Marketing as Science

It has become usual to portray marketing as evolving initially from economics. Vargo and Lusch’s (2004) presentation of the evolution of marketing thought, for example, starts by stating that “the formal study of marketing focused at first on the distribution and exchange of commodities […] and featured a foundation in economics” (p. 1). The value of this foundation narrative seems to lie in the way that it serves to strengthen (by inheritance) the claims of marketing to be a science. As Vargo and Lusch (2004) go on to explain, at the time of the formal birth of marketing, economics had already become “the first social science to reach the quantitative sophistication of the natural sciences” (p. 3). So, although marketing thought might be concerned with far more immediate and tangible problems than most economic theory, the fact that it is framed as born from a rigorously quantitative discipline affords it outstanding rational and empirical credentials. Wilkie and Moore (2003) bring some more detail to this foundational narrative by describing how the “first era of formal marketing thought” (p. 117) arose because a particular aspect of the “business system”, namely the challenges of distribution, began to be given more attention than it had previously garnered. As they point out, economists had traditionally “not been handling the topic” as their focus was instead on production. By the start of the twentieth century, however, the business environment had changed radically with a whole host of societal, technological, and infrastructure changes, meaning that market distribution had become a far more complex and critical component in a firm’s success. Wilkie and Moore (2003) argue that there was a “genuine need for some economists to step forward” (p. 118) and provide an explanation of this new aspect of the business system. These economists (“professors at a number of universities across the [US]”) are the founding fathers of the marketing discipline. An early analogue of this account can be found in Cassels’ (1936) article for the second issue of the fledgling Journal of Marketing, where he notes that “in recent years … certain significant changes both in economic theory and in the methods of distribution which have aroused among economists in general a new interest in marketing problems and created an attitude towards them more likely to lead to practically useful results” (p. 133). This intellectual engagement with the issue of distribution uses “methods of theoretical analysis combined with empirical research” but is clearly positioned as stemming from a need to provide practical advice to current and future business leaders.

At the same time, the extent of the contribution of economic theory to this analysis of distribution is perhaps rather questionable. We can see from a rather exasperated article published in the late 1940s in the Journal of Marketing that it was clearly not the case that early US university marketing departments laid much emphasis on economic knowledge. Seelye (1947) notes that “some teachers of marketing apparently believe that economic theory has little or no place in marketing courses” (p. 223) and this is primarily because of the “assumption that economic theory is unrealistic and, therefore, has little or no application to the modern marketing structure” (p. 224). As a consequence, the “contribution of economic theory to the study of marketing is held to be negligible” (p. 223). Seelye contends that such an attitude places marketing in a “vacuum” (p. 226), blinding it to the relationships its functions have with “fundamental economic phenomena”. Only through an appreciation of such relationships can marketing understand its “true position … as an applied branch of economics” (ibid.). The pure and applied dichotomy echoes the more established pattern in the scientific disciplines—it is also an attempt to positively frame the accusations of ‘unrealism’ that seem to have been commonly applied to economics by incumbent marketing faculty. If marketing is to be a ‘science’, then it must have its ‘pure’ theory as well as its practical implementation.

Whether most of its participants regarded themselves as performing ‘applied economics’ or not, it is fair to say that most marketing teaching and scholarship in the early years of the discipline was heavily descriptive rather than concerned with theory building or analysis. Certainly, the reports sponsored by the Carnegie and Ford Foundations (Gordon and Howell, 1959; Pierson, 1959) in the late 1950s, which investigated the state of US business education, found that the “core courses (such as marketing) were mostly descriptive, rather than analytical” (Hunt, 2012, p. 408). Given that these foundations (along with the Rockefeller Foundation) were important sources of funding for US business schools, it is not surprising that their judgements had significant effects upon the way in which marketing scholarship developed (Hubbard, 2005; Tadajewski, 2006a, 2006b, 2016). However, while the embarrassing reports of these foundations can certainly be considered to have had an impact upon the ‘scientification’ of business education in general and marketing in particular, there had already been strong internal evidence of a move towards considering the young discipline as a scientific endeavour. Jones and Monieson (1990), for example, have persuasively described the influence of the German Historical school (which emphasised an inductive scientific approach) on the marketing economists of Wisconsin University and the Harvard Business School in the early decades of the twentieth century. Furthermore, Edmund McGarry (1936) had stressed the need for “scientific method” in advertising work right back in the first edition of the Journal of Marketing and by the time of Converse’s (1945) article on the “development of the science of marketing” the use of the descriptor appeared to warrant little editorial defence. Indeed, as Stephen Brown has noted, Converse’s article assumes that “marketing was indubitably a nascent science” (1996, p. 244). At the time, Hutchinson (1952) noted the “ferment which had been started in the minds of students of marketing” (p. 287) in regard to this issue. Yet, while scholars such as Brown (1948), Alderson and Cox (1948), and then Bartels (1951) argued that marketing could (and even should) be considered a form of science, there were certainly voices raised in opposition. Hutchinson (1952), for example, wrote a coruscating critique of those scholars seeking to admit marketing “into the category of a science” (p. 286), arguing that such an “ill-advised” (p. 287) project has so far either involved “distorting the meaning of words” (p. 288) or vaguely criticising the weak foundations of economic theory (which does nothing to develop a viable theory of marketing). Hutchinson points out that the one real reason why marketing scholarship had so far been unable to make much headway in the construction off a “unique body of theory” was simply because “marketing is not a science” (p. 289). It is, instead, a practice (like architecture or medicine) which applies “the findings of many sciences to the solution of problems” (p. 290).

Hutchinson’s message, however, was largely lost upon the audience of young marketing scholars coming into their voice in the late 1950s and 1960s, many of whose studies were being funded by the Ford Foundation (Tadajewski, 2006a). This shift towards thinking of marketing as a science was also echoed in the Journal of Marketing’s formation of an official editorial policy that sought to support rigorous, scientific advancements in marketing as well as the establishment in 1961 of the Marketing Science Institute (Kerin, 1996). While Buzzell’s (1963) article in the Harvard Business Review made it clear that there were serious problems with marketing’s performance as a science (mostly due to the fact that it needed to examine events that were “tightly coupled, nonlinear, and dynamic”, p. 166), it was equally adamant that, slowly, the scientific project in marketing would be realised.

