketing is a process fraught with difficulty, which at times leads to divisions, ruptures and ambiguity in the newly created organisational culture.