Demarketing: An Optional Strategy for the Oil‐exporting Countries Available to Purchase

If the events of late 1973 have been the catalyst for an accelerated transition from the age of low‐cost oil, they have also demonstrated, on the one hand, the feasibility of demarketing as an advantageous optional strategy for the oil‐exporting countries and, on the other, the inevitability of demarketing as an appropriate strategy to cope with the new situation in the oil‐importing countries. Writing in 1971, Kotler and Levy asserted that the marketer's task is not blindly to seek increases in sales; rather, it is “to shape demand to conform with long‐run objectives”, including “that aspect of marketing that deals with discouraging customers in general or a certain class of customers in particular on either a temporary or a permanent basis”, i.e., demarketing. Kotler and Levy could not have hoped for a better situation to prove the soundness of their ideas than the present oil crisis.