Journal of Marketing is the property of American Marketing Association and its contents may not be copied or emailed to multiple

sites or
posted to a listserv without the copyright holders express written permission. However, users may print, download or email this article for
individual use.

A Statement of Marketing Philosophy

This statement is a summary of the basic ideas or convictions about marketing which are shared by the marketing faculty of The Ohio State
University. It was formulated by them in order to provide the faculty with a formally stated sense of purpose; a means of unifying individual
efforts; a tool for achieving consistency; a guideline for maintaining charted courses; a basis for evaluating marketing educational and
research programs; a prerequisite to the development of a formally stated philosophy of marketing education; and a statement to clarify their
views to the academic and business community.
Journal of Marketing, Vol. 29 (January, 1965), pp. 43-44

BASIC to a philosophy of marketing is one's concept of the nature of marketing itself. We have felt it
imperative to reexamine and clarify our concept of the nature and purpose of marketing in order to
determine whether our views were adequate to advance our goals as marketing educators. These goals
involve striving for higher levels of sophistication in marketing knowledge and facilitating socially useful
and self-fulfilling careers for marketing students. Plans for the attainment of such goals are clearly related
to the nature of marketing itself.
Certainly there is no lack of divergent viewpoints concerning the nature of marketing. It has been
described by one person or another as a business activity; as a group of related business activities; as a
trade phenomenon; as a frame of mind; as a coordinative, integrative function in policy making; as a
sense of business purpose; as an economic process; as a structure of institutions; as the process of
exchanging or transferring ownership of products; as a process of concentration, equalization, and
dispersion; as the creation of time, place, and possession utilities; as a process of demand and supply
adjustment; and as many other things. Each of the foregoing concepts may be appropriate for a given
person, at a given time, when examining marketing problems from a given point of view. We have felt it
necessary to conceive of marketing in a manner sufficiently comprehensive to encompass other
viewpoints which may be narrow or more specialized. Accordingly, we have formulated a definition of
marketing as follows:
Marketing is the process in a society by which the demand structure for economic goods and services is
anticipated or enlarged and satisfied through the conception, promotion, exchange, and physical
distribution of such goods and services.
When so viewed as a composite process, marketing is clearly a subject of much broader scope than the
compilation of functions or managed activities commonly identified as marketing responsibilities in
individual companies. It includes the continuous inter-action of original producers, middlemen,
facilitating agencies, governments, and consumers. As such, marketing possesses a dynamic quality and a
sense of purpose.
For some purposes, marketing may appropriately be defined as an area of management responsibility
within the business firm, or as a technology by means of which action in the marketing process is
planned, organized, and controlled. We hold, however, that such views are partial and can properly be
understood and evaluated only with reference to the broader process of which they are a part. Marketing
can also be conceived as an area of knowledge involving both scientific and disciplinary study and
research. As a subject, its scope may be broadly coextensive with our definition of marketing as a social
process or, for more restrictive purposes, equated to its technological or managerial aspects.
Convictions About Marketing
Some of our most basic ideas or convictions about marketing are summarized as follows:
1. Whether marketing is more of a science or more of an art is debatable, but it is certainly an area in
which considerable scientific progress is being made, both in the sense of the expansion of a body of
classified and systematized knowledge and also with respect to increasing application of scientific
methods to basic research and in decision making processes within firms.

 Journal of Marketing is the property of American Marketing Association and its contents may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or
posted to a listserv without the copyright holders express written permission. However, users may print, download or email this article for
individual use.

2. Marketing is both a formative influence and an adaptive aspect of our culture. It is adaptive in the
sense that business firms in the marketing process must be responsive to the changing wants and
circumstances of dynamic markets if they are to survive and grow. Marketing is also a formative
influence in our culture in the sense that the aggregate impact of product offerings, marketing
communications and institutions contribute to the formulation of attitudes or values.
3. Significant contributions have been made to marketing knowledge by such fields as economics,
psychology, sociology, anthropology, cultural ecology, demography, political science, and history.
Scholars and technicians from such disciplines, contributing new concepts, viewpoints, and methods
to the study and practice of marketing, have made notable contributions to marketing thought. At the
same time, marketing has had a significant impact upon the content and methods of cognate
disciplines.
4. With expected continuing increases in population, productive capacity and living standards,
marketing will become increasingly significant, by developing better means of enlarging and
servicing markets, thereby enabling our economy to produce more and better goods and services.
The ends served by the marketing process are, hopefully, the more complete satisfaction of human,
business, and public wants, and at the same time provision for the highest attainable degrees of
utilization of our technological and human resources.
5. Marketing is an integral part of our whole productive process, in the sense that it adds values to
goods and services through the creation of time, place, possession, and information utilities. A
positive approach to marketing as a part of our productive process calls for changes in certain
common concepts, such as the meaning of product, production, and productiveness of the labor force
and other factors of production.
6. Taking a broad view of marketing as a social process does not preclude functional specialization nor
does it diminish the importance of managerial competence in marketing divisions of business firms.
On the other hand, such a broad view gives to managerial marketing a sense of purpose, clearly
calling for high degrees of efficiency in functional responsibilities and for the utilization of the most
advanced problem-solving methods so that the firm may deliver to customers what they most want in
the best manner.
7. Because the scope of marketing is broader than marketing management per se, there is much need
for:
a) An understanding of the entire marketing system, its historical development, and the forces
within it that spell its dynamics, which may be useful for purposes of making appropriate
choices and decisions, recognizing its contribution to the social order, or developing the
knowledge and perspective.
b) An understanding of the environment within which the marketing process is being performed as
illuminated by other social disciplines.
c) Duly considering all points of view, with emphasis on consumer or social welfare, on the
maximization or optimization of profit or efficiency in individual enterprises, and on
relationships between social and acquisitive efficiency.

AB0UT THE AUTHORS. This article is the result of the composite efforts of the following full-time marketing faculty of the Ohio State University: Robert
Bartels, Theodore N. Beckman, W, Arthur Cullman, William R. Davidson, James H. Davis, Alton F. Doody, James F. Engel, Jimmie L Heskett, Rate A.
Howell. Robert B. Miner, William M. Morgenroth, Louis W. Stern, and James C. Yocum.
The material reproduced here was originally published as a pamphlet by the Bureau of Business Research in cooperation with the Department of Business
Organization, College of Commerce and Administration, The Ohio State University.