Abstract
The marketing discipline, which emerged in the early 1900s, spent its first 70 years focused on describing and evaluating how for-profit organizations conduct their commercial operations with products and services. Starting in the 1970s, marketing scholars – Philip Kotler, Sidney Levy, Gerald Zaltman, and Richard Bagozzi – wrote a series of articles showing that marketing activities go on in the non-profit sector as well. They proposed that the marketing discipline would be enriched by working with the “marketing” problems of non-profit and public organizations--not just the marketing problems of commercial organizations. This subsequently came to be known as the “broadening of marketing.” A few years later, some marketers challenged the broadening idea as not belonging in the discipline of marketing. The broadening scholars suggested carrying out a referendum with marketing professors. The subsequent vote proved to be overwhelmingly in favor of the broadening movement. More recently, Adel El-Ansary and co-authors (El-Ansary et al. AMS Review, 2018) raised the question of whether the broadening work is part of a larger paradigm that might lead to a general theory of marketing.
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Kotler, P. Why broadened marketing has enriched marketing. AMS Rev 8, 20–22 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13162-018-0112-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13162-018-0112-4