The Role of Marketing in Economic Development

Abstract

A review of the literature of the past thirty years in the field of economic development reveals a general lack of interest in the role marketing may play in the development process.¹ This neglect has several roots, one of the most important being the confusion over the very definition of marketing. Some authors take a broad view. Peter Drucker has written that marketing has the consumer as its focus and ‘marketing is thus the process through which the economy is integrated into society to serve human needs’ (Drucker, 1958, p. 253). Others have taken more functional approaches in defining marketing. Moyer, for example, takes marketing to be the middleman in the exchange process and the dynamics of linkages between local, regional and national markets (Moyer, 1965). Other authors, particularly in the marketing literature, employ the ‘marketing concept’ as the definition of marketing. This concept places the consumer in the pivotal role because the consumer ultimately is said to determine what is to be offered for sale with producers striving to meet his or her wants, tastes, and needs. This definition of marketing may be more applicable to an economy characterised by an excess supply of consumer goods as exists in many developed nations than to an economy characterised by a scarcity of these goods, a situation prevalent in developing nations and in the Soviet Union until the 1960s and even today for certain products.²