Total Marketing:

Total Quality and the Marketing Concept

Barry J. Witcher
UNIVERSITY OF EAST ANGLIA

ABSTRACT

This paper argues that marketing is not understood by managements in its modern
sense. Marketing activities are obvious to everybody and this is probably why
managements have trouble applying the marketing concept. The Marketing profession
itself defines marketing too narrowly. The marketing concept is a total concept and has
much in common with quality ideas. Yet they are often treated as contradictory or seem t
odds. Total quality management is potentially very useful for internal marketing and
relationship marketing. British companies should look to their corporate cultures to turn
Britain’s marketing failure into success.

The word ‘marketing’ in its modern usage

Here are some company functions which are obvious marketing activities: there
include selling, market research, advertising and branding, and all of these have been
around for a very long time. Yet the word which describes them all as part of one
operational function – marketing, is fairly recent in terms of its modern usage.
The most important books used in marketing education are those of the American
author and teacher, Philip Kotler. In his classic textbook called Marketing Management, he
outlines and defines the principles of modern marketing as centring around the
management of market ‘exchanges’ –
“marketing management is the analysis, planning, implementation, and control of
programmes designed to create, build, and maintain beneficial exchanges with target buyers
for the purpose of achieving organizational objectives.”i
This involves making the customer central to a company’s business operations, and
should be basic to every company’s business philosophy. Kotler and other marketing
professionals are one in calling this external focus on the customer the ‘marketing concept’.
It is regarded as a necessary step to commercial and market success for any company. A
market must be understood in terms of its customer needs. This understanding allows a

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company a company to break a market down into segments, which then allows the
company to target its resources in a way which closely meets the needs of the target
customers. This closeness of match and differentiation of the company’s offers helps
establish a competitive edge over competitors. Kotler has written –
“The marketing concept holds that the key to achieving organizational goals consists in
determining the needs and wants of target markets and delivering the desired satisfactions
more effectively and efficiently than competitors.”ii
It is difficult to be sure when marketing ideas like these began to influence business
leaders and managers. The publication of Ted Levitt’s famous ‘Marketing Myopia’ article in
the Harvard Business Review in 1960 was a sign that marketing had arrived in its modern
sense.iii However the universal application of the so-called marketing concept is today far
from complete.

The failure of modern marketing

In July, 1987, a comparative study of British and foreign owned companies operating
in the UK market found that basic marketing ideas were not being universally applied. UK
and US companies, the study’s report declared, were found to be worse than Japanese
owned companies. For instance, the report stated the following –
“Segmentation and positioning is at the heart of modern marketing. Successful
companies are invariably those that decompose the market into relatively homogeneous
groups of customers and target their offerings to those with the cost potential. It was
therefore alarming to discover that 47 percent of British and 40 percent of the US companies
(vs. 13 percent of Japanese) acknowledged that they were unclear about the main type of
customers in the market and what their needs were.”iv
More generally, it is clear that many companies continue to follow, albeit quite
unconsciously, policies and actions which are rival creeds to the marketing philosophy.
These fall into three main kinds.
 A tendency for a company to give more attention to production matters is likely to
focus business operations on costs, quality and availability, which encourages a pre-
deterministic rather than a flexible and responsive approach to customer needs. This is a
product orientation or bias in a company’s operations.

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  A concern with existing products and business, and an over-emphasis on product
features at the expense of customer benefits, which is likely to prevent a company from
seeing and understanding the significance of changes in competitive offers. This is a
product orientation.
 A heavy dependence on selling focuses a company’s efforts on promotion, which can
result in a hit-and-run attitude towards the customer, which gives a distinctly short-term
emphasis to a company’s operations. This is a selling orientation.
These three tendencies do not necessarily work without any success. One of the most
famous entrepreneurs of our times is Alan Sugar, founder and chief executive of Amstrad,
the consumer electronics company. He has recently been quoted as saying this –
“If you have a winning product, thrash it to death. Don’t get complacent. Knock the
living daylights out of the thing. The Amstrad approach to marketing is simple. In a way
marketing is just like a stall in Petticoat Lane. We also work to pile ‘em high, sell ‘em cheap.
My philosophy is all about realism. Pan Am takes good care of you. Markers & Spencer
loves you. Securicor cares. IBM says the customer is king. At Amstrad we want your
money.” v
The question is how long can it continue? What about the future in terms of new
products and new markets? What do Amstrad’s customers want? Amstrad was one of the
companies included in the UK-based survey of marketing practices reported above.

