Nonprofit marketing: the key to marketing's mid-life crisis?

This paper examines the use of marketing exchange theory in the nonprofit sector and argues that current mainstream marketing theory is ill equipped for such use. It is argued that this is due to its continued reliance on neoclassically derived assumptions of human behaviour, resulting in a dominant instrumentalist exchange paradigm. As the basis of this is individual rather than socially determined utility maximisation, achieved exclusively through the medium of exchange, it can be seen as inappropriate for application to this sector. Finally, the paper proposes that emergent, alternative nonexchange behaviours such as one-way transfer and expressive behaviour, sit more naturally within a post-Keynesian paradigm. It is suggested that this could be adopted by nonprofit marketing. In this sense nonprofit marketing could start to drive theory development in mainstream marketing rather than, as is too often the case, the other way round.