Beyond Customer-Centricity: Extending Human-Centric Marketing into Identity-Oriented Marketing

Over the past decades, marketing theory has undergone a significant transformation, largely shaped by the human-centric framework developed by Philip Kotler. By shifting focus from products to customers, and later to values, society, and technology for humanity, this framework repositioned marketing as a discipline fundamentally concerned with people rather than offerings. Parallel to this evolution, a substantial body of research has examined the relationship between consumption and identity. However, identity-related insights remain largely fragmented across domains such as branding, influencer marketing, corporate social responsibility, sponsorship, and celebrity endorsement. This paper does not seek to introduce a new phenomenon, nor to challenge existing paradigms. Instead, it proposes a higher-order, integrative analytical lens that brings together dispersed practices under a coherent strategic logic. By introducing the concept of Identity-Oriented Marketing, the study extends human-centric marketing by explaining how identity operates across contemporary marketing practices in socially visible, culturally plural, and symbolically mediated markets.