R. Devarajan

The kernel of marketing management is its kaleidoscopic character. Companies capable of achieving a complete and comprehensive change alone will make the grade and arrive, considering the dog-eat-dog competition in the contemporary market economy.

Nowadays, the marketing function is a much bigger landscape in management. It is no longer just a department that puts the icing on the cake; it is the cake itself.

It is not a mere peace-keeping force conducting ceremonial parades and periodical march past. It has become far more active and dynamic. Marketing has gone to war, fighting battles at several fronts.

In the earlier era, people had their pattern of living well laid out for them. From generation to generation, they were born into living and leading a life similar to their parents. Everyday experience was confined to the roots and regimen of convention and conformity.

People followed scrupulously the rules of religion, the laws of the land, and the stipulated standards of behaviour and conduct appropriate to their age, gender, education, profession, and so on. The situation is different today. There are fewer traditions that people abide by less customs are in vogue, and less faith in the spiritual heritage and in the scriptures.

A clear vision

The future belongs to those companies that come up with a clear and compelling long-term vision about their market, and their own place in the economy, say, five years from now; and then, transform themselves to get there first. Their vision must be deep, demanding, challenging, and seismic.

A parallel instance that comes to mind in this context is the clarion call given by President Kennedy, when he proclaimed that the US must be the first country to put a man on the moon. It was at once so electrifying and energising to the core scientific community of that nation that they eventually did achieve that mission.

The kernel of marketing management is its kaleidoscopic character. Companies capable of achieving a complete and comprehensive change — when warranted — alone will make the grade and arrive, considering the dog-eat-dog competition in the contemporary market economy. Business thinking is often driven by impersonal words such as strategy, system, structure and so on. But success is much more about people.

Breakthrough in ideas

It depends on how and what a company sets out to do with the help of its people. Strong individuals create teams, in the first place, with their own ideas and ideologies that in turn help them build powerful business enterprises. An idea is a derivative from a certain mode of thinking. It is an inference germinating from a thought. Ideas are the products of a certain set of assumptions and mental models. Big breakthroughs in the history of ideas have always been triggered by a shift in some basic assumptions. Like the shift made by Charles Darwin, when he traced the ancestry of man to the animal kingdom. When Copernicus asserted his view that the earth orbited the sun, it was a major transition in thinking.

Paradigm shift

Usually, an avalanche of ideas accompanies those kind of phenomenal shifts. Such a changeover to a fresh and fundamental principle has, nowadays, come to be known as the paradigm shift.

A new way of thinking is initially and invariably dismissed as heresy. If it survives over a long period of time, it gains the status of orthodoxy. Earlier, the class system was a defining part of consumer markets.

People purchased only such products that reflected and represented their status in the society. This viewpoint was embedded in the subconscious minds of the people, and further reinforced by peer pressure.

The marketing reference in those days was the hierarchy of needs, as formulated by Abraham Maslow, in the 1960s of the last century. At the more basic levels, it was a cluster of worries. The main and major concern was the physiological needs such as food, clothing, and shelter.

As the lower-level needs were met and moved away from the agenda, people progressed upward in the ladder to satisfy more lofty and higher level needs. This model was true when there was a straitjacket society, which was more structured and stratified.

Passion for possession

In the present-day situation, however, things seem to be different. People in the lower levels of society also display a distinct propensity for purchasing luxury goods and services.

The advent of the small screen with its tendentious outreach together with the unprecedented explosion in the consumer goods sector, backed by obnoxious advertising and publicity have contributed to this passion for possession — a kind of paranoia and phobia. Of course, all these are an adjunct to the aggressive marketing manoeuvres that is commonplace in the millennium.

It is a paradox of political economy that capitalism has triumphed because communism has failed. The fact that capitalism has managed to outlive the State-controlled economy has given the market economy the label and insignia of success. The non-competitive state economy is fast fading into the background. The competitive market economy is all set to win the war, at least for the present.

(The author is a Chennai-based freelance writer.)

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