Relationship Marketing

Defined as to establish, maintain, enhance, and commercialize relationship with customers

and other partners, at a profit, so that the objectives of the parties involved are met. And,
this is achieved by a mutual exchange and fulfillment of promises (Gronroos, 1994).

Historical Perspective of Relationship Marketing

Even though most of the papers indicate that the concept of relationship marketing
originated from late 1970s (Gronroos, 1994), there are historical studies of relationship
marketing showing the use of similar practices from the 1880s onward. An example can be
seen from the writings of Keep, Hollander and Dickson (1998) that dates back to 1840s:

- 1840 to 1870: where the relationship between an advertising agency and advertiser (the
client) involved repeated transactions with a low level of interdependence. In 1870s, the
agency started an open contract and added specialized skills, which increased
interdependency – relationships became bilateral with very high commitment between the
buyer and the seller.

From a critical point of view, Wanamaker and Sheldon play important roles in terms of the
development of relationship marketing. Wanamaker has implemented the concept of RM in
his retailing emporium, which was established in 1861. For example, he was against caveat
emptor (a situation where the seller has more information than the buyer about goods
purchasing and the seller tries to hide defects in goods/services to customers). Also, he
emphasized on reciprocity and the promotion of goodwill with customers, stressing on the
mutual benefits. In addition, he stated that customers would be influenced by factors such
as convenience in shopping in-store as well as by other factors such as the store displays
and interior design. Moreover, he stressed on internal marketing by training salesmen,
providing recreation, adopting the customers’ view by letter writing and complaint
monitoring.

Also Sheldon (Tadajewski, 2011) had developed certain points to be stressed upon in
relationship marketing, which are:

1. Permanency of patronage: Developing permanent relationships requires the

salesperson to practice what Sheldon calls “constructive salesmanship”. It is not only
getting business, it is building business. It is not only procuring patronage, it is securing
the patron. It is an art of selling to the customer, which makes him satisfied and thus
progressively profitable patron.

2. Selective salesmanship: He promoted to use all appropriate sources of information to

establish the most suitable consumers for the store's offerings. He wanted to avoid
consumers who where not looking for products that the store offered because that
would mean a waste of time and energy on part of the salesmen; though he believed in
treating each and every consumer well.

3. Character analysis: He focused on physiognomy and phrenology for understanding the

consumer’s character so that the salesmen could modify his/her approach based on that
analysis; however, numerous publications appeared to question the use of character
analysis, judging a person based on his/her biological appearance. These views failed to
have immediate impact on practitioners at the time.
4. Ethics: Sheldon stated, “what you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others” as
dissatisfied customers avoid a company where they have had bad experiences and share
those stories with their friends, neighbors, and families.

5. Rotary club: According to Sheldon, “service above self- he profits most who serves
best.” He was a man of Christian faith, after all. His ethical practices sprang from his
faith in religion.

Sheldon died in mission at the age of 67, however his ideas influence the lives of others
(Tadajewski, 2011).

Beyond Wanamaker and Sheldon, there is wider marketing discourse as listed below:

1. Mutually satisfying relationship: Moriarty (1923) highlighted saying that “The great
function of retail advertising in direct relation to customer is not to gain new customers,
but to hold onto existing customers…. It is evident that the regular customer is the
store’s real gain and this alone should make evident that the real function of advertising
is to develop regular customers and retain them.”

2. Reciprocity: Bagozzi (1995) put reciprocity as the core of marketing relationships. Also,
a reasonable amount of reciprocity tends to put business concerns on a comfortable,
friendly basis, and to encourage close acquaintance and mutual interest in one another’s
business. It results in securing the services of your business friends who have your
business interests in mind and try to extend your sales or help in any other reasonable
way.

3. Long-term customer orientation: Instead of trying to attract customers, it put

emphasis on satisfying existing customers. As Moriarty (1923) mentioned, “the seller
wants to sell to him again and therefore wants to safeguard against taking any risk
which will not result to his profit.”