A deeper meaning to the marketing concept

A marketing oriented organization considers its customers in all its workings and
operations. Modern marketing has as its primary role the job of making this happen inside
the company. This requires more than a simple organization of a distinct function, which
oversees and coordinates only those activities directly involved with the outside – such as
sales, promotion and delivery, as important as these things are. The implementation of the
marketing concept cannot be solely confirmed to a marketing department (which is often
removed from operations and located in a head office).
The cooperation of senior management in every function of the company is
important. Every employee influences, and is influenced in opinion and motivation, by
organizational climate and culture. The greatest determinant of these things is company
policy and the quality of top company management.

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 In this sense the marketing concept goes much deeper than market segmentation
and idea about targeting. There are three related conditions that a company’s management
must try to fulfil if the company is to be truly marketing oriented. These are –
 Condition 1: The company must be externally focused on customers in all aspects of
organization and operations.
 Condition 2: The company’s efforts must be coordinated and matched with the needs of
target customers.
 Condition 3: Everybody who works for the company must participate in a total
marketing corporate environment.
The first of these is about awareness of the trading and marketing environment; the
need to understand and keep in touch with customers, and the need to ensure that useful
marketing information reaches all concerned.
The second condition is about market segmentation and positioning: the need to
match what the company is good at, to the needs of customers, in a way which strengthens
the company’s competitive position. This requires market planning, with its associated
segments’ strategy and their coordinated mix of marketing variables.
The third condition is the most important. It is about the way a company, when
considered as a whole, is organised and coordinated, so that a favourable corporate climate
and culture to marketing is established. A total approach is necessary, if employee
motivation is going to be positive enough to turn the company into a customer responsive
organization, where individuals are going to be proactive, rather than passive, in their
dealings with the outside world.
Yet the marketing profession does not make this clear to managers. Marketing
professionals define their subject too narrowly. See for example, The Chartered Institute of
Marketing’s definition, which follows closely the ideas of Kotler –
“Marketing is the management process responsible for identifying, anticipating, and
satisfying customers’ requirements profitably.”vi
This definition does not make it clear to those outside the marketing profession what
the modern sense of marketing is about. It is too much based on the first and second
conditions. The third condition is hidden away. Marketing textbooks are just as narrow.
The importance of internal marketing is missed.

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Internal Marketing
In most of the UK’s largest industrial companies marketing is still seen (or more correctly –
treated) as a set of related but compartmentalised activities, which are separate from the
rest of the company. This means that any attempt to implement marketing as a general
company-wide philosophy is likely to breakdown in a mass of internal communications and
the vested interests of sectional purpose.
Company communications, workings and employee motivation, have long been the
subject of training. These matters have traditionally included schemes which have aimed to
shift the emphasis from departmental and individual interests to those which concern the
interests of the total company. But they have not generally involved any input from
marketing, except where customer care and contact have been directly relevant, such as,
for example, for showroom, service or maintenance staff.
In more recent times total quality management ideas, originally derived from
Japanese management development schemesvii, have been applied widely in large
companies to improve –
(i) Internal communications: by using company mission statements (of supreme
relevance to marketing decisions) and related promotional materials for training purposes.
(ii) Staff understanding: of the relevance of daily work to planning, by building up cross-
functional linkages.
(iii) Marketing relationships: between a marketing company’s personnel and the staff in
customer companies.

Total quality management

British Telecom has recently introduced a full scale TQM programme. The convergence of
telecommunications, computers and consumer electronics technologies, has led to new
telephone product applications in final markets. These opportunities, coupled with first the
liberalisation of telecommunications, and then the privatisation of the company, has had
profound implications for the corporate culture of BT. It has had to try to move from an
essentially engineering based company, with an administrative style of management, to one
which is market-led, with a commercially responsive style of management. Changes in
corporate culture are the most difficult of things to achieve for large companies, and BT is a
very big company indeed of about 240,000 employees.

