The impact of lean thinking and the lean enterprise on marketing: Threat or synergy?

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Abstract
It is argued in this paper that marketing theory and practice has reacted largely ineffectively to many of the fundamental challenges posed by developments in other disciplines, illustrated in recent years by total quality management (TQM) and business process re‐engineering (BPR). The urgency of addressing the need for responsiveness to paradigm shifts in other disciplines is underlined by the newest cross‐disciplinary challenge of this kind, which comes from the emergence of “lean thinking” and the conceptualisation of the “lean enterprise”. The goal in this paper is to identify the ways in which lean thinking relates to the marketing process in terms of both conflicts and synergies, and to set an agenda for a productive and timely response from the marketing discipline to the advent of lean thinking.