There could be more to marketing than you might have thought! An invited paper, by Professor Roger Layton

2016 
Abstract Is marketing a management technology, a societal provisioning system, or the study of seller and buyer decision processes in increasingly complex contexts, or could it be repositioned as a discipline within the social sciences? Could repositioning avert the growing fragmentation of marketing scholarship? Would it open up new opportunities for significant research in and between these different ways of seeing our discipline? And would perhaps the right repositioning engage marketing with adjacent social sciences in explorations opening up new fields of research, influencing management choice and public policy in the challenges human communities face at all levels? One possible positioning that offers a positive response to these questions is to assert, “Marketing is the study of value co-creation through voluntary economic choice made in exchanges among individuals and entities in and between human communities.” This positioning includes studies in manager and customer choice, work in societal provisioning systems in communities at any and all levels of development, and the growing interests in culture and communication. Links with anthropology, archaeology, history, sociology and economics are then explored. Drawing on empirical work in marketing and in adjacent disciplines the core elements of a dynamic theory of evolutionary change in exchange networks and marketing systems are identified, providing a possible starting point for an exploration of the marketing response to the difficult and complex challenges faced by human communities across the world.
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