Marketization and its Limits

This commentary provides a short reflection on what marketing should be rethinking. We suggest that marketing should reconsider its relationship to markets, namely in the light of the so-called marketization wave (i.e., the use of market exchange as the principal mode of the coordination of socio-economic life based on the belief that markets are an inherently superior way of organizing the conception, production and exchange of goods). Our argument is that by dissolving economic into generic exchange, marketing unwittingly finds itself unable to pass comment on marketization whilst occluding its own contribution to the spread of marketization. The question that concerns us is whether marketing, as an academic discipline and as a set of professionalized practices, should engage with the marketization debate and if so, what form should this engagement take. We conclude and call for a more systematic assessment of how marketing practices have societal impact. We argue that marketing theory should pay closer attention to how it contributes to marketization by providing an ideology, a toolkit and expertise to expand the scope of markets. A more reflexive attitude as to how marketing contributes to marketization opens up a space of debate and critique on both the appropriate scope of markets as well as the role of marketing in making and operating markets.