A Dangerous Divergence: Marketing and Society

Jagdish N. Sheth is Charles H. Kellstadt Professor of Marketing, Emory University (e-mail: Jagdish_Sheth@bus.emory.edu). Rajendra S. Sisodia is Professor of Marketing, Bentley College (e-mail: rsisodia@bentley.edu). In Wilkie and Moore’s (2003) landmark article, they point out an important and troubling development in Era IV (1980–present) of marketing scholarship, namely, a major decline in “mainstream” interest in issues that pertain to marketing and society. Instead, there has been a “ghettoization” of scholarship in this vital area in both journals and conferences, and though a small and hardy group of researchers continue to press on, the vast majority of their colleagues blithely ignore societal imperatives. Marketing is a vital and highly visible institution in free market societies around the world. However, it is suffering from significant problems with each of its major constituents; that is, there is a lack of respect within the corporation and a lack of trust by consumers. Taken together, these two major deficiencies have placed marketing in society’s doghouse as a shallow, wasteful, and polluting influence. Many marketing scholars’ ignorance of larger societal issues has already had serious consequences for the marketing profession. Increasingly, marketing practices are out of sync with today’s consumers. A study by Yankelovich in 2004 (Smith, Clurman, and Wood 2005) found that many consumers have moved from simply ignoring marketing to actively resisting and, in some cases, fighting it. More than 60% of respondents believe that marketing and advertising are “out of control,” and 70% try to tune out as much marketing and advertising as possible. Approximately half of the respondents said that the quantity of marketing and advertising negatively affects their experience of everyday life. These negative attitudes are much stronger than are those that Bauer and Greyser (1968) report in their study for the American Association of Advertising Agencies. Bauer and Greyser estimate that 15% of consumers are “serious resisters” of advertising, whereas Yankelovich’s 2004 research finds that 60% of the population are serious resisters, and approximately 70% are interested in products that help them skip, block, or opt out of marketing and advertising. It appears that marketing practices have become worse as products have become better. Surprisingly, Yankelovich’s research shows that few marketing executives understand the rising hostility that consumers have toward the ways that marketing is conducted (Smith, Clurman, and Wood 2005). A recent study on the image of marketing conducted at Bentley College and Emory University found that 62% of consumer respondents had a negative attitude toward marketing, 28% were neutral, and only 10% had a positive attitude. Some of the positives that marketing is associated with include creativity, fun, humorous advertising, and attractive people, but these positive connotations are swamped by the negatives, such as telemarketing, lies, deception, deceit, annoyance, and manipulation (Sheth and Sisodia 2005). Why is this happening? We believe that it is because marketing has become excessively driven by a managerial agenda and has lost sight of its fundamental mission, namely, to represent the customer’s interest to the company.