Marketing is marketing – maybe!

“Marketing is marketing, irrespective of the product or marketplace”. This is a theme common to many introductory marketing texts and degree courses. The two most common exceptions cited to this proposition are buying behaviour models between consumers and business buyers and the extended ingredients of the services marketing mix. While the overall sentiments of marketing hold true across product and market boundaries, perhaps the differences are in fact more marked? Intends to spark some discussion pertaining to the extent to which marketers can safely generalise when discussing the nature and characteristics of marketing. Are we correct in offering students and in‐company training programmes generalisations that cut across the marketing domain? Are we doing justice to the core nuances if we simply draw out the variations between consumer goods, services, industrial and business‐to‐business marketing? Is there a different perspective that should, in the new millennium, be the focus of textbooks and marketing courses?