Re: the consumers behaviour

The problem is that of a definition of "marketing" and marketing purpose.

I completely agree with you on the basis of managerial interest of books,
i.e. "How to sell": you need a very recent book if you are looking for
marketing recipes.

Now if you are a university student, and you want to know what are the
rationale behind industrial marketing and BtoB relationships, you need to
understand how and why these recipes were made so that you can create yours.
That is probably the purpose of studying marketing in the first place at
university, because it will be useful for a lifetime, unlike the "recipes"
which will be relevant only for some time and in certain specific
circumstances...

Now to catch up with your architecture example, we can appraise the
invention of lifts, as you describe it, as a change of paradigm in
architecture, since the changes introduced by a lift in the design of
buildings make the way architect think different in many ways. The problem
is that in BtoB, no "lift", or, more academically, paradigm, was found since
1982 and that book from Hakansson and the IMP group.
Although this obviously does not mean that some "recipes" were not invented
since that time that can merit some attention, from a managerial point of
view, but they will probably be outdated before our student has
graduated -and he will have all of his time to learn it inside a business
anyway. To catch up with your architectural example, it is not because the
lift changed everything in architecture that buildings before the lift were
all the same during 2 milleniums!!! That is why it was important to know the
classical rules governing the construction of buildings with  a lift and,
before its invention, before the lift...

--------------------------
Fabrice Pombet
Doctoral student
Imperial College London