Hunt’s (1976) article sought to settle the debate once and for all via an examination of the various competing claims concerning marketing’s scope. It received the Harold H. Maynard Award in recognition of its “significant contribution to marketing theory and thought” (Anderson, 1994, p. 9) and became the most succinct and cogently argued expression of the pro-science viewpoint in marketing scholarship. Its argument was largely based upon the observation that the reason there continued to be a degree of reluctance to think of marketing as a science was that previous understandings of what science actually was were mistaken. In particular, Hunt describes Buzzell’s (1963, p. 37) highly cited stricture that a science must be “organized around one or two central theories” as “overly restrictive” (Hunt, 1976, p. 25) and points out that it “confuses the successful culmination of scientific efforts with science itself”. Buzzells’ terms have constructed too high a bar for marketing to reach in its young life and the absence of “one or two central theories” does not mean that marketing is not engaged in scientific endeavour. Hunt argues that, for a discipline to be a science, it must have a “distinct subject matter”; it must also presuppose “the existence of underlying uniformities or regularities among the phenomena that comprise its subject matter”, the discovery of which can lead to “empirical regularities, law-like generalizations (propositions), and laws”; and, finally, it must employ the “scientific method” based upon “the bedrock of empirical testability” (ibid.) in the discovery of its knowledge. Hunt stated clearly that he believed that marketing scholarship fulfilled all three of these criteria. Marketing’s distinct subject matter is the transaction. While marketing’s progress has been slow in identifying “underlying uniformities” across transactions, it is, opines Hunt, impossible to deny that there has been “some progress” in identifying “some uniformities”. The final criterion regarding the use of scientific method is rather embarrassingly handled by Hunt, who acknowledges that there have been forthright criticisms of the scientific rigour of marketing scholarship but excuses the discipline with an argument that veers dangerously close to a tu quoque fallacy, namely that “researchers in marketing are at least as committed to the method of science as are researchers in other disciplines” (p. 28). Consequently, the final sentence of the paper proudly announces that “the study off the positive dimension of marketing can be appropriately referred to as marketing science”.

One aspect of Hunt’s (1976) paper that deserves some additional comment is the way in which he addresses the problem of marketing’s definition. While acknowledging that the lack of agreement upon the nature and scope of marketing has so far made the provision of an unproblematic definition of the discipline impossible, Hunt writes that this should not be seen as a point of weakness. He notes that philosophy had also been beset with definitional questions some decades earlier, particularly focused around issues of scope and he approvingly quotes Karl Popper’s commentary at the time, in which he stated that “there is no such thing as an essence of philosophy, to be distilled and condensed into a definition” because any definition can “only have the character of a convention, of an agreement” (Popper, quoted in Hunt, 1976, p. 23).

While Hunt’s (1976) article employed the confident tone of settling the matter once and for all, in many ways it ironically acted as a rallying target for all those who had become disillusioned “with the dominant hypothetico-deductive perspective” (Brown, 1996, p. 255). Those young marketing scholars who had been exposed to the rising tide of relativism in the social sciences saw Hunt’s article as the epitome of an arrogant, traditional mainstream approach to the marketing enterprise that was largely out of touch with what was happening elsewhere in the academy. The expression of dissatisfaction with the position that Hunt (1976) represented culminated in a series of articles by Paul Anderson (1983, 1986, 1988) in which he took issue with Hunt’s logical positivist interpretation of science and argued that the bulk of recent writing in philosophy, social sciences, and the history of science pointed to the bankruptcy of such an interpretation. Instead, Anderson outlined a “critical relativist” approach to science, which constructed it as a “process of consensus formation” and “ultimately a social activity” (1983, p. 25). Central to the emotional power of Anderson’s argument was the cutting observation that “despite its prevalence in marketing, positivism has been abandoned by these disciplines over the last two decades in the face of the overwhelming historical and logical arguments that have been raised against it” (ibid.). In other words, the “strong honorific overtones in labelling a discipline a science” (Hunt, 1976, p. 25), were beginning to be eroded by a general realisation that such labelling did not reflect access to unassailable, objective truth. For Anderson (1983), “a relativistic stance appears to be the only viable solution to the problem of scientific method” (p. 25). Such a stance, which Anderson dubs “science ₂”, is founded upon “societal consensus”, which determines that “science is whatever society chooses to call a science” (p. 26). Anderson intimates that, for marketing to be seen as scientific by society, it must move away from building marketing knowledge from the perspective of the marketer and instead move towards that of “the consumer or the larger society” (p. 27) and pursuit of knowledge for the sake of knowledge. A discipline that predominantly favours the hidden persuader, it seems, will not be valued enough by society to achieve the consensus that it deserves to be understood as a science.

Anderson’s writing on these issues and the relativistic marketing scholarship that it to some extent precipitated resulted in a series of articles and dense monographs by Hunt (1984, 1990, 1994, 2002, 2003) in which he argued that relativism had, in fact, already been abandoned by philosophers of science, who had instead “adopted some version of scientific realism” (2002, p. 77). The influence of constructivist theories from scholars whom Anderson had relied upon in his arguments, people like Kuhn and Feyera-bend, was dismissed as “exaggerated” (ibid.). Both Brown (1996) and Kavanagh (1994) contain overviews of the Hunt/Anderson positivism versus relativism debate. Even in 1994, Kavanagh was declaring the clash largely over, describing the debate as “repetitive” as well as “confusing and virtually impenetrable to the majority of marketing academics” (p. 28). Kavanagh (1994) argues that the “inexorable sparring match” between realism/relativism in marketing scholarship has become irrelevant, as both perspectives are ill-equipped to engage with what has become “postmodern marketing” (p. 36). Brown (1996) similarly declares the debate moribund, though his reasoning is a little more partisan. Like Kavanagh (1994), he notes that the legacy of the period of “internecine warfare” between scientific realism and relativism was a “widespread sense of perplexity and bemusement” (Brown, 1996, p. 250). However, Brown argues that the debate should be considered terminated because science has so clearly lost. Extending the postmodern to a consideration of academic discourse (rather than simply marketing practice, as Kavanagh did), Brown contends that the era of “Anti-science” has been ushered in by “the continental European versions of the postmodern” (p. 251). For thinkers aligned with this latest intellectual evolution, “the appellation ‘science’ is no longer considered honorific” (p. 251); indeed, “postmodern consciousness … […] … is premised upon the repudiation of the Western scientific paradigm” (p. 250). Postmodernism sees science as “morally bankrupt, spiritually bereft, and intellectually barren” (p. 251). Importantly, while Brown is quick to concede that the “vast majority of marketing academics” “continue to work within the broad realist/empiricist/instrumentalist/positivistic tradition” (p. 249) and so therefore cannot be considered postmodern, or even relativist, scholars by any stretch of the imagination, he claims that the “revolutionaries of relativism have triumphed” precisely because they have not been killed off. As Hunt’s mission was to destroy the intellectual foundations of relativism, reasons Brown, the fact that many marketing journals do currently contain scholarship based in interpretivist or constructionist perspectives demonstrates that he has clearly failed. In addition (and echoing some of Anderson’s original arguments), as all the other social sciences have imbibed the postmodern perspective and seen the pursuit of science for the illusion it is, the general “denial of scientific authority cannot fail to strike a chord with the observers of the contemporary marketing scene” (p. 251). This, combined with the fact that “marketing scholarship has actually achieved very little of practical, implementable worth in the post-war period” (p. 252) means that the marketing academy is ripe for the realisation that the pursuit of science is an embarrassing snipe hunt.

