Has marketing failed, or was it never really tried?1

Abstract

The author looks at the weak performance of Marketing in the UK over the past 30 years from a practitioners viewpoint. Four recipes for marketing disaster are identified: “thrust marketing, marketing department marketing, accountant's marketing and formula marketing”. The author concludes that marketing performance will improve when practitioners learn to recognise more easily areas of false marketing and theorists are able to define more clearly what marketing actually is.