4. Organizational coordination: All departments in an organization should be geared to

meeting customer expectations, which fits in the idea as “team play” (Butter, 1923) and
“organizational synthesis” (Lyon, 1926)

5. The customer as a central object of managerial attention: ‘the patrons of your

company are the bosses; they can preserve or destroy your organization...Because the
men who manage it do everything they can to satisfy the customer. That is the secret of
progress and success in any business.’ (Ivey, 1926)

When relationship marketing is viewed through the contemporary perspective, the brand,
Harry Potter, is a really good example that permits multiple ways of engagement with the
customers, including books, movies, merchandise, computer games, etc. As Fournier (1998)
mentioned, “A brand… is simply a collection of perceptions held in the mind of the
customers.” He further developed 3 types of brand relationships:

1. Traditional relationship pattern seeks to use brands to provide a person with the
sense of belonging and stability.

2. Postmodern relationship uses brands as explicit form of social communication.

3. Transnational relationship, wherein relationships sits midway between the above
two types. Consumers are not defined by social roles, but not willing to engage in the
postmodern self-construction process.

From Fournier’s point of view, the consumers buy brands not just because they like them or
work well, but because the consumers are involved in relationships with a collection of
brands because of the meanings they add to their lives.

Even though relationship marketing stresses the point of reciprocity, do we, as consumers,
really get the benefits from this relationship? As O’Malley and Prothero put it, “I think the
corporations might like to convince people so that they have a relationship… They would
like you to feel like they care about you.” Here are alternative perspectives to see
relationship marketing.
First of all, polygamy is the idea that relationship marketing is not just a two-way
relationship as business-customer or business-business relationship, but involving multiple
parties. However, these parties are not broadly similar ones between spouses, as we would
expect within a polygamous marriage. They differ significantly in nature and closeness
depending on the legal relationships and contracts, and the relative power of the respective
partners.

Second, the use of financial incentives as rewards for the participants in a RM scheme
changes the nature of the relationship. It more closely resembles prostitution than marriage
as paying a participant for their compliance in the relationship. Overtime, the customers
who receive the bribes might just turn to the highest bribes available as that is the only
satisfaction they receive from the exchange.

Third, stalking, which refers to database and direct marketing, which uses the knowledge
of demographic, psychographic characteristics of consumers to target a marketing
campaign at those individuals regardless of their willingness or interests. This relationship
involves aggressors and victims: the needs of an aggressor are met at the expense of the
victims. These cases fall outside the definition of a mutually beneficial exchange relationship,
which underpins the understanding of RM.

Fourth, seduction: according to Deighton and Grayson (1995) "transforming the consumer's
initial resistance to a course of action into willing, even avid, compliance. The paradox of
seduction is that it induces consumers to enjoy things they did not intend to enjoy."

The above speaks of the development of relationship marketing. However, the use of
relationship marketing seems to be driven to a direction that the mutual beneficial link
between customers and sellers is disappearing; instead the sellers try to manipulate the
customers into this relationship.

What is the marketing concept? Critically assess the view that this concept emerged
in the 1950s

Marketing concept: philosophy holds that achieving organizational goals depend on

knowing the needs and wants of target markets and delivering the desired satisfactions
better than competitors do (Kotler, Armstrong, Harries, Piercy, 2013).
From Keith’s point of view, the marketing era is during the time of 1950-1960, and he
claimed that he was the first one to implement the marketing concept. Keith was the
executive vice president of Pillsbury Company. At the time, research and development were
able to mass-produce, and thus he found the need to increase sales with new products.
However, they required a system to decide which new products would be produced into the
markets. They built up a new department function, which directs and controls all other
functions in the corporation from procurement to production to advertising to sales. This
function was called marketing and was an integral component of any business knowing
what its market position is, who its customers are and what it is they want. Also, Keith
claimed that “brand manager” was a new and important concept for the move to marketing.
The brand manager was responsible for a range of tasks from pricing to execution of plans.
In addition, he argued that his case study was generalizable to rest of the “business
universe”.

However, there are several problematic issues in Keith’s statements. The criticism is that
other writers during the time as Keith (1960) argued that the theoretical debates about
various “business philosophies” were not new. Many considered General Electric as the first
company to fully implement the idea of marketing concept. Moreover, there were academics
and practitioners that had implemented the marketing concept even before GE. In
addition, Tadajewski and Jones (2012) highlighted the contribution of Percival White who
was deeply influenced by scientific management during the early 20th century, and they
think White was the first (1927) to circulate a clear and complete statement of the
marketing concept. Another example is Lillian Gilberth who was a well-known proponent of
studying needs of women consumers to improve product design and superimposing the
idea of an individual woman as rational, complex, and intelligent onto a woman's
consumption practice in the late 1920’s. Last but not least, in terms of the idea of business
universe Keith claimed, it should be noticed that Keith only represented an American case
study that does not reflect the nature of business practice around the world.

