Ten years ago, McKinsey and Company asked the question, "Is Marketing Dead?" In this timely and radical re-statement of the marketing concept, Idris Mootee shows that marketing, wisely re-interpreted and updated, has never been more vital or more germane. The Demise of Marketing It is true that between, say, Theodore Levitt's "Marketing Myopia" of 1960 and CK Prahalad and Gary Hamel's "Expeditionary Marketing and the Corporate Imagination" of 1990, marketing - at least in the way that it was practiced by the majority of companies - could be said to have lost its status, if not its way. Its self-appointed role was no longer that of the intellectual conscience of the business, or the architect of its strategic design, or the builder of its product-market portfolio. Instead, it became a euphemism for selling, but without the tiresome responsibility for a sales-force. It survived merely as the function responsible for all the downstream activities of the business. It became the investment budget of last resort.

Amongst its peer departments - finance, operations, R&D, operations - it operated on the shortest time-horizon. Too often, it became the handmaiden of the advertising agency. Indeed, it acquired the reputation - not entirely unfairly - for being, not the voice of the customer in the boardroom, but a conspiracy against the interests of the customer. In the public mind, "hidden persuasion", to echo Vance Packard's vivid phrase, had become synonymous with what was seen as the black art of marketing. Marketing was assumed by many to be the skill of exploiting human frailty. Gary Hamel caught the mood nicely when he suggested that customer ignorance had become the only profit center of the company. Visit our free download page to download and read the full text.