Marketing's Changing Role: Expanding or Contracting?

T IS evident in the literature that current circumstances are changing the role of marketing-what marketing does and in whose interest it does it. The portents are that the change may well be radical. A critical question thus is raised: Is the role expanding or contracting as marketing changes and, if contracting, what can be done to preserve the current strengths of that role? The literature on marketing's role has, for the past five years, been marked by change, contradiction, and confusion-in short, by all of the problems attending a concept in transition. The shifting and often conflicting themes in the literature have reflected the state of transition through which the concept is passing and an uncertainty on the part of marketing experts about which future course the change will take. The leading authors on the subject have differed both among themselves and even, in successive writings, with themselves as to which course of change the role of marketing should or will follow. Yet these authors seem generally to agree that the role of marketing must and will change-in fact, that it is changing.