Each of the terms in the triad marketing, ethics, and quality-of-life (QOL) needs some clarification, and their juxtaposition raises additional issues. Indeed, marketing may be the least well articulated of the three and, for present purposes, the most in need of clarification. It is patently impossible to discuss an activity’s
likely impact on QOL, or its ethical implications, in the absence of some precise idea of the nature of that activity. In this regard, marketing is something of an anomaly.

Marketing authors have held that the discipline’s subject matter is exchange. Apparently many fail to take cognizance of the radically different kinds of exchange that underlie marketing and selling. Often, a “selling” model seems implicit as authors discuss “marketing,” leading to errors of omission and commission; the latter in focus here. Until remedied, authors deny conceptual development to marketers’ central question, and daily real-world task: What shall we produce? How shall we use resources for human satisfaction?

Managers protest the literature’s irrelevance; academics seek release from the straightjacket of “managerial relevance” and, alarmingly, advocate doing nonmarketing (sic). The fact of specialization in production provides clues to a valid measure of managerial relevance. It also points to fundamental processes of resource allocation and use as the problem domain of marketing science and practice.

Representing users to producers is the subject of this paper — the essential yet, outside of marketing practice, most overlooked aspect of marketing. It requires basic science that breaks new ground. As appropriate conceptualizations become available, chances improve that the producer’s question: What shall we produce? will be answered more efficiently than heretofore. Consumer researchers are invited to create the behavioral science that marketing needs.

This paper proposes bases for considering influence to be aimed at affecting peripheral or fundamental elements, a task that requires analysis of the nature of action and of persuasive assignments. Three kinds of persuasive task are discussed in light of a general model of action, as is use of the terms, peripheral and fundamental, to characterize behavioral elements.

Most students and users of consumer research are likely to be interested in learning about the world as individual consumers perceive it. Accordingly, a special session was organized to introduce consumer researchers to the largely neglected domain of phenomenological psychology. This paper discusses some respects in which phenomenological interests and method may help to address aspects of marketing practice which up to now have received less than their due attention within the dominant natural scientific tradition. Topics for a continuing dialog with phenomenological psychology are also discussed.

At a time of national concern over energy shortage, inflation, and international unrest, we may be excused for wishing it were true that the files of corporate offices or behavioral science departments contained the knowledge needed to induce people to change their behavior. We could use a few “hidden persuaders’ , to get people to conserve energy, desist from debasing the currency, and refrain from threatening lives and engaging in violent actions. It is sobering to consider the actual state of our knowledge of persuasion, particularly in light of the enormous amount of research time and creativity that have been devoted to the subject.

This paper questions the extent to which marketing as distinct from selling or advocacy has been modeled in the communications literature of marketing and consumer behavior. It states communicative implications of the marketing concept and discusses conceptual and empirical issues that are relevant to each of three stages of marketing communications. Broader disciplinary implications are also considered.

This paper is about two topics that marketing authors have neglected, motivation and resource allocation. Although the topics are pivotal to understanding marketing as an activity and to the science of marketing, resource allocation has received virtually no attention; such treatment as marketing authors have given to motivation brings little to the subject that is not available elsewhere. Significant for the present discussion, a connection between motivation and resource allocation, which is the essence of a marketing perspective on motivation, has not been developed.