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Marketing ParadigmsMarketing, in one form or another is at least as old as civilization, but modern marketing as an applied art and science began in the 1960s and 70s. It originated in consumer markets where relatively low-valued products were sold to mass markets using mass media. Marketing theory held that the first step was to determine customer needs, then next, produce a product or service that will satisfy these needs. The underlying philosophy was that all the firm's strategic decisions were driven by customer expectations. This core idea has gone though many incarnations in the intervening decades, and gone under various names including: marketing orientation, customer driven, the marketing philosophy, customer intimacy, customer focus, and market driven. Marketing as a discipline has seen a gradual evolution, refining its key concepts, adding many new concepts, and broadening its scope. For example, there has been a gradual shift from mass marketing to segmented marketing to mass customization. Marketing has also broadened its scope to include industrial markets (introducing the concepts of long-term marketing relationships, microsegmentation, and buying centers) and to include electronic markets (introducing the concept of personalized marketing) and to include channel management (introducing the concepts of supply chain marketing programs and distributor marketing programs). Starting in the 1980s, there was a group of theorists that felt this gradual evolution was unsatisfactory. They saw marketing, not as a continuously evolving discipline, but as an established discipline ripe for a paradigm shift. They felt that a radical new perspective was required. These theorists are typically associated with either relationship marketing, customer experience management, or network marketing. Relationship marketers, for example, feel that the shift from single transaction marketing to long-term relationship marketing will require a complete revamping of the discipline. Customer experience marketers feel that the relationship marketers started in the right direction but were derailed by their dependence on customer relationship management software, which caused them to lose focus of the individual customer's experience of the service encounter. Network marketers stress the interconnectedness of market actors and transactions and can be seen as the application of systems thinking to marketing. Whether we envision a gradual history of evolution, or a radical paradigm shift probably has more to do with factors associated with the individual's psyche than with any objective or empirical system of change categorization. One thing is certain however, marketing is being greatly enriched by these contributions.
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