Of course, Kavanagh and Brown were both writing before the publication of Hunt’s (2002, 2003) mammoth tomes on the foundations and controversies of marketing theory, the second of which was helpfully subtitled, “for reason, realism, truth, and objectivity”. Certainly, while significant schools of critical marketing, consumer culture theory, and broadly inter-pretivist approaches to consumer behaviour have established themselves in marketing scholarship over the past few decades there appears to have been little sign of a general retreat from the pursuit of marketing science. Indeed, perhaps the most successful stream of research in marketing theory since the early 2000s has been Vargo and Lusch’s Service-Dominant logic (Vargo and Lusch, 2004, 2008, 2011, 2015, 2016; Lusch and Vargo, 2006, 2011, 2012). Vargo and Lusch’s (2004) foundational JoM article for their logic is full of language designed to anchor their perspective within the legacy of Western scientific empiricism and which works persuasively to attract their readership and convince them of the logic’s rigour and scholarly desirability (Miles, 2014, 2018). Clearly, the trappings of the scientific (or at least, scientism) still have “strong honorific overtones” for the broad mass of JoM readers. Additionally, much of S-D logic’s evolution over the past decade has been focused on the (re-)integration of systems theory in to the S-D framework and this is very much done from a scientism perspective, where the scientific status of the systems approach is clearly a valuable marker of its rigour and scholarly desirability (e.g. Vargo and Lusch, 2011, 2016). While it is true that Vargo and Lusch have occasionally argued that S-D logic should not be understood as operating within the same context as the “sciences of the natural or social” (Lusch and Vargo, 2012, p. 195), this is because they wish to place it within the “science of the artificial” as conceived of by Herbert Simon (1996) in his study of artificial intelligence, complexity and dynamic systems—an even more modern and shiny type of science, in other words. Recently, however, Vargo and Lusch are content to use the descriptor of ‘science’ in order to situate their own evolution of “service science” within the broader ‘economic sciences’ and ‘political sciences’ (2011, 2015). Mainstream marketing scholarship’s valorisation of science over any alternatives continues just as strongly as it did before, it appears.

Much of the dynamic across the realism versus relativism debate (and even across the science versus practice discourse) can be conceived of in rhetorical terms. As we have seen, Hunt (1976) admits the “honorific” power of the label of science, although he refrains from turning his observation back upon marketing’s own obsession with the sobriquet. Yet the rancorous energy that is displayed in his vituperations of relativism speaks of great emotional investment in the issue of whether the discipline he has dedicated his life to can be thought of as uncovering objective truths in the way that chemistry or physics does. It might mean, of course, a great deal to both scholars and practitioners of marketing whether the rules and conclusions that the discipline expounds to the world are based upon ‘facts’ and ‘analyses’ which have the persuasive power of science behind them. In addition, much of academia is concerned with status, or ethos, at the personal, departmental, institutional, and disciplinary level. Despite Brown’s (1996) protestations, science maintains a position of authority in much of the modern world (Cialdini, 2001). A 2015 Pew Research Center Report found that “science holds an esteemed place among citizens and professionals” in the US, despite some strongly diverging opinions between citizens and scientists on issues such as the safety of GM food (Funk and Rainie, 2015, para 2). Since the Ford and Carnegie reports, the intellectual status of business and marketing scholarship has seemed to depend (at least from within the discipline) upon projecting the impression that it is founded upon rigorous, positivist scholarship that can serve as a reliable source of decision making for management and enterprise. The promotion of ‘marketing science’ through the establishment of such institutions as the Marketing Science Institute and the Academy of Marketing Science (and its related journal) as well as through the tireless advocacy of scholars such as Shelby Hunt has meant that the concept of marketing science has become normalised and valorised. At the same time the efforts to promote relativistic, interpretive and aesthetic foundations for the marketing discipline are also closely tied to efforts to amplify the ethos of the work of those scholars and ‘schools’ who choose to work within such frameworks. Such amplification work is necessary in order to defend and build academic status, particularly as manifest in terms of promotion prospects and employability. If scholars are to engage in qualitative, interpretive research or concept building that relies upon critical, relativistic foundations, then it pays to promote and argue for these perspectives within the marketing academy using rhetoric which positions the positivistic approach as out-of-touch, old-fashioned, as well as fundamentally flawed. Allied to this, perhaps, is the fact that some scholars working within marketing might be more cognisant of how other scholars working within the social sciences might regard their discipline’s approach—there is definitely a sense of embarrassment evident in much marketing writing from the relativistic or postmodern perspectives. How can a sensitive marketing academic familiar with much of the intellectual legacy of the twentieth century hold their head high in the company of communication scholars, media scholars, sociology scholars, and literature and history scholars, when the discipline is so clearly still in thrall to a 1950s scientism which these other disciplines have long since abandoned or heavily modified? In this sense, the relativism expounded by Anderson and others in opposition to Hunt’s defence of scientific realism is an equally rhetorical reaction to the rhetoric of ‘marketing science’. It attempts to increase the cachet of marketing scholarship within the social sciences and humanities, where relativism has become largely mainstream.

Looked at this way, the relativism/realism division collapses—both are rhetorical framings designed for the academy, wider university and government audiences, (very) occasionally the ‘end users’ of marketing knowledge, and perhaps most often the marketing academics engaged in these debates themselves (engaged in self-persuasion). Marketing is a both a manqué hard (realist) science and a manqué (relativist) social science. It convinces as neither because, ironically, its rhetoric of self-definition is always concerned with turning away from what it actually is, namely, rhetoric. Rhetoric does not fit the mould of twentieth-century scientism or ‘humanities discipline’. As we have seen in Chapter 1, issues around its status, nature, and scope as a discipline have continually beset Western rhetoric. Furthermore, academic rhetorical studies in the twentieth century have tended to move towards rhetorical analysis rather than practice. Rhetoric in the modern academy does not look like many earlier manifestations of rhetoric because it has become (rhetorically) framed as a critical tool within a (North American liberal) construction of civic discourse. Similarly, marketing scholarship doesn’t look like marketing practice, and this is largely because it has been (rhetorically) framed within a scientism/social scientism that obscures its nature in practice.

