Explanations of Marketing: Evolving, Changing or Competing?

This chapter seeks briefly to show how and why marketing has become an important business discipline. Towards the end of the twentieth century marketing experienced something of a reversal in popularity and esteem as a business function, with questions being asked as to the value of the contribution that marketing could make to business success. The classically successful approach to marketing, that which initially established it as a vital and perhaps even fashionable strategic tool, seemed to lose focus and application.