Marketing has completed a full cycle - it is back to the primitive marketing form. Only that it is now an electronic barter system that marketing analysts and observers now talk about. The author traces the evolution of marketing, the contributions of other disciplines to the concept of marketing and identifies as many as 36 trends that, he believes, are likely to change the course of marketing in the next millennium. He feels the concept of marketing itself has been myopic in by wasting efforts and resources on cosmetic issues like advertising and image-building. In the process, the very essence of marketing has been missed - new opportunities have not been identified and exploited proactively. With the strategic aspect of marketing - assessment of opportunities - being taken up by top management, the operational aspect has not been integrated with other functions. MJ Xavier asserts that at this rate, conventional marketing, as is in vogue today, may not exist in the future. He, hence, identifies trends using the "yearning for the pre-industrial societal framework". The information revolution should be able to offset the ills like poverty and unemployment that came bag and baggage with the industrial revolution.

Primitive marketing focused on selling agricultural products. Subsequently, the scope expanded to marketing of industrial products. The accepted wisdom in the marketing establishment that marketing meant physical goods was almost never challenged. As the services sector and technology developed, new methodologies and concepts developed as well to meet the new requirements. There were parallel developments in the field of business-to-business marketing that moved away from the traditional 4Ps approach of product-price-place-promotion. Quality management first introduced the customer satisfaction concept. This is turn was borrowed by the services and business-to-business marketing. Developments in strategic management and information technology led to greater integration of these functions thereby diluting the function of marketing. The 4Ps marketing management approach is gradually drawing to a close as a universal marketing approach.

The world of marketing is in a flux. The independent buyer-seller relation is giving way to an interdependent buyer-seller tieup. The marketer was once an omniscient expert. Now, there is an increasing realisation that partnerships with customers lead to networking relationships. Marketing used to be segmented in the conventional approach. Now, the stress is more on 'segment-of-one marketing or micro-majority'. The episodic perspective is transforming into a holistic perspective, while the craving for maximisation of value from each transaction is yielding ground to the desire for maximising the customer lifetime value and managing the customer lifecycle. The focus used to be on gaining new customers; now more emphasis is laid on the value enhancing of existing customers. The responsibility of marketing was earlier the sole prerogative of the marketing department. The shift is now towards marketing being the job of everyone in the organisation.

Marketing, says Xavier, cannot be seen anymore as a separate function since business strategy is increasingly becoming with marketing strategy. Marketing is also getting integrated with other major functions. Research and development, design and production should be coordinated with marketing to assess customer needs. Marketers, therefore, will have to understand the functioning of other departments too. Intra-organisational competition, particularly among individual employees and departments, which turn out to be counter-productive, must be done away with. Archetypal planning must make way for tracking the future and planning strategies according to the perceived futuristic scenario. Among other trends that Xavier feels the need for are 'Small is beautiful'; 'Business with a purpose'; 'Boundaryless organisation'; 'Be different'; 'Customer is not always right'; 'Customer satisfaction to customer value management'; 'A shift towards one-to-one marketing'; 'Shared-destiny relationships'; 'Individual empowerment'; 'Monologues to dialogue'; 'Virtual marketing'; 'E-commerce to e-business'; 'Standard of living to quality of living'; 'Emancipation of women'; and 'Uniformity to variety'.

Xavier assesses the situation and prescribes his 36-set-panacea from an Indian perspective. His assessment of the prevalent marketing trends and fallacies is objective. The only mistake that he makes is when he enumerates regional conflicts and separatist movements in the section titled 'Trends in India' in the appendix on 'India-Vision 2020'. It is not "the Sikhs" who are demanding a separate Khalistan - it IS only an isolated group of extremists. The definite article is misleading. Separatism, moreover, died in the Indian state of Mizoram in the mid-Eighties - it is the most peaceful state in Northeast India today. That, however, remains the only drawback in an otherwise thought-provoking and perceptive book.

Until Isabel Allende burst onto the scene with her 1985 debut, The House of the Spirits, Latin American fiction was, for the most part, a boys' club comprised of such heavy hitters as Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Luis Borges, and Mario Vargas Llosa. But the Chilean Allende shouldered her way in with her magical realist multi-generational tale of the Trueba family, followed it up with four more novels and a spate of nonfiction, and has remained in a place of honour ever since. Her sixth work of fiction, Daughter of Fortune, shares some characteristics with her earlier works: the canvas is wide, the characters are multi-generational and multi-ethnic, and the protagonist is an unconventional woman who overcomes enormous obstacles to make her way in the world. Yet one cannot accuse Allende of telling the same story twice; set in the mid-1800s, this novel follows the fortunes of Eliza Sommers, Chilean by birth but adopted by a British spinster, Rose Sommers, and her bachelor brother, Jeremy, after she is abandoned on their doorstep.

"You have English blood, like us," Miss Rose assured Eliza when she was old enough to understand. "Only someone from the British colony would have thought to leave you in a basket on the doorstep of the British Import and Export Company, Limited. I am sure they knew how good-hearted my brother Jeremy is, and felt sure he would take you in. In those days I was longing to have a child, and you fell into my arms, sent by God to be brought up in the solid principles of the Protestant faith and the English language."

The family servant, Mama Fresia, has a different point of view, however: "You, English? Don't get any ideas, child. You have Indian hair, like mine." And certainly Eliza's almost mystical ability to recall all the events of her life would seem to stem more from the Indian than the Protestant side.

As Eliza grows up, she becomes less tractable, and when she falls in love with Joachin Andieta, a clerk in Jeremy's firm, her adoptive family is horrified. They are even more so when a now-pregnant Eliza follows her lover to California where he has gone to make his fortune in the 1849 gold rush. Along the way Eliza meets Tao Chi'en, a Chinese doctor who saves her life and becomes her closest friend. What starts out as a search for a lost love becomes, over time, the discovery of self; and by the time Eliza finally catches up with the elusive Joachin, she is no longer sure she still wants what she once wished for. Allende peoples her novel with a host of colourful secondary characters. She even takes the narrative as far afield as China, providing an intimate portrait of Tao Chi'en's past before returning to 19th-century San Francisco, where he and Eliza eventually fetch up. Readers with a taste for the epic, the picaresque, and romance that is satisfyingly complex will find them all in Daughter of Fortune. © Amazon.com


What The Guardian says:

Expansive might be one word to describe Isabel Allende's new novel, which aspires to the dubious condition of historical saga despite taking place over a period of only 10 years. The complex plot, the wilfully unusual characters and their outlandish fates, and the vast backdrop of mid-19th-century Chile and California - all speak of a writer keen to deploy her talents on as broad a canvas as possible.

Allende's narrative strategy is reminiscent of the childhood game Grandmother's Footsteps, where one covers ground by a combination of exaggeratedly large strides and surreptitious little mincings. Thus we have extraordinary leaps in the story, where suddenly Eliza falls madly in love at first sight, loses her virginity, gets pregnant and stows away on a ship in pursuit of her lover, who has succumbed to gold fever; or where Rose and Jeremy's brother, a roguish sea-captain, is peremptorily revealed as Eliza's possible father.

The transformation of America into wildly precarious entrepreneurial society, complete with cut-throat bandits, die-hard prostitutes and vicious inter-racial strife presents the author with some interesting opportunities, but is consistently made to play second fiddle to Eliza's own voyage of self-discovery. She is accompanied throughout by the Chinese doctor Tao Chi'en, whose communion with his dead wife introduces a somewhat bogus vein of mysticism, and with whom she eventually builds a sustained, fulfilling relationship. © The Guardian