However, in addition to the rhetorical expediencies that have resulted in framings of marketing as a positivist/relativist (social) science, there exists one additional factor that unites marketing and the scientific enterprise—control.

Control and the Scope of Marketing

Marketing seems fundamentally concerned with control—control of resources, control of decision-making within the enterprise, control of moods, attitudes and behaviours, control of flow and distribution. No matter what era a definition of marketing originates in, its concern with control is always present. As Durkheim ([1959] 2009) noted (after Saint Simon), the “most vital trait” of the “spontaneous organization” of industrial order is “that its goal, and its exclusive goal, is to increase the control of man over things” (p. 107). Beniger (1986), in his study of the control orientation of modern information societies, argues that the industrial revolution, particularly the way it fuelled a rampant increase in the rate at which materials could be transported and processed, precipitated a “crisis of control” in America by the mid-nineteenth century in which “the social processing of material flows threatened to exceed in both volume and speed the system’s capacity to contain them” (p. 219). Myriad problems arose as a result of this crisis. Railroads became increasingly unsafe and unmanageable, with companies deliberately delaying the introduction of larger systems “because they lacked the means to control them” (ibid.). Distributers and wholesalers began to find it increasingly difficult to keep track of raw material shipments, finished goods, and cash across the rapidly mushrooming manufacturing and retailing networks. Producers themselves were stretched to breaking point trying to respond to the increased speed of their own new production methods as well as the jump in upstream supply rates. All the rapid improvements in continuous processing technology had to be integrated into systems that had evolved for much lower rates of production and distribution. As a consequence, by the 1880s, production in many sectors was outstripping consumption and producers needed to create additional markets in order to “stimulate and control consumption” (ibid.). It is this requirement that Beniger identifies as generating the birth of modern marketing. He quotes Harry Tipper, Texas Company’s (the precursor to Texaco) advertising manager in 1915, as saying that it was necessary for producers to educate consumers “to use more than they formerly had used, and to discriminate between different sellers or sections of the market in order to control the market” (quoted in Beniger, 1986, p. 264).

As an example of the way in which continuous processing technologies were integrated into a business sector and then caused a crisis of consumption control which needed to be addressed through early marketing, Beniger relates the story of Henry P. Crowell’s adoption of automatic flour mill technology to his proto-assembly line production of packaged oatmeal in 1882. The production innovations he implemented allowed him, under one roof, to take raw oats as input and then output packaged oatmeal. However, there was little market for the vast amount of product his factory was generating—outside of the small constituency of Scottish immigrants, oats were not generally considered a fit food for human consumption. The result was that he was soon producing “twice as much oatmeal as the market could absorb” (p. 265). His answer was national advertising targeted directly at the mass consumer market using a number of innovative promotion techniques which have since become canonical. He created an easily identifiable brand label based around the figure of the Quaker, he re-packaged his product in smaller, friendlier 24-oz sizes, used testimonials, apparent scientific ‘proof’, free samples delivered door-to-door, and publicity stunts (hiring a train promoting his brand which ferried across states an actor dressed as a Quaker). As a result, Crowell “managed to dispose of surpluses created by the control revolutions in production and distribution by inventing not only the modern breakfast food industry but breakfast cereal itself—a product then almost entirely new to American tastes” (p. 266). Crowell’s story, of course, is just one of the earliest in the history of advertising and marketing communication. However, its substance, and the way that Beniger frames it, raises a number of important questions regarding the nature and scope of marketing.

The definition of marketing as the ‘control of consumption’ certainly seems convincing within the context that Beniger provides for it. It includes advertising, branding, packaging (designed to sell itself), preprocessing (i.e. reducing the informational variety facing consumers so that their responses could be more predictable), as well as processing of the consumer via automated, self-service (nowadays we would say ‘curated’) retail experiences (as championed in Clarence Saunders’ Piggly Wiggly stores). In other words, all the activities that a company might make use of to affect attitudes and behaviours of consumers towards their products, services, or brands—to “control the market”, as Tipper had it. Most of the techniques that Beniger covers broadly fall into the category of advertising or promotion. However, if we look at the early years of academic marketing we find that our founding disciplinary fathers were rather divided on the significance of promotion for marketing work. Indeed, it is difficult to not note a division in the early decades of the Journal of Marketing between those scholars who are concerned with advertising (and salespersonship) and those who are concerned more broadly with distribution (i.e. the activities of bringing a product to market). Some of the origins for this division might well come from the fact that the functional approach to marketing which emphasised the study of the “functions of middlemen” (Jones and Monieson, 1990, p. 109) tended to be promulgated by economists who took a dim view of advertising. Those writers concentrating on advertising often already had a quite large choice of outputs for their musings on advertising and sales techniques including trade newspapers such as Printer’s Ink, the publications of the various advertising associations, as well as the printing of books designed to aid the small business person (see Thompson and Adams, 1996, p. 270, n3 for a long list of representative texts). The study of the economic significance of middlemen, however, was not so well served and was not so popularly followed, but it did have a more respectable mien particularly for scholars trained in economics and economic history. Thomson and Adams (1996) note that the early American advertising industry was generally associated with “exuberant boosterism or imported ‘grotesque’ decorative forms” (p. 253). They quote Alfred Lasker’s recollections of being an ad man at the start of the twentieth century where he recalls how “bankers refused to lend businessmen money if they revealed it would be used for advertising” and that the profession of advertising was “socially barred with very few exceptions” (ibid.). While the importance of advertising to successful business could not be denied, this didn’t mean that society was particularly fond of what they did. Consequently, those engaged in developing the discipline of marketing chose to focus on another figure rather than the advertiser.