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 In 1987 the company began a TQM programme in n attempt to commercialise its
workforce, from the top down. This has involved several parts:-
(a) Spreading the BT’s mission, based on a full explanation throughout the company of
end-user requirements from BT service. The mission statement used involved a
breakdown in terms of customer service, product quality, the involvement of
suppliers and attainment of a positive market position, the welfare of staff, and
involvement in the community at large.
(b) The use of cross-functional training and workshops, to involve participants from
every level of the company.
(c) A full discussion of the purpose of the TQM programme, its concept and need, how
one’s work is relevant to that of others, the techniques required to facilitate working
together, and how to obtain commitment over time. These sessions involve a series
of stages to guide discussion and work to suggest answers to two basic questions:
Where do we want to be?
What do we want to achieve?
(d) The determination of acceptable levels of failure, and a time-table to review
progress.
The emphasis of this programme is on quality of service achieved through everyone
rather than the old supervisory techniques of quality control. The idea is to implement
planning and management through the use of team working, and by so doing, create an
understanding that leads to a greater spread of responsibility, and proactivity. BT hopes
these things will eventually improve its customer service and contact, and lead on to a
better corporate image.
To some extent these ideas are no more than an inwardly directed public relations
exercise to improve employee relations. Yet it goes further, in that TQM tries to make the
process continuous and seeks to involve people and change their actions as a way of
working, not just to simply make them understand the reasons for things.

Relationship Marketing
These kinds of considerations are potentially very important to how marketing is
implemented. Total quality management programmes should beat the heart of

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implementing ideas in companies. Since the ideas which they reflect match perfectly a
growing concern in the marketing literature with relationship marketing.
“Most marketing scholars seem to agree that the ‘exchange relationship’ is the core
phenomenon for study in the marketing discipline...”viii
Relationships imply something more than just a short-term event in a market-place.
Relationships take time to establish and are long-term phenomena which involve complete
series of exchanges (however defined). This is obviously important for the maintenance of
profitable supplier-buyer relationships in industrial markets. In this particular context
relationship marketing has been defined by Barbara Jackson as –
“...marketing oriented towards strong, lasting relationships with individual accounts.” ix
In her book, Winning and Keeping Industrial Customers, she emphasises the
commercial importance of individual account relationships over time –
“With this focus, marketers can find and analyse promising marketing actions that might not
be found with existing approaches.” – such as by using market segments.x

Business-to-business marketing
Industrial marketing presents a name for itself which has a popular image of heavy
engineering, process technology, of complex and big [products. Yet this subject-area
includes a wide variety of products and services, many of which are similar, if not identical,
to those bought by final consumers. The significant difference is that the reasons for
purchase are different. A better name for this area of marketing is business-to-business
marketing, which covers both industrial and commercial organizations.
Much of general textbook marketing is about supplying products and services to final
consumers in large markets. Marketing to other businesses has to take into account the
buying motivation not only of individuals but of groups of individuals where buying criteria
are distinctly different. This is because organizational behaviour, the objectives and
decision-making processes, and the face-to-face interactions associated with them, have
their own social characteristics which are very different to those associated with the
psychology of the final consumer markets.
In a way, because the numbers of suppliers and customers are generally smaller in
total number, they tend to be closer to each other, and know more about products and
services they buy then do final customers, marketing should be an easier process. There

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may seem to be less requirement for market segmentation ideas, and positioning. In fact
things are more complex, because this kind of marketing involves individuals who have to
function in groups, whether these are formalised or not. The problems for internal
marketing are generally greater and are more open ended. Marketing as a coordinating
activity is very important.

Marketing is too basic to be noticed

The [problem here is that marketing is so basic to a business, and may seem so obvious to
management that its general role within the firm is unrecognised. This has been observed
and commented upon; see for example, Frederick Webster’s comment on a survey of
management opinion in the United States –
“...managers do not spend a great deal of time thinking about the marketing function
in the abstract; they focus on the problems of their own businesses and see
marketing...intertwined with other business problems and functions. A good portion of
these executives had trouble separating marketing from corporate strategy and planning.” xi
The problem is that this understanding is not followed through to the general
workforce, and marketing textbooks do not have much to say about the implementation of
the marketing concept in large companies, how marketing activities can be coordinated and
organised. This is particularly true for those companies whose employees must interact
closely with those in customer organizations, where company purpose should be clearly
defined and understood by all. This includes companies in some of the more traditional
business areas such as engineering, where the product centeredness of technical
managements is sometimes at its worst.