All these evidences above show that the marketing concept did not actually emerge in
the 1950s and 1960s (Tadajewski and Jones, 2012). The time when marketing concept
emerged is rather earlier than what Keith claimed.

Critical Marketing
Arguably, the ideal foundation of the marketing concept is fulfilling consumer needs
(Tadajewski and Brownlie, 2008). In a perfect market economy, what the consumer wished
for would control what commodities were to be produced and in what quantity (Alvesson,
1994). But these are only assumptions and arguments, the truth is none of the above is true;
at least not entirely. Critical theorists would agree; as, in the real world, humans
increasingly pay more attention to materialism and are controlled by the world of
marketing and advertising (Tadajewski, 2010).

For instance, Veblen (1919/2005) regarded marketing related activities as fruitless

(Tadajewski, 2010); he talked of how marketing and advertising communications deceived
consumers into believing they needed products, which offered them, slight or absolutely no
added benefit over other products in the market or those that the consumer already had. On
a similar level, Fromm (1956/2005) asserted that all of these useless activities distracted
consumers from pursuing other meaningful and constructive jobs (Ellis et.al. 2011). Not
only was Veblen and Fromm against the negativities of marketing, Lynd (1936) stated that
marketing activities had progressed to “a fine effective art” of admonishing goods on
consumers “as substitutes for more subtle forms of adjustment to job insecurity, monotony,
loneliness, and other situations of tension” (Tadajewski, 2010). Rorty (1934/1976) was also
another critic who claimed that radio companies and advertisers collaborated under the
name of society for profit and delivered an advertising-based “pseudo-culture” that was
“acquisitive, emulative, neurotic and disintegrating” (Hetherington, 2014).

On the other hand, Kotler (1976) used a more broad definition of marketing; he stated that
it was “… a human activity directed at satisfying needs and wants through exchange
processes”. However, he explained that more often marketing researchers were concerned
with controlling the demand in such a way that would benefit the organization in attaining
its goals. Jonsson (1979) talks of how even social marketing gives more importance to the
interests of an organization instead of upholding the ability of a consumer to make
sovereign decisions (Alvesson, 1994).

Paul Lazarsfeld (1941) advised that human beings “behaved more and more like pawns on a
chessboard”; he gave an example asking readers to imagine about an advertisement where
a brewery showed a man throwing aside a newspaper filled with the European war stories
and drinking beer to find peace; such an advert, though it would make the consumer think
that it was a sales trick, was a dangerous sign of promotional culture (Tadajewski, 2010). In
the end, it is not only consumers who behave as pawns but also marketers become puppets
of organizations as they function in an atmosphere where an overpowering importance is
placed on accomplishing outcomes that might make them ignore the magnitude of their
actions (Tadajewski & Brownlie, 2008).

Critical Marketing
→ Critical marketing studies ‘is concerned with challenging marketing concepts, ideas and
ways of reflection that present themselves as ideologically neutral or that have assumed an
otherwise taken for granted status’ (Tadajewski, 2011: 83).
→ Marketing advocates individualism but really promotes conformity.
→ Critical marketing was first mentioned in 1981 under the Journal of Marketing, and the
group of scholars was characterized as the children of 1968.
→ The critique they offered was that the marketing system didn’t actually fulfill human
needs at all. We were always left dissatisfied by what we bought, never finding the right
product for us. In equal measure, it replaced more human and human values, with a
consumption orientation that furthered distance from the natural environment.

University of Wisconsin (under GHS)

→ Marketing as a university level subject began in the early twentieth century; the primary
institutions in the development of marketing thought are Harvard and Wisconsin.
→ At the time, the scholars in University of Wisconsin were concerned about marketing and
distributive justice. Jones was critical of the number of retail outlets in operation, he
scrutinized the costs added by marketing and sales activities to the prices of goods and
found these to be problematic, in as much as they added “50%” to prices (Jones and
Monieson, 1990: 105).
→ Moreover, Taylor was interested in what was called ‘the marketing problem’. This related
to the issue of whether middlemen were manipulating the prices for consumer goods.
→ Most of the scholars were not interested in rejecting the system and in trying to
formulate alternative economic arrangement.
→ GHS is interested in slightly adjusting the system, rather than in drastic change, this is
why GHS is not really into the critical marketing society.