Control and the ‘Middleman’

The term ‘middleman’ has not stood the test of time particularly well. Notwithstanding the obvious defects related to its sexist construction, the term carries with it the inevitable connotation of the activity being “of lesser consequence than that of manufacturing or retailing” (Steiner, 1976, p. 6) even of being in some sense “parasitic” (Brown, 2002, p. 30). It places the marketer in an inferior position and that is a hard place to remain content. Nevertheless, the term was common in the early days of marketing practice and scholarship and was used to indicate all those agents who had sprung up to help navigate and facilitate the increasingly long and irksome journey of goods from producer to user that the industrial revolution had brought about. This was, indeed, the descriptor term for marketers used by Arch Shaw (1912) in his article that formally heralded the birth of the functional approach to the discipline (Converse, 1945; Jones and Monieson, 1990). Cassels’ (1936) paper on the place of economics in early marketing thought spends some time discussing the interesting dichotomy between the quite negative way that much of the general public regarded ‘middlemen’ and the far more “optimistic” view that classical and neo-classical economists had of such agents. He argues that Adam Smith’s enthusiastic support for “agencies developed for commodity distribution” (p. 133) ‘infected’ the majority of economists, who consequently found it difficult to look critically at the place of the ‘middleman’ until problems of distribution (the types of problems outlined by Beniger, one presumes) forced them to look more carefully at the functions of agents and describe them in more sophisticated and nuanced terms—and so was born the academic study of marketing.

Cassels’ paper is also interesting for the way in which it looks far, far back in history in order to provide a rounded foundation myth for the ‘marketer as middleman’ perspective. Indeed, the first persuasive gambit that Cassels uses is an argumentum ad antiquitatem to position marketing as an area of human endeavour which enjoyed the early attentions of great intellectuals, thereby proving that it is, contrary to popular perception, “one of the oldest” branches of economics (p. 129). He points out that it was one of the first areas of economics “to receive attention from the Greek philosophers and others who laid the foundations of the science” (ibid.) and that the central marketing question that concerned Plato and the greats remains at the core of twentieth-century understandings of the profession. This question, Cassels argues, is the problem of how to carry “through efficiently from the social point of view this final stage in the production process”. He goes on to note how Plato, after recounting in the Republic the way in which increasing sophistication of exchange markets inevitably leads to specializations of roles, describes the way in which a special class of men will arise to meet the need of all those specialized professions. There will be times that a specialist artisan will have goods to sell when there are no customers available and therefore risks having to “sit idle in the marketplace” (quoted in Cassels, 1936, p. 129). This is the value of the middleman for Plato—someone who can “remain on the spot in the marketplace and give money for goods to those who want to sell, and goods for money to those who want to buy” (p. 130). Interestingly, Cassels has to defend Plato’s curious stricture that such middlemen will be made up of “persons of excessive physical weakness” (ibid.), explaining that this is a consequence of Plato’s views on the social division of labour. The Platonic marketer is someone who literally is well-suited to sitting still in the middle of the marketplace and who can therefore take advantage of that position to facilitate the exchange of goods. At this early stage of market development, it is clear that the middleman is basically a conduit of convenience—there is no hint of the persuasive ‘control of consumption’ that begins to typify the middleman’s role after the control revolution. Furthermore, in basing his exposition of Platonic marketing on the Republic he ignores the harsher treatment that philosopher affords middlemen in the Laws, something that Kelley (1956) picks up in a later JoM piece covering similar ground. The job of middleman should be given to metics (immigrants or ‘strangers’) as there was far too much risk of the retail trade infecting Athenians with a love of profit. As Kelley puts it, “corruption of the moral fabric of the stranger would do less harm to the state!” (p. 63). The Laws also forbid the ‘flattering of goods’ and the provision of guarantees as any form of persuasion with regard to the retailing is considered to be dishonest. Cassels’ (1936) attempt to provide middlemen with a sympathetic version of Platonic support is, perhaps, a misguided attempt at the argumentum ad antiquitatem, implying that, if the oldest and grandest of the Greek philosophers was convinced of the middleman’s necessity, then the profession should be assured a respected place in the modern academy. From this perspective, this whitewashing of Plato’s view on middlemen is made all the more necessary, as the bulk of ancient opinion that comes after Plato is set squarely against the morality of the merchant. Indeed, he has to jump all the way up to Thomas Aquinas in the fourteenth century to find even a grudging acceptance that, under certain very clear circumstances, it was morally acceptable to charge more for a good than was paid for it. As Kelley (1956) points out, this general lack of sympathy for the middleman prevails “right through the medieval period of history”, when the idea of a “mutuality of benefit from a mere exchange of goods” was simply inconceivable (p. 63).

There is, then, a dilemma for those who wish to amplify the antiquity and importance of marketing’s early roots. Being able to point out how central the mercantile or middleman function has been throughout history amplifies the ethos of the discipline. At the same time, any consideration of the evidence for public perception of this function tends to indicate that societies in general did not trust those performing the function and held them in low regard. Trade was a corrupting influence on those performing it and those coming into contact with it. If you want to link the names of the great philosophers and thinkers with the practice of marketing, then you will mostly be dealing with invective and mistrust, it seems. Of course, one option given this dilemma is to ignore the historical perception of marketing and simply construct a history of how trade has grown over time. This is Fisk’s (1967) approach, for example, in his book on marketing systems; the opening sections provide a bloodless narrative of the development of international trade development since the Mesopotamian merchants completely devoid of any sense of how these various traders and agents were perceived by society at large. Here we get the strategic narrative point that marketing is at the heart of growth and civilization without any consideration of its intellectual significance. We retain the cachet of ancient lineage without any of the awkward questions regarding the social status of that lineage.

Bartels (1976), in his The History of Marketing Thought, sidestepped the whole issue by largely dismissing the pre-nineteenth century importance of the middleman. In broad alignment with Beniger’s (1986) argument, Bartels (1976) saw the middleman as of “incidental significance” (p. 17) until the explosion of production capacity in the years following the American Civil War. Previously, Bartels explains, middlemen individually “were necessary, but collectively they did not constitute what might be regarded as a distributive ‘system’” (ibid.). However, as the widespread introduction of new industrial methods meant that production was “no longer carried on for an immediately available market but in advance of known markets and for unknown markets at great distances” (p. 16–7), so the intermediary position of market agents became increasingly vital. The responsibilities of such middlemen also grew, encompassing the creation of value through “time, place, and possession utilities” (p. 17). Price itself became “a managed phenomenon” rather than a “market or natural one” (ibid.). This significant increase in scope and impact of the middleman or market agent led directly to the birth of marketing thought. Middlemen became a distinct and substantial class of business managers dealing with issues that classical economics had not been designed for. As Bartels argues, this class of managers “required a type of scientific or academic thought that no prevailing theories provided, and […] it became the objective of marketing thought and marketing literature to supply” it. (p. 18).

