Counterculture, Criticisms, and Crisis: Assessing the Effect of the Sixties on Marketing Thought

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Abstract
To assess the effect of "the Sixties" on the development of marketing thought, a framework is developed that embodies three broad paradigms that existed or were emerging during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Marketing scholars have labeled these the Apologist, the Social Marketer, and the Reconstructionist Paradigms. Through the in-depth presentation of various authors' positions, it is argued that these three perspectives largely capture the essence of academic marketing's response to the Sixties. The Apologists sought to maintain the status quo. The Social Marketers attempted to reconcile the fundamental worth of marketing with the idealistic goals propounded by society, but they largely avoided addressing many of the core ideas and criticisms of the Sixties. This was left to the Reconstructionists, who seemed to challenge the very foundations of the marketing discipline. While the intellectual contributions of the Reconstructionists and the Social Marketers are evident today, primarily in the broadened concept of marketing, from the vantage point of the 1990s it appears that the Apologists' more circumspect view of marketing has been validated.

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