Veblen (1857-1929):
→ He contributed a lot to critical marketing.
→ He stated that business had transformed the world. It had made many products available
to people that did ease their lives: lower priced standardized goods were revolutionizing
society.
→ But the needs of the market was not necessarily in the best interests of the business
owner. Sabotage was the common good, so far as it is a question of material welfare, is
evidently best served by an unhampered working of the industrial system at its full capacity,
without interruption or dislocation. But it is equally evident that the owner or manager of
any given concern of this industrial system may be in a position to gain something for
himself at the cost of the rest by obstructing, retarding or dislocating this working system at
some critical point in such a way as will enable him to get the best of the bargain in his
dealings with the rest.’ (Veblen, 1919/2005: 93)
*Marketing, advertising and salesmanship was not about satisfying innate human needs.
Business manufacturers need it to subsequently help them achieve a profit.
→ ‘So inordinately productive is this familiar new order of industry that in ordinary times it
is forever in danger of running into excesses and turning out an output in excess of what the
market…will tolerate. There is a constant danger of “overproduction.” (Veblen, 1919/2005:
63)
→ The notion that the things we buy were somehow differentiated, somehow better in ways
that could not be objectively determined, was the key to the maintenance of corporate profit.
In other words, Veblen promoted the idea that marketing advocates individualism but really
promotes conformity (to fit in with a group).
→ According to Plotkin, Veblen treated advertising as an enterprise in exploit. It was a
means of cognitive coercion and confinement that drove customers away from
preoccupations with material need and efficient items of use, towards goals of invidious
distinction, emulation and conspicuous consumption.
→ As Murray and Ozanne described, capitalism, advertising and salesmanship all structure
the social world and our place within it. The colorful appeals the system creates distance
production origins of the objects we consume and the end result of our consumption habits:
more waste.
During 1930s and 1940s, there were a number of similar arguments to Veblen’s articulated
thoughts. At this point, we already had distanced from the idea that the customer is king.
Early Ideology Critiques: Frankfurt school
→ As Marcuse (1964) indicated, ‘the people recognize themselves in their commodities;
they find their soul in their automobiles, kitchen equipment. The very mechanism which
ties an individual to his society has changed, and social control is anchored in the new needs
which it has produced.’
→ According to Marcuse, we have transcending needs, that is, desires for freedom,
autonomy and self-expression that the system cannot hope to fulfill. They can trigger
discontent with the status quo. The system encourages us to look forward to rising
expectations; expectations that the system can probably never deliver.
→ However, there are also many people not able to participate in the marketing and fashion
systems. This is likely to generate unhappiness in the future (casualties of consumerism).
They are “flawed” consumers who do not have access to achieve their consumption goals.
→ The culture industries - marketing, advertising, fashion, arts, music, literature, and so
forth, all encourage us to view the world through the prism of consumption.
→ Lazarsfeld, on the other hand, talked about pawns on a chessboard much in the vein
associated with critical theory, which is about emancipation, freeing people from the ‘chain
of illusion’. He brought out the idea of being orientation and having orientation.
⇒ these scholars have a darker view of the contribution of marketing to society. They view
marketing as tying people ever more closely to the capitalist system, for example, work-
spend cycle.
⇒ they argued that there were new forms of domination that affect human relationships
with other people and the natural environment.
*The work-and-spend cycle is a phenomenon in which people in affluent nations remain
trapped in a pattern of long hours of work and increasing consumption spending that fails
to generate lasting improvements in well-being and plays a major role in ecological
degradation.

At this time, the critical/applied boundary is not so clearly defined. Critical perspectives
once combined with “applied marketing”, however the distinction was to become more
obvious as the business system failed to deliver the material satisfaction and quality of life.
The idea became clear in 1930s.