So, we can see that while the ancient origins of the middleman can occasionally (and awkwardly) be used to argue for the marketing profession’s credibility, the transformation of middleman into marketer seems, according to general scholarly consensus, to occur in line with Beniger’s (1986) identification of the control crisis in American industry in the mid to late 1900s. This is not to say that consideration of what ancient thinkers had to say about the profession of middleman is useful only for an ad antiquitatem amplification of the discipline’s ethos. Indeed, we will return to consider more closely the significance of Platonic and Aristotelian censuring of middlemen for what it can tell us about the relationship between marketing and some of the other professions that these thinkers find untrustworthy. However, the narrative of the middleman’s transformation under the pressure of the crisis of control does allow us to consider the way in which marketing’s blurred disciplinary boundaries have come about and continue to exist.

Bartels’ point that the transformation of the significance of the middleman was accompanied by a widening in the responsibilities and scope of the profession is an important one. Much of marketing’s definitional chaos is a direct consequence of being a practice borne from the shifting sands of necessity. Bartels’ (1976) study of the development of marketing thought makes this quite clear in its own structure. Initial chapters deal with separate areas of practice and research such as advertising, credit, sales, retail, and wholesale—as Bartels reviews the early literature across these topics it is clear they see little connection with each other. The writers and practitioners in these areas do not see themselves as part of a larger discipline of ‘marketing’. Instead, ‘marketing’ begins to slowly be positioned by a small number of forward thinkers (Shaw, Butler, Weld and Cherington, in Bartels’ narrative) as a concept that can serve to integrate the disparate functions, processes, and institutions that had been gradually growing in importance over the second half of the nineteenth century. Yet, despite the work by early pioneers of the integrative marketing outlook, the constituent areas continued to develop and publish and organise within themselves, with little regard to their place in this new umbrella discipline (which remained predominantly conceptual rather than functional in the sense that companies were not integrating these separate areas into marketing departments). It is not surprising, indeed, that the early marketing writing of the 1920s consisted of descriptive “commodity studies” (Bartels, 1976, p. 147). Those promulgating an integrative ‘marketing’ initially needed to position the necessity for such integration by persuasively describing the ways in which all of the distributive, sales, and advertising functions can be seen to lock together into one meta-function (as seen in work by Duncan, Hibbard, and Macklin). Only from such a base could the principles of the meta-function be identified and promoted.

One of the consequences of the integrative nature of marketing is that it subsumed some quite wildly different areas of activity. The middlemen that evolved to handle the crises of control in production, distribution, and consumption were necessarily highly specialised, and much of the thinking that developed around their various professions relied upon quite different knowledge sets and proficiencies. This continues to be an issue in modern marketing practice and scholarship—most advertising scholars will be quite unfamiliar with resource-advantage theory or theories of market entry, and supply chain specialists are ill-equipped to navigate the literature on consumer culture or social media marketing. Specialisms, and the silos they can inspire, are not just an issue for marketing, of course, but it is rare for an academic discipline (and a profession) to have emerged through the integration of so many disparate areas. The fact that advertising is taught in some universities around the world under the aegis of schools of Journalism or Media Studies rather than in Departments of Marketing in Business schools is an indication of just how unnatural and contentious some of this integration remains. In the professional environment, logistics is now rarely integrated with the marketing function in the organisational structure of most firms.

However, though there might be problems in integration at the practical level, the scholarly discipline of marketing is more integrative in approach than ever. For example, the debate that has occurred around social marketing (Kotler and Levy, 1969a, 1969b; Kotler, 1972; Luck, 1969, 1974; Arndt, 1978, Andreasen, 1994) is indicative of the way in which the urge to integrate (perhaps even co-opt) further areas of responsibility under the marketing banner remains hard-wired into the DNA of marketing scholarship. Despite discomfort from some quarters Kotler and Levy’s conception of social marketing has become a largely accepted part of marketing’s scope. While Kotler’s (1972) subsequent expansion into “generic marketing” has not met with quite as much overt enthusiasm its transformation into the “holistic marketing” that he promotes in his successful (ubiquitous) textbook on marketing management (Kotler and Keller, 2015) is a further indication of the influential nature of the integrative urge. Furthermore, the small amount of criticism in print regarding Vargo and Lusch’s (2004) Service-Dominant logic, a perspective which has managed to galvanise a wide variety of marketing scholars internationally and already resulted in a vast citation nexus, is often focused on its ambitious attempts to seemingly integrate a wide variety of marketing research streams from the 1980s and 1990s (Achrol and Kotler, 2006; O’Shaughnessy and O’Shaughnessy, 2009, 2011). Vargo and Lusch’s project to create a new dominant paradigm for marketing which subsumes disparate, sometimes independent, discourses into one behemoth of theory has tended to resonate with the marketing academy precisely because the marketing academy is built upon such panphageous beginnings. A final example of this avaricious appetite will suffice. The tremendous popularity of co-creation and co-production as a contemporary marketing technique, both with practitioners and scholars, is clearly indicative of marketing’s urge to control product and service research and development, an area that it has historically been envious of yet remained relatively powerless to influence (Miles, 2016). The broader idea of the co-creation of value, which has been central to the premises of Vargo and Lusch’s S-D logic, provides a powerful argument for marketing’s purview over re-positioned R&D and production departments.

So, the argument that I am making is that the discipline (and, to a certain extent, the practice) of marketing comes out of a concern with conceptually unifying a broad variety of burgeoning middleman functions. While many of these functions could be said to have roots in the early growth of trade, they had all evolved significantly in the second half of the nineteenth century as a response to spiralling crises in control. Additionally, these functions had been working largely independently, but early marketing thinkers proposed that firms might benefit from managerial consolidation across them. In this sense, and adapting Beniger’s (1986) terms, marketing is a discipline built upon the need for meta-control—it has sought to integrate under central control practices that are motivated by the desire to control production, distribution and consumption. This need for meta-control is reflected, fractal-like, in many smaller issues relating to marketing’s search for increased scope and responsibility.

