Marketing from a family business perspective

Regardless of the organizational or industry context, marketing essentially centers on the process of delivering customer satisfaction at a profit without damaging current or future generations’ ability to maintain social, economic, and environmental sustainability. As a distinct discipline in business and academia, marketing was established only in the first half of the twentieth century. Legitimate positioning as a key subject area was secured with the requisite paradigmatic breadth and depth of understanding and application (Jones and Monieson, 1990; Jones and Shaw, 2002). Following the advent of family business as a distinct research destination, recent developments in the area of marketing have specifically considered the context of family-owned business. Although work is still undergoing to identify, understand and exploit the potential advantages of this vast and vital organizational genre, research focused at the intersection of marketing and family business is limited (Reuber and Fischer, 2011). In this chapter, therefore, our goal is to add the discourse aimed to better understand how marketing can leverage the family business character. We review the essence and particularities of family business, also taking into account established and emerging marketing discipline doctrine.