Helen Rosen Woodward (1882-1960)

→ She is the key to help people appreciate, understand and avoid the seduction and biases
of the marketing and advertising system.
→ View of the consumer: Consumers enjoy the arts of marketing, are seduced by them, and
can be ‘silly’ and ‘easily fooled by appearances’ (Woodward, 1938: 12-13). Their ability to
be hoodwinked by the advertising community is a source of ‘continual amazement’ for the
ad community itself!
→ There was no standard of honesty. If you were able to put a trick on the public, you did
it…this business of advertising was a game. It was a contest with the public to see what you
could put over. It is still like that today, although now it is more pompous and more
cautious’ (Woodward, 1938: 22-23).
- Later, she takes a more sympathetic view. The consumer, she opines, is intellectually
malleable.
⇒ she was a socialist, whose movement from practice to critical scrutiny of the marketing
system places her within the orbit of marketing critique.
* Socialism: equality, sexual equality, cooperation rather than selfish, self-directed
individualism and solidarity.

Marketing and the Cold War (WWII 1939-1945; Cold War 1945-1991)
→ During the time of Post WWII, there were massive growth in production, price declined,
product variation proliferate, standard of living rising.
→ In this context, business education was subject to a great deal of attention for various
reasons. But, criticism was not to be expected, nor was it welcome in the society.
→ Ford foundation encouraged the development of mainstream marketing when they
helped to establish the Indian institutes of management.

Critical theory has been incorporated into marketing via Reflexively Defiant Consumer
→ Traditionally, the critique in marketing is that it viewed consumers as information
processing machine, assuming that the provision of information ensured they will make
better choices in the marketplace.
→ The cultivation of the reflexively defiant consumer critique their ‘natural attitude toward
the existing order and, instead, question economic, political [e.g. laws], and social
structures’ (Ozanne and Murray, 1995: 516).
→ ‘…a more radical notion of the informed consumer would involve consumers forming a
different relationship to the marketplace in which they would identify unquestioned
assumption and challenge the status of existing structures as natural. Through reflection,
the consumer may choose to defy or resist traditional notions of consumption, become
more independent from acquisition or disposition systems, or define their own needs
independently from the marketplace’ (Ozanne and Murray, 1995: 522).
Critical marketing study (1960)
→ There is no growth in critical marketing between WWII and 1960s. The idea of consumer
sovereignty was witnessed in the 1960s, but it would not have been convincing from a
critical theory perspective.
→ This seems like an opportune moment to take a slightly different perspective on the
history of the discipline, using a critically oriented historical study to question one of the
founding myths of marketing that is perpetuated in pretty much all introduction to
marketing courses and mainstream marketing text books, that is, the myth of the marketing
revolution (Jones and Richardson, 2007).
The 1960s, debates around the boundaries of marketing
→ During the 1960s, there were a number of movements that sought to respond to changing
external environmental pressures that were delegitimizing marketing.
→ The reconstructionist movement sought to offer a humanist perspective where the
marketing system still was effectively managed as normal, but with slight modifications to
production and marketing methods to take account of ‘Social costs, externalities,
conservation in the use of resources, and other “macro”, environmental and humanistic
concerns’ (Spratlen, 1972: 405).

Leslie Dawson (1960s-1980)

→ He seeks for social change.
→ His view of the wasteful nature of American consumption habits as individualistically
oriented consumption patterns and excess, his argument can be seen as the historical
precursor of Frommian.
→ He argues that it was increasingly apparent that rising levels of consumption were not
satisfying people; that the invocation of the marketing concept was not leading to the
creation of a happier world.
→ Dawson’s work registered the challenge to materialism: a greater role for spirituality and
culture over consumption.
→ The marketing concept, he argues, essentially caters to selfish desires:
“A marketing concept inevitably casts the industrial organization in the role of one of
society’s more predatory creatures, a giant cooperation stealthily and eagerly stalking the
marketplace, always at the ready to leap upon a new market opportunity or to devour a
competitor” (Dawson, 1969:35)
→ There are 3 levels that the change had to take place:
1. First is the internal organizational level. He advocates a humanistic orientation to
business strategy, treating workers as human beings, but with an eye to self-
development, operational efficiency.
2. Secondly, business should pay attention to the proximate environment (i.e.
shareholders, competitors, government); a firm still needs to pay its bills. Thus a
customer orientation still had relevance even in the era of the “human concept”.
3. Thirdly, business needed to reorient the way it viewed its activities. The American
market is now undergoing a transformation where in the wants are not material but
psychological and social.
→ Connecting to Frommian thread, Dawson’s idea called for paradigm shift in marketing
theory, reordered into a framework of thought that is closer to ethics of relationships, love,
and sharing.
1. Marketing is the key to a more equitable distribution of the world’s material resources.
In terms of nations and continents, the world’s land and mineral resources are unevenly
divided in the extreme’ (Dawson, 1980: 78).
2. Business leaders are mandated to adopt roles of leadership in the advancement of our
society to new levels of moral conduct.
3. Marketers can embrace their ethical responsibility and start to transform ‘the useless
into useful’, recycling waste so that it becomes raw material of value. However, we are
still surrounded by a consumption lifestyle even we are aware of the problems.