Before moving on to a discussion of the ramifications of this urge for control that I am arguing characterises the marketing discipline, I would like to address one particular alternative vision. The search for a common denominator behind all the functions and practices that marketing seeks to bundle together has been continuing for some time, if not very successfully. The changing definitions of the American Marketing Academy represent the ways in which the discipline has sought to explain its central concerns to itself and those it seeks to persuade of its status. The 1960 AMA definition states that marketing is “the performance of business activities that direct the flow of goods and services from producer to consumer or user” (quoted in Hunt, 1976, p. 17). This covers classic middleman territory in a manner that clearly situates the marketer in between the producer and consumer. In that the responsibility of marketing is the direction of the flow of goods and services the definition is consistent with marketing as a control function. Yet, the nature of that control is rather weakly framed—‘direction’ seems simply a matter of choosing the right trajectory, making sure flow doesn’t get held up or caught in cross traffic. The emphasis seems to be on distribution and the terminology does not lend itself well to considerations regarding the control off consumption. As Sheth and Uslay (2007) point out in their study of the AMA definitions, the above definition was actually the original AMA formulation and reaches back all the way to 1935. It was changed only in 1985, a full fifty years into the discipline’s evolutionary journey. The 1985 revision stated that marketing was to be understood as “the process of planning and executing the conception, pricing, promotion, and distribution of ideas, goods, and services to create exchanges that satisfy individual and organizational objectives” (quoted in Lusch, 2007, p. 264). The scope has clearly expanded here and marketing is now positioned at the “conception” of “ideas, goods, and services”, right at the start of production, in other words. Marketers are also strongly framed as agents of “organizational objectives” (rather than just the self-interested objectives of the middleman). We can, also, see a clear reference to the marketing mix in the way in which the definition is structured. More importantly, however, the 1985 definition recognised what had been an increasingly concerted attempt by marketing scholars to conceptualise marketing around the concept of exchange (Sheth and Uslay, 2007).

Bagozzi’s (1975) article on “Marketing as Exchange” remains the epitome of scholarship seeking to orient marketing as a whole in terms of the concept of exchange, or the “exchange paradigm” as the author put it. It comes out of assumptions explicit within Kotler’s (1972) formulation of “generic marketing” that depicted the practice and discipline as concerned with answering the questions of “Why do people and organizations engage in exchange relationships?” and “How are exchanges created, resolved, or avoided?” (Bagozzi, 1975, p. 32). Kotler (1972) had argued that there was a radical “consciousness” beginning to emerge amongst some marketers which extended the boundaries of the discipline beyond the customer to include “all other publics” of an organization. (p. 48). He noted that this understanding of marketing did not rely upon a structural perspective (whereby marketing is defined as dealing with particular institutions to be found in the business environment) but rather based itself upon a functional approach wherein marketing occurs wherever a marketing function is performed. In considering what “core concept” can constitute the marketing function, Kotler identified the transaction, which he defined as “the exchange of values between two parties” (ibid.). Bagozzi (1975) takes up this position, stating that “there appears to be a growing consensus that exchange forms the core phenomenon for study in marketing” (p. 32). He then proceeds to explain what he identifies as the three different types of exchange (restricted, generalized, and complex), which allows him to analyse how even the decision to watch a television programme can be thought of as a “complex circular exchange” in which “different tangible or symbolic entities” (p. 34) are transferred between the viewer, the programme makers, and their advertisers and advertising agencies. As Bagozzi analyses in more depth the nature of exchange in society, he begins to frame it in a manner that is fundamentally concerned with influence. He argues that “social actors obtain satisfaction of their needs by complying with, or influencing, the behavior of other actors” and this is achieved through “communicating and controlling the media of exchange, which, in turn, comprise the links between one individual and another, between one organization and another” (p. 35). Bagozzi is careful to admit that not all of marketing is concerned with influence, in that it is also must deal with “meeting existing needs and anticipating future needs” (ibid.). However, this is surely short-sighted: according to the exchange paradigm that Bargozzi is outlining, those existing needs are certainly the product of previous exchanges and any future needs are necessarily going to be the result of future influence.

The most far-reaching aspect of Bagozzi’s (1975) analysis is his assertion that exchange should be divided into three different “classes of meaning”: “utilitarian exchange”, “symbolic exchange”, and “mixed exchange”. The first of these, he explains, has been the focus of marketing for most of its development; it describes “an interaction whereby goods are given in return for money or other goods and the motivation be-hind the actions lies in the anticipated use or tangible characteristics commonly associated with the objects in the exchange”. It is a conception of exchange that stems from an understanding of humans as economic agents. Symbolic exchange, however, is based upon what people understand the media of exchange to mean rather than what they can do (to paraphrase Levy, 1959, whom Bagozzi identifies as one of the first scholars to recognise this truth). It describes the “mutual transfer of psychological, social, or other intangible entities between two or more parties” (ibid.). Bagozzi asserts that marketing exchanges involve a mixture of the utilitarian and symbolic and the recognition of this truth allows us to uncover how the discipline of marketing deals not with “economic man” but “marketing man” (p. 37). The clear implication here is that the practice of marketing has always been concerned with mixed exchanges but the academic discipline’s early debt to economics blinded it of its true “core concept”, something that was also perhaps exacerbated by the variegated distribution focus of early marketing practice. The exchange paradigm therefore promises to provide marketing with an unveiled understanding of its disciplinary and professional identity. It also supports marketing in its attempts to seek a wider base within the firm and society. Bagozzi paper finishes with the assertion that marketing is a “general function of universal applicability” and that it can be defined as “the discipline of exchange behavior” (p. 39). Keeping in mind Bagozzi’s conception of “mixed exchange”, it is not difficult to see how this perspective was widely applauded throughout the academy—it constitutes a strong defence of the discipline, based around an already popular “core concept” that can include older, economic conceptions of marketing as well as the more modern social and symbolic ones. It also neatly ties together the distributive and the communicative aspects of the field.

The intellectual confidence that the exchange paradigm began to afford many in the marketing academy is best represented by Kiel et al. (1992), an article which can be seen as the foundation for Vargo and Lusch’s (2004) introduction of S-D logic (Miles, 2018). In this paper, Kiel et al. argue for marketing to be seen as part of a larger “universal system of exchange” (p. 62). By “universal”, the authors mean situated within the universe, so that marketing can be understood as being embedded in larger physical (i.e. non-human) systems of exchange. Kiel et al. (1992) advance what they term a “natural science of exchange” (ibid.) as an antidote to the predominantly “anthropocentric microtheory building” of extant marketing approaches to exchange. Their conception of the “natural science of exchange” attempts to explain “the evolution of all exchange systems and properly positions marketing in this evolutionary exchange paradigm” (ibid.) and implements a General Systems Theory perspective that sees all systems in the universe as exhibiting the fundamental characteristics of exchange, attraction, dynamic equilibrium, and the evolution of complexity (via circular movement through the stages of emergence, convergence, proliferation, and divergence). Within this framework, marketing is seen as one of the most recent expressions of universal exchange within the human system and is a function of the increasing complexity of human social systems. Kiel et al.’s (1992) paper is a highly compressed but nevertheless tremendously ambitious argument in favour of placing exchange at the heart of not just marketing but the whole universe. In doing so, they not only attempt to explain the connection between marketing and all the other social and physical sciences but also situate marketing as a discipline that has a clear place in the universe through its consideration of the basic constructive forces of the universe. The dynamic of exchange stands as the central motif throughout the paper, and, as such, it is working within the tradition of Kotler (1972) and Bagozzi (1975), yet in its serious engagement with the terms of General Systems Theory it elevates the marketing conception of exchange into something fundamental to not just human life but the workings of the universe. To study marketing from this perspective is to study the universe.

