The Marketing Environment (RLE Marketing)

John Dawson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317647294
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Business

This comprehensive work, covering a wide spectrum of the marketing environment, provides a fundamental basis to marketing geography for those concerned with market research, comparative and international marketing, and the study of economic geography. The book focusses on the spatial patterns and processes in marketing, and the development conflicts occur in the marketing system, and how evolution and change in marketing systems is realised through the resolution of these conflicts. The major sectors and institutions in the marketing system are described and a detailed study is made of the ways they change and interact.

1 THE ECONOMIC ROLE OF MARKETING

The processes involved in the distribution of goods, whether food, consumer goods or capital goods, from their points of production to those of consumption, are managed, manipulated and controlled. This is the case not just with the economies of high mass consumption but it is equally true of the developing and communist worlds. The equation of supply and demand which is the basis of the distribution process is central to both the disciplines of economic geography and marketing and the two subjects have clear points of contact and overlap. Usually supply and demand are spatially separated and the management of the processes which close this spatial gap is relevant to marketing science and geography. Demand structure–the amount and types of good required for consumption–varies through geographical space and this variation again provides central themes in marketing and geography. Government control of marketing activities varies in type both among and within countries, so again geographical variables impinge on marketing decisions.

The Development of Marketing Geography

For many decades economic geography drew strength from classical economics with its concentration on the factors of production. Analyses of land, labour and capital provide the bases for the majority of geographical studies until the late 1950s. The agricultural and industrial sectors were both studied from this productive standpoint. Economic geography followed Adam Smith who argued in the Wealth of Nations that

Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production; and the interest of the producer ought to be attended to, only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer. The maxim is so self-evident, that it would be absurd to prove it. But in the mercantile system, the interest of the consumer is almost constantly sacrificed to that of the producer; and it seems to consider production, and not consumption, as the ultimate end and object of all industry and commerce. (p. 625, Modern Library edition).

Only in the last 20 years has economic geography begun to escape from the stranglehold implied in this philosophy. Hodder and Lee (1974) have outlined the evolution of economic geography from a production based deterministic approach to a wider framed approach using the concepts of economic systems. While markets and the structure of demand were components of economically derived models in economic geography, as Chisholm (1970) points out, they took a subservient place with the market viewed only as a place to absorb production. A classic study is that of Harris (1954) who studied the market as a factor in the concentration of industrial production. The market had no relevance except as a factor of production. With the emergence of systems analytic approaches to the study of economic activity (McDaniel and Eliot-Hurst, 1968), so a more balanced view was taken of the relationship between production and consumption. Manners’ (1971) study of the world market for iron ore illustrates this change in emphasis away from production dominated studies to ones involving an evaluation of the market allocation processes. Smith (1973) has taken an even more positive view of the role of market forces in his attempts to analyse spatial inequalities in social wellbeing and to relate these to market situations and in turn to industrial production. The market, in such studies, takes on an active rôle in analyses of the economic system. The basis of Hodder and Lee’s view of economic geography is a system based economic model in which the driving force is not production but consumption.

With this swing in emphasis in economic geography generally it might be expected that marketing studies would have emerged as a strong, rapidly developing branch of economic geography. Its lack of development is not due to any absence of pleas for its acceptance. Hartshorne (1959) argued that a unitary statement of economic geography could be achieved based on a geography of consumption which he claimed

of greatest significance for all of geography. To relate such a field to the many essentially separate geographies of production we need to develop far more than we have the geography of exchange, including marketing as well as transportation. (p. 41).

Before this, Applebaum (1954) was suggesting marketing geography as a major potential growth area in economic geography. With

the large section of the working population that is engaged exclusively in marketing functions, the large part of the urban landscape that is devoted to the structures of wholesale and retail trade, and the complex channels of distribution that lead from producing to consuming areas, it becomes even clearer that there is a place and need in economic geography for special attention to marketing geography. (p. 245).

Despite the potential for development, the subject developed slowly with only a few practitioners and a very limited view of what marketing geography entailed. Berry (1967) states that, ‘The prime concern of marketing geographers … is in how to measure a trading area’ (p. 127). The scope of marketing geography is much wider than is implied by this statement.

The pleas of Applebaum and also later Green (1967) to develop a cogent branch of economic geography dealing with the economic, social and political processes influencing goods after their production had some effect although development was not rapid. Murphy (1961) points out in an editorial to an issue of Economic Geography devoted to retailing that ‘In the last decade the practitioners in this adolescent field have grown in numbers and in activity’ (p. 1). Whether or not one would agree with Murphy in his view that by 1961 marketing geography had ‘come of age’, none the less by then certain topics, for example retail trade area measurement, had a considerable literature. Marketing geography, however, had rather more unresearched topics than subjects of which there was partial knowledge. In 1961 while there was a sizable geographical literature on retail trade area measurement and on shop location (Berry and Pred, 1961), at least in its broadest terms, and on fairs and rural markets, one has to turn to the marketing literature to find studies of consumer behaviour, agricultural marketing, wholesaling, channel structure, shopping centres and many other key topics.

