Example Of Critical Thinking On Frontiers Of The Marketing Paradigm In The Third Millennium

Dixon and Wilkinson’s article “An Alternative Paradigm for Marketing Theory” advances the idea that marketing, as all the sciences, is in a continuous change and transformation, based on older paradigms inserted in new research models for developing an emerging functionalism. The article explain that when “normal science”, enrooted in the accepted paradigms that serve as theories, is challenged, because paradigms that support it are no longer adequate, scientific revolution occurs and older paradigms are updated, and this is how the Kuhn’s Paradigm is described.
Further the article explores Alderson’s General Living System Theory, which supports that living systems are open and in a continuous relation of building up and breaking down their components as they are exchanging their materials with the environment. As such, marketing is considered a living system, which is influenced by its environment, hence it needs to be adapted to its environment. This theory situates marketing in relation to non-marketing sphere, indicating that non-marketing activities determine the role of marketing. The General Living System seems to be a structural-philosophical metaphor, suggesting that marketing, as a living organism adapts to its neighbor living organism, represented by the environment that shapes marketing’s functions, roles and activities.
Related to marketing’s transformational process, the reading indicates that the concept of “organized behavior system”, initiated by Alderson, represents a need for developing a system which to permit the integration of existent research into scientific marketing principles, which makes marketing a behavioral science. The lecture further explores the behavioral sciences, advanced by Alderson, which argues that marketing is such a science, as it defines the human behavior in an operating system, delineating an organized behavior system that describes the functionalist approach, which implies identifying systems of action and determining how and why they work as they do.
A rather less epistemological and more pragmatic approach is proposed by Fisk that defines the Marketing Systems Theory, which is focused on applying management concepts to a small system, a firm, for studying marketing activities as a total system, which is based on interrelationships between the sub-systems (production, marketing and consumption), defining the interest of the main actors of the system (the business manager, the marketing channel commander, the consumer and the social welfare), finding that there is a hierarchy among the elements constituting a system. This model is the applied normal science, which Alderson describes as “the theory of the firm”, positioning marketing activities somewhere between economic and non-economic variables.
Further in Dixon and Wilkinson’s study, marketing is defined as a normal science, because, as the text suggests, marketing is composed of activities that define this domain as a normal science, which serves the total system that refers to the firm which applies marketing strategies by manipulating four variables that constitute the marketing mix. In fact, the manipulation of the marketing mix variables leads to the market segmentation or a modern approach on the market’s elasticity and price adaptation to various groups of customers, as Robinson defined it. McCarty’s observation that any market delineated through the market segmentation, might need a different marketing mix, as each market has a different demand curve is relevant and consistent with the producers’, the marketers’ and the consumers’ behaviors, as the requirements of the consumers positioned in the mainstream market segment may differ of those positioned in the high end segment and both producers and marketers need to observe the behaviors of the consumers from different market segments and to propose them what they need for optimizing the selling of the product. This theory is still relevant nowadays, but, according to the General Living System Theory, marketing should be permanently adapted to its environment, and the environments’ changes. This suggests that the market segmentation theory, although still applicable in the current marketing context, needs to be adapted to the environment’s trends, which are now in a full process of globalization. Globalization implies the adaptation of a global rather than on a local market, and this induces the challenge of defining market segmentation for a more complex market.
The article further discusses about marketing as a component of the economic domain. The authors explain how marketing fulfills the market transaction role, by referring to Alderson’s functionalist approach for the study of marketing, which indicates that marketing operates in a system of action having the purpose of assuring the necessary resources required for the material environment. Alderson’s perspective on marketing as an extension of the economic domain focuses on the microenvironment, on the marketing activities involved in a small firm operated under the form of market transactions between the producer, various suppliers and the household. The market transactions include various market sub-systems, related and dependent on each other, differentiated based on the function that they fill in the action system and nested in hierarchy of systems of action, which include lower level and upper level inputs and outputs that refer to marketing activities performed at a firm’s level.
In this context, marketing connects the firm, the primary supplier source of goods, with the households, the ultimate source of demand and consumption of the goods, through several marketing specific activities that imply communication (contact, interaction between the seller and the buyer), material transformation (transforming materials in form, time, space, for meeting the requirements of the consumers, who just as objects have a material existence) and contract (transferring the ownership and usership rights from seller to buyer through money transfer, which is an aspect of the contract). Contact, material transformation and contract are divided among market and non-market transactions that result in system outputs, also defined as flows, while the firm converting the transactions into flows is called unit flow channel. Briefly, the article indicates that the output of the entire market system is the material satisfaction.
Dixon and Wilkinson’s exploration of marketing’s role in society from the functionalist perspective reflects Alderson’s microeconomic approach to marketing. Yet, besides the uncontested functional role that marketing has in linking firms to households through its activities and sub-systems, marketing’s role in society reaches beyond the economic domain, being also an extension of societies’ cultural expressions, giving the fact that marketing activities, operations, hence, implicitly the sub-systems comprised in the system of action need to be adjusted on the society’s specificities, which must include close consideration for the cultural component. The cultural component must be approached in the contact (interaction, communication processes), material transformation (material transformed or adapted to society’s cultural specificities) and contract (requiring the adaptation of the goods to the society’s cultural appreciation), but also in system/sub-system relations (requiring adaptation to the society’s buyers and sellers nature that develop their behavior based on cultural patterns), intra-marketing system relations (connecting individuals, households and firms from a cultural perspective) or marketing system – environment relations (adaptation to the cultural specificities of the environment, which influences the behavior and performances of buyers and sellers).
The article is specifically targeting marketing professionals or students aspiring to marketing careers, as the language used is adapted on these targeted audiences. The concrete marketing notions are mingled with abstract and philosophical concepts, which situates the text beyond a simple marketing classroom reading that challenge the practitioners to continuously search to adapt their marketing strategies and activities to the permanently changing environment in which they perform.