Publication

Abstract : For the past couple of decades, a debate emerged in different corners of the management world, both in corporate sectors and in academia, challenging the existing marketing theories and concepts and questioning the need to redefine the marketing theory. The relevance of 4Ps in the emerging e-commerce and digital marketing scenarios and differing understanding of the present day marketing functions, as well as emergence of various related and unrelated theories reignited the debate in many forums time again. The tumultuous growth of internet and mobile applications and the emergence and evolution of both e-commerce and m-commerce as the game changers of marketing of goods, services and technologies made it essential to work towards identifying and building a new marketing theory. The paper attempts to make a brief revisit on the idea of marketing and put forward the perspectives of marketing as the idea emerged and became an essential and integral part of modern management theory. The paper intends to chronicle developments in marketing and overlapping ideas that touch upon marketing and sales and finding a core underlying thread that help build a better understanding of the developments and weave together a contemporary framework or understanding of the theory of marketing, so as to help develop, if possible, a new theory of marketing.