Consumer sovereignty

“Consumers decide precisely what should be produced, in what quality, in what quantities....
the entrepreneurs, the capitalists and the farmers should have their hands tied. They are
bound to comply in their operations in the orders of public buying.” (von Mises, 1949)

The principle of consumer rationality is based on two key assumptions, consumer

rationality and freedom of choice. In essence, rationality is established when consumers’
revealed preferences reflect the optimal allocation of their dollar votes to a specific range of
market products. The resultant market mechanism is said to determine what is produced,
how it is produced, and how it is distributed, leading the maximization of utility and
consumer welfare.

Early American marketing textbooks also held that profit was a means, not an end; the
purpose of marketing was not to earn a profit for the firm but to satisfy human wants. From
society’s perspective, “profit is not the object of the business, but the incentive for business
to supply human wants”, which emphasize on the “consumer minded” businessman who
“looks at his own business from the viewpoint of the consumers”. This relationship between
marketing and society is apparent from the late 1930s till after WWII.

Consumer sovereignty and the Marketing concept

The subsequent of the “marketing concept” simply introduce a new term for an idea that
had been implicit in the economies and marketing literature since the eighteenth century.
The mechanism through which business responds to consumer demand is the market
viewed as a system in which “dollar votes” are cast. Consumers vote with their dollars.
“Every buyer then determines in some degree the direction of industry. The market is a
democracy where every penny gives a right of vote.

The underlying theme associated with consumer sovereignty is that consumption drives
production activity: the argument is that all productive activity is a response to the
perceived demand for goods and services.
#Consumption is the purpose of product activity: the profit derived from the provision of
appropriate goods and services is the incentive for production.
However, Consumer sovereignty can only be employed to describe the functioning of a
market as long as the limitations are understood.
Firstly, consumers must have utmost freedom in their choice. Many of these limitations
arise from the actions of sellers in the market. Also, many of textbooks already indicate this
limitation.
Second, the ends of buyers and sellers are usually not identical: “The interest of dealers… in
any particular branch of trade or manufacturers, is always in some respects different from,
and even opposite to, that of the public.

Companies produce what consumer wants

One “contribution” of marketing is “persuading people to want and to buy more and
different things”. According to this point of view, the influence of marketing effort on wants
significantly limits the arguments that companies produce what people want. But whatever
the source of wants, before producers can respond, these wants must be transformed into
market demands for specific goods and services.

Wants are transformed into market demand

Not all wants are transformed into the market demand.
It is not the consumer who expresses demand, wants are interpreted and market goods
acquired by purchasing agents. For example, when consumers make errors, the demand
does not reflect what they actually want.
Wants are not transformed into market demand when available resources are insufficient to
purchase the appropriate goods and services. Only some wants that people wish to satisfy
in the market can be transformed into market demand.
Goods not only must be available, but it also must be known that they are available. The
acquisition of information is costly, and the evaluation of information from advertising that
is self serving, and sometimes false and misleading, is difficult.

Producers respond to demand

It cannot be argued that producers simply respond to demand: “Private enterprise either
adjusts itself to existing demands or attempts to influence demands through an elaborate
system of research, estimating, planning, and promoting.”

The marketing concept identifies only one constituency that constrains a firm’s decisions.
However, there are constituencies other than stockholder, conflict may arise at each stage of
the channel, so that the decisions not to offer the desired goods and services may be made
are one or more channel stages.

Producers sometimes act on incorrect information or misinterpret available information,

thus errors in demand estimation are made.

Moreover, there are ethical and legal limitations to the range of goods and services offered
in the market. Licensing is one example.

Thus the unqualified statement that companies produce what consumers’ want is not a
valid description of the operation of markets. Similarly, consumer sovereignty cannot be
identified with the market concept.