Drucker on Marketing: Lessons from the World's Most Influential Business Thinker

Chapter 3Any Organization Has Only Two Functions: One Concerns Marketing, and the Other Is Marketing

In one of his earliest books focused entirely on management, Drucker wrote that because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two—and only two—basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs.¹ Almost 20 years later in 1974 he went further. He wrote: “Marketing and innovation are the foundation areas in objective setting. It is in these two areas that a business obtains its results. It is performance and contribution in these areas for which a consumer pays.”² Was Drucker being overly simplistic? Overly enthusiastic about these two functions? Was ...