Marketing vs. quality

Marketing’s inclusion in total quality management could improve things. Yet for most
companies TQM has not directly involved marketing, it is a programme nearly always
confined to a personnel department. A good example is the total customer service
programme at Black & Decker, based in County Durham. It is a company which is generally
thought of as a progressive marketing and employee training organization. A scheme which
includes among other things, the idea that each employee treats every other employee as a
customer, involves no formal contact with the company’s marketing people at all. The

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marketing function is located 200 miles away near London and the contact between its staff
and the production plant is not easy.xii
It is clear that many people writing about quality see marketing as a part of a quality
problem, for example this is taken from a text about just-in-time management –
“In a ‘customer oriented’ or ‘market led’ company, the emphasis is on service, and
the prime evil is the inability to satisfy customer demand – ANY customer demand. This
precept becomes part of the informal company culture and percolates through to the person
who makes the replenishment decision...His operating doctrine becomes: if unsure, order
more...If top management in a company is willing to put quality before everything else...then
this message will quickly percolate through the level of commend to the shop floor, where
quality is determined. Often the simple message that quality is important is sufficient to
improve it.”xiii
Opinions expressed in these terms are likely to cause misunderstandings, and worry
marketing people. In 1982 Peters and Waterman in their bestselling book, In Search of
Excellence, wrote –
“The traditional industrial approach to the management of quality concentrated on
the means of production, rather than a wider understanding of quality in the sense of it
being ‘fitness for purpose’ – the customer’s purpose, the idea that a characteristics of an
excellent company is its ‘nearness to the customer’.”xiv
And, more recently, others have written in an article in Industrial Marketing
Management –
“The recent interest in the quality concept is a good example of a traditional
approach that, while effective in its own right, falls short of moving the company to being
more market=responsive. In some instances, the quality concept may even serve to drive the
company further away from being market responsive.”xv

Total marketing corporate environment

Tom Peters, in his latest book, has added that if these misconceptions are to change, then
TCR – total customer responsiveness – must be added to total quality. The trouble is that
TCR entails a “wholesale change of attitude”. He lists “at least” nine factors that are
necessary, most of which are about closer intra-organizational linkages, flattening the
organization and breaking functional barriers, replacing adversarial dealings with

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partnership thinking, supplier and customer integration, superb training and wider use of
friendly information technology. Just-in-time should be used to assist customers as part of
an integrated marketing strategy.xvi
Peters is one of the first writers working to bring marketing into TQM ideas. If
quality is defined as fitness for use, then surely this must be done as a recognised part of
internal marketing. Marketing texts and training practice must together begin to take
notice of the correspondence between quality, marketing, and training. These are issues
about how management and employees can be ‘commercialised’ in large companies, so that
they take a holistic approach to marketing, which is true to the modern meaning of the
name.
If ‘total’ ideas or schemes are to work for internal marketing, then the backing of top
management is necessary. Marketing managers should be encouraged to inform others
about market trends, competition, and about their own company’s market performance, to
balance all the company’s operational functions in a way which pulls everybody in the same
desired direction. For example, promotion and sales must not promise what production
lines and delivery systems cannot produce, and it is the marketing function’s job to provide
the balance. In this it is insufficient to simply give people in non-marketing departments so-
called market information, it is also necessary to provide them with motivation and
understanding – to provide a context for using marketing information. The management of
the company’s total marketing corporate environment is paramount.

Partnership not adversarial trading

A total marketing corporate environment is important to relationship marketing. How well
supplier-buyer organizations match up to each other, depends upon the forms and the
management styles of the organizations involved. This is additional to the direct
commercial advantages of cooperation, such as where dynamic final markets or complex
production processes require close working.
The importance of cooperative working puts an even greater stress on seeing things
from the customer’s viewpoint. Peter Chisnall has written in The Marketing Book about the
importance to industrial marketing of coordinating individual efforts in organizations –
“In some cases, technological marvels are not what customers really want; they seek
solutions to their problems and should be offered products RELEVANT to their needs. This is