Since 1960 some of these subject areas have formed the basis for advances in economic geography. The general change in emphasis in human geography, from a deterministic to a behavioural standpoint, has resulted in consumer behaviour, particularly of shoppejs, becoming a significant research frontier. A number of the established subject areas within marketing geography advanced in the 1960s with the evolution of central place theory (Berry, Barnum and Tennant, 1962). Location and trade area studies thus became even more the foci of research of economic geographers concerned with marketing (Kornblau, 1968; Cordey-Hayes, 1968). This development was without doubt at the expense of other equally important topics such as channel structure or the way goods move from producer to consumer. Thus by the 1970s although marketing geography has grown in importance it has neither blossomed nor been accepted widely as a valid field within economic geography. Scott’s (1970) important volume reviews the growing body of work on retailing. Other than Eastman’s (1930) volume, no book carried in its title the term ‘marketing geography’ until the publication in 1976 of Davies’s text. The review by Beaujeu-Garnier and Delobez (1977) together with Davies’s book suggest, perhaps, that European geographers have taken over from those in North America the marketing geography flame despite the strength of marketing science per se in North America.

The slow initial growth of marketing geography and the slight quickening of interest in the 1970s is due, as Berry (1967) points out, to the inward looking nature of geography before the 1960s and the development in the last decade of a greater sensitivity to developments in cognate fields. Even so it is surprising the extent to which economic and urban geographers have failed to appreciate the extent of both theoretical and practical work in marketing. Even Hodder and Lee (1974) who take an essentially consumption orientated view of economic geography do not refer to any recent work by marketing scientists. Despite Berry’s view, certainly economic geography has failed to appreciate the advances made in marketing in recent years.

Only recently have research theses in economic geography begun critically to examine some of the marketing literature (Bradford, 1975). Some aspects such as those based on central place theory, drawing relatively slightly on work in marketing, have developed rapidly. Others such as the spatial organisation of distribution or the spatial variation in operating costs and prices have hardly developed at all. It is these branches which require inputs from disciplines other than geography if progress, within a geographical framework, is to be made. Between such extremes lie topics in which there is overlap between various branches of geography itself. Consumer behaviour is a case in point. Research in urban geography and population geography have been drawn on heavily by marketing geographers studying consumer behaviour at a retail level (Clark and Rushton, 1970). Studies of consumer behaviour carried out within marketing and psychology and of consumption within economics have been drawn upon less frequently (Davies, 1973).

The Emergence of Marketing Science

Before considering in detail the specific content of marketing geography, it is worthwhile to look, briefly, at the marketing input into the subject. As with geography the development of the discipline of marketing has been somewhat introverted with frequent discussion on the definition of the subject and vindications for its study (Bartels, 1970). Bartels (1968) argues that marketing has become an increasingly fragmented discipline in the last 30 years. ‘Since the end of World War II, marketing thought has developed along a number of different lines, with the result that it has been increasingly difficult to know, teach, or practise the “whole” of marketing’ (p. 29). The parallel with geography is very noticeable. Other marketing scientists, notably Revzan (1965) and many of the contributors to Alderson, Cox and Shapiro (1964) view marketing in a more holistic manner, considering the total marketing system as a single entity rather than as separately managed units in a complex process. Revzan (1965) states

The marketing organization is thought of as the functioning of a system of interrelated structures or organisms; and, its functioning is conditioned by the cultural and political patterns of the geographic unit in which it operates at any given period of time … The marketing system, in the above context, cannot be segmented and considered effectively apart from its relationship to the whole economy. At the same time it must be viewed as an entity for study representing one aspect of economic specialization. (p. 38).

The contrast between this holistic view and the fragmented approach which typified marketing philosophy in the 1950s stems largely from the impact of concepts of system.

The evolution of the discipline in the United States in the early years of this century has been well documented by Bartels (1968). The emergence of a mass consumption economy in the USA significantly increased the importance of marketing as a concept and marketing science as a discipline (Cox, 1965A). The spread of marketing concepts from North America to Europe and to the remainder of the world has occurred, for the most part, since 1950. The works of Braithwaite and Dobbs (1932), Smith (1937) and Jefferys (1950, 1954) are concerned essentially with economics and the origins of the books lie in academic economics in Britain rather than in the discipline of marketing emerging in the USA.

Attempts to define marketing, in similar fashion to geography, are legion. The consensus of these definitions is that marketing is concerned with the processes governing the transfer of goods and services from points of production to places of consumption. The definition provided by the Marketing Staff of Ohio State University (1965) is perhaps the most comprehensive and most relevant to a geographical interpretation of marketing processes: ‘ Marketing is the process in a society by which the demand structure for economic goods and services is anticipated or enlarged and satisfied through the conception, promotion, exchange, and physical distribution of such goods and services’ (p. 43). By this definition