The 1985 AMA (re)definition of marketing, therefore, can be seen as a natural (if tardy) reflection of the way in which the exchange paradigm had come to dominate academic marketing understandings of the discipline’s “core concept”. At the same time, the 1985 definition was accused by some of not recognizing “(implicitly or explicitly) marketing as a societal process” and did not easily lend itself to extensions of marketing beyond the traditional scenario of “organizations marketing to customers” (Lusch, 2007, p. 264). Dissatisfaction with the definition, as well as recognition that marketing theory appeared to be moving towards an obsession with value, led to another revision of the AMA definition in 2004. The wording of this version, however, completely dropped any reference to exchange as well as continuing with the move towards a more managerial and less societal understandings of the discipline and profession (Sheth and Uslay, 2007). The 2004 definition stated that marketing “is an organizational function and a set of processes for creating, communicating and delivering value to customers and for managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organization and its stakeholders” (quoted in Wilkie and Moore, 2006, p. 227). It is difficult to know whether the absence of exchange here is a function of the more recent focus on value being seen to necessarily imply exchange or whether there was some more oppositional intent informing its absence. Lusch was involved in the definition’s construction but is on record as preferring his own formulation which does explicitly contain reference to the exchange paradigm: “Marketing is the adaptive process, in society and organizations, of collaborating to communicate, create, provide, and sustain value for customers through exchange relationships while meeting the needs of diverse stakeholders” (Lusch, 2007, p. 265). Quite why the AMA committee decided to abandon exchange (while adopting an emphasis on value and stakeholders) is not clear. Certainly, the fact that it did was seen by some as a victory. Sheth and Uslay (2007) are positively delighted with the elision, as they see marketing as “amidst a paradigm shift from exchange (value in exchange) towards value cocreation (value for all stakeholders) with an intermediate iteration at value creation (value in use and relationship marketing” (p. 305). They equate exchange with what Vargo and Lusch (2004) have identified as Goods-Dominant logic, and they even use some re-heated terminology from Vargo and Lusch (2004) when they state that “exchange masks the value creation capabilities” of goods and services (Sheth and Uslay, 2007, p. 305). For Sheth and Uslay (2007), it is value co-creation which is fundamental to marketing and which generates exchange. However, given the extent to which Vargo and Lusch’s writing on S-D logic is used by Sheth and Uslay (2007), it is curious that they ignore the central place that exchange has within it. For Vargo and Lusch (2004), the emerging service paradigm does not do away with (or de-emphasise) exchange at all. Instead, it keeps it at the heart of marketing. The goods-dominant logic is characterised as being concerned with “commodities exchange”, whereas the new service paradigm starts from the assumption that “people exchange to acquire the benefits of specialized competencies (knowledge and skills)” (p. 7). S-D logic still sees marketing as based upon exchange; it is just that the paradigm’s view of what is being exchanged has transformed from the tangible to the intangible. Indeed, their phrasing through the foundational 2004 paper makes it clear that they are promulgating a “service-centered mode of exchange” (p. 14). Exchange has remained at the centre of the S-D logic even as many other aspects of its formulation have evolved and transformed. Lusch and Vargo’s (2014) book-length presentation of the logic, for example, still frames it as a way of “viewing human exchange systems” (p. 5).

The 2004 AMA abandonment of exchange as a defining characteristic of marketing was short-lived. Indeed, Sheth and Uslay’s 2007 paper included an epilogue which notes that the journal’s special sections editor has informed them that “a revised definition of marketing has already been proposed by the 2007 AMA task force” (p. 306). This revised definition, which they include in this final paragraph to the article, has re-included exchange in its wording, though the manner in which it is done clearly limits exchange by now distinguishing it from other equally important marketing processes. The 2007 revision remains the ratified AMA definition at the time of writing and conceives of marketing as “the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large” (AMA, 2017). If exchanging is separate from communicating, creating, and delivering, then it is unclear what exactly it is but it is certainly not what Kotler, Bagozzi, Kiel et al., and Vargo and Lusch mean by the term. There is clearly a degree of confusion here, and much of this is located in the way in which value (co)creation and exchange have become seen by some marketing thinkers as originating in mutually incompatible paradigms, or at least in deserving of dramatically different emphasis. While Vargo and Lusch have been quite clear concerning the continuing exchange basis of S-D logic, other proponents of value co-creation have been more vague. Prahalad and Ramaswamy (2004) are perhaps the most prestigious voices in the co-creation of value movement. They are writing as scholars of enterprise and business strategy, rather than from inside the marketing academy and so therefore their view of exchange is not marketing-focused. Nevertheless, they do characterise the “traditional concept of a market” as being one where products and services are the subject of an “exchange of value” (p. 120), whereas the new “emerging concept of a market” is based upon co-creation converting “the market into a forum where dialogue among the consumer, the firm, consumer communities, and networks of firms can take place” (p. 122, emphasis in original). Prahalad and Ramaswamy do not actually deny that the emerging market is not based upon exchange—instead they use the word “interaction” to describe the “locus of co-creation of value and economic value extraction by the consumer and the firm” (ibid.). Although clearly this locus of interaction, along with the depiction of the market as a “forum”, is perfectly amenable to the idea of the market as a place of exchange, the adoption of new terminology rhetorically underlines the emphasis on a particular form of exchange that the authors are favouring.

In the next chapter, I advance an understanding of marketing as exchange which seeks to include the creation and co-creation of value, looks back on marketing’s intermediary past, and looks forward to its future in what is increasingly being understood as a global society based upon an ‘attention economy’. In doing so, my motivation is to construct a conception of marketing as exchange which is rigorous enough to inform the broadest as well as narrowest definition of marketing while enabling the discipline to be clearly identified as an extension of the rhetorical tradition. It is important that this understanding of marketing as an extension of rhetoric does not just refer to marketing communication. As we have seen above, most scholarly consideration of marketing’s nature and scope has not focused overtly upon its communicative aspects. On the other hand, most scholarly work linking the rhetorical tradition to marketing has indeed narrowly understood marketing through its communicative function, with the consequence that the majority of marketing scholars and practitioners assume that a rhetorical perspective has little to offer the other practice areas of marketing and, therefore, marketing in general.