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where R&D people, the designers and the marketing team should work hand-in-hand to
develop EFFECTIVE solutions for specific kinds of industrial customers.” xvii
Cooperative working not only calls for internal coordination from the marketer but it
also calls for the same from the buyer company, and from the two together. This may call
for a kind of partnership trading where suppliers and buyers involve each other in their
planning. It certainly calls for a basic trust. This is very different to the old adversarial ways
of doing business.
Even so, the long term success of these buyer-supplier relationships comes down
again to the motivation of individuals. Since relationships will often depend upon the
chemistry of the individuals involved, of the individual salesperson and buyer. The trust
built up between individuals in different companies has a permanency all its own, and is not
necessarily always in the interests of both companies. These are coalitions of convenience
and personal preference, which sometimes explain why companies buy moderate products
rather than the best ones. These relationships have to be handled and controlled sensitively
by managements.
Conceptual and empirical research has concentrated on the influences which affect
the behaviour of single organizations rather than the organizational relations. An admirable
exception is the research supported by Hakansson, which compared buyer-seller
relationships in five European countries.xviii This suggested that British industrial companies
are bad at managing long-term relationships.
There is something in the British character, perhaps, that favours a
compartmentalised and competitive approach, rather than a holistic and a properly planned
one. The emphasis on targets in British companies stands out in contrast to the way the
Japanese seem to do things. The main thrust of the way they use plans is based on
continuous improvement principles and what the ‘plans’ are about, rather than the
deterministic achievement of particular objectives as such.
These, and a number of other related issues, were discussed at a recent conference
at Newcastle.xix A large number of Japanese companies in the Tyne-Tees area have
experienced important problems in establishing long-term relationships with local suppliers,
to an extent where some Japanese owned companies have given up altogether and
continue to rely on suppliers in Japan and elsewhere. The Japanese it was claimed, prefer
partnership arrangements with suppliers, and select them rather like they select employees,

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for the long-term. Some large UK-owned companies have switched to a partnership
approach for suppliers, including the Rover Group, which now involves a small number of
suppliers in its planning process.xx
This is quite new, since marketing planning itself has been treated by British
companies as a separate activity. Paradoxically this is just what planning is meant to
prevent. Planning, if it is about anything, is about the integration and coordination of
disparate activities to achieve a common goal. Yet somehow, planning has been turned into
something which is both too narrow and overly deterministic. It has become a separate
activity from everything else in the company.

A conclusion
The insularity of UK-based companies has probably prevented the full application of
marketing in its modern sense. This is a British marketing failure. For the future, British
companies should look to their corporate cultures, and change them. The marketing
concept, like the total quality concept, applies totally and to everything. Both these things
must be brought together through training and company identity schemes as a common
programme to influence culture. Management have to understand that the marketing idea
is not a functional activity, but a way of business life. In the Japanese way of stating things,
it is an important part of ‘continuous improvement’. This is not generally understood at the
moment, which is why companies do not seem to be implementing modern marketing
ideas. The marketing profession must understand it first.

References
i
Kotler, P. (1986), Marketing Management, 3rd edition, New York: Prentice-Hall.
ii
Kotler, op cit.
iii
Levitt, T. (1960), ‘Marketing Myopia’, The Harvard Business Review, July-August.
iv
Doyle, P., Saunders, J. and Wright, L. A. (1987), A Comparative Study of US and Japanese Marketing
Strategies in the British Market, Report, Warwick University, July.
v
The Daily Express, (1989), ‘Amstrad Scrambles to Keep Up’, 15th February 1989.
vi
Institute of Marketing (1990), Marketing as a Career, The Chartered Institute of Marketing.
vii
Garvin, D. A. (1988), Managing Quality, London: The free Press.
viii
Frazier G. L., Spekman R. E. and O’Neal C. R. (1988), Just-in-Time Exchange Relationships in Industrial
Markets, Journal of Marketing, 52(4), 52-67.
ixix
Jackson B. B. (1985), Winning and Keeping Industrial Customers, Lexington: Lexington Books.
x
Jackson, op cit.
xi
Webster Jr., F. E. (1981), Top Management Concerns about Marketing Issues for the 1980s, Journal of
Marketing, Summer.

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xii
Competing in Europe from a British Centre of Manufacturing Excellence, presentations by David Fanthorpe,
General Manager, Black & Decker, at a meeting of the Management Research Group (BIM), Durham, 9th
March, 1989.
xiii
Dear, A. (1988), Working Towards Just-in-Time, London: Kogan Page.
xiv
Peters, T. And Waterman R. H. (1982), In Search of Excellence, New York: Harper & Row.
xv
Masiello, J. (1988), Developing Market Responsiveness Throughout Your Company, Industrial Marketing
Management, 17.
xvi
Peters T. (1988), Thriving on Chaos, London: Macmillan.
xvii
Chisnall P. (187), Industrial Marketing, in Baker M. (ed.) The Marketing Book, London: Heinemann, pps 343-
354.
xviii
Hakansson, H. (ed.) (1981), International Marketing and Purchasing of Industrial Goods: An Interaction
Approach, Chichester: John Wiley.
xix
Management and Cultural Difference, a seminar organized by Newcastle upon Tyne Polytechnic, Newcastle,
October, 1988.
xx
Day, Sir Graham, reported at a Durham Business School Management Meeting, 1 st March, 1989.

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