A marketing paradigm is a set of procedures and attitudes that, taken together, define how marketing is done.

The traditional marketing paradigm

Marketing, in one form or another is at least as old as civilization, but modern marketing as an applied art and science began in the 1960s and 70s. It originated in consumer markets where relatively low-valued products were sold to mass markets using mass media. Marketing theory held that the first step was to determine customer needs, then next, produce a product or service that will satisfy these needs. The underlying philosophy was that all the firm's strategic decisions were driven by customer expectations. This core idea has gone though many incarnations in the intervening decades, and gone under various names including: marketing orientation, customer driven, the marketing philosophy, customer intimacy, customer focus, and market driven. Marketing is the process of planning and executing the pricing, promotion, and distribution of goods, ideas, and services to create exchanges that satisfy individual and organizational goals. ... A marketing oriented firm (also called the marketing concept, or consumer focus, or customer focus) is one that allows the wants and needs of customers and potential customers to drive all the firms strategic decisions. ...

Marketing as a discipline has seen a gradual evolution, refining its key concepts, adding many new concepts, and broadening its scope. For example, there has been a gradual shift from mass marketing to segmented marketing to mass customization. Marketing has also broadened its scope to include industrial markets (introducing the concepts of long-term marketing relationships, microsegmentation, and buying centers) and to include electronic markets (introducing the concept of personalized marketing) and to include channel management (introducing the concepts of supply chain marketing programs and distributor marketing programs). In marketing, Market segmentation is the process of grouping a market into smaller subgroups. ... Mass customization, in marketing, manufacturing, and management, is the use of flexible computer-aided manufacturing systems to produce custom output. ... Personalized marketing (also called personalization, and sometimes called one-to-one marketing) is an extreme form of product differentiation. ...

New marketing paradigms

Starting in the 1980s, there was a group of theorists that felt this gradual evolution was unsatisfactory. They saw marketing, not as a continuously evolving discipline, but as an established discipline ripe for a paradigm shift. They felt that a radical new perspective was required. These theorists are typically associated with either relationship marketing, customer experience management, or network marketing. Relationship marketers, for example, feel that the shift from single transaction marketing to long-term relationship marketing will require a complete revamping of the discipline. Customer experience marketers feel that the relationship marketers started in the right direction but were derailed by their dependence on customer relationship management software, which caused them to lose focus of the individual customer's experience of the service encounter. Network marketers stress the interconnectedness of market actors and transactions and can be seen as the application of systems thinking to marketing. A paradigm shift is the term first used by Thomas Kuhn in his famous 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions to describe the process and result of a change in basic assumptions within the ruling theory of science. ... Relationship marketing is a form of marketing that evolved from direct response marketing in the 1960s and emerged in the 1980s, in which emphasis is placed on building longer term relationships with customers rather than on individual transactions. ... Customer experience management (CEM) is the process of strategically managing a customers entire experience with a product or a company (Schmitt, 2003, p. ... The term network marketing is used in two ways. ... The generally accepted purpose of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is to enable organizations to better manage their customers through the introduction of reliable processes and procedures for interacting with those customers. ... Systems thinking involves the use of various techniques to study systems of many kinds. ...

Whether we envision a gradual history of evolution, or a radical paradigm shift probably has more to do with factors associated with the individual's psyche than with any objective or empirical system of change categorization. One thing is certain however, marketing is being greatly enriched by these contributions.