Demarketing

Rudolph Asare-Danso is a Ghanaian and the Finance/ Administration Manager of Utrak Financial Services Limited, a non-bank financial institution. He holds Higher National Diploma (HND) in Marketing Management from the Kumasi Polytechnic, Bachelor of Business Administration (BBA) in Banking & Finance at Christian Service University College/ University of Ghana Business School and currently pursuing MSc. Financial Management at the Queen's University of Brighton, Netherlands.

Demarketing is a little known concept which aims at dissuading customers from consuming or buying some things either because it is harmful or simply because the demand is more than the supply.

The underlying rationale for this new term was that marketing, up until the 1970s, dealt with an ever-expanding market for which there was an unlimited supply of products (it was a period characterized as a buyer’s market). In a complete reversal of this paradigm, Kotler and Levy note that there are periods in the marketplace of product shortages or scarcity (a shrinking market or one in which the sellers of product dominate) to which marketers (and managers) must respond (Kotler & Levy, 1971).

This response they termed �demarketing’ which they defined as �… that aspect of marketing that deals with discouraging customers in general or a certain class of customers in particular on a temporary or permanent basis’ (Kotler & Levy 1971:75).

As such, the definition is not the opposite of marketing, but an intrinsic aspect within marketing management вЂ" a crucial point that many marketers (and others) seem to miss, to their detriment.

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