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

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.

Chinese Abstract市场营销是一种管理技术、一种社会供给系统、对买卖双方在日益复杂的情形下的决策流程研究，抑或是可以被重新定位为社会学科内的一项学科呢？再定位能否避免市场营销学识的不断碎片化？它会否会为我们在审视学科的不同方法间进行重要研究提供新的机会？另外，正确的重新定位或可将市场营销与相关社会科学相连接，在人类社会各个层次上所面对的挑战中探究新的研究领域、影响管理选择和公共政策？一个可能会对这些问题带来积极回应的定位是主张：“市场营销是对人类社会个体和实体之间的自愿经济交换选择带来的价值共创的研究。”这一定位包括对经理和客户抉择、在各发展层级的社会中的社会供给系统中工作，以及对文化和交流的不断增长的兴趣的研究。因而可探究人类学、考古学、历史学、社会学以及经济学与之的关系。借鉴市场营销及相关学科方面的实证研究，找出了交易网络和市场营销系统中革命性变化变动理论的核心要素，为探索以市场营销的方式应对全世界人类社会所面对的困难而复杂的挑战提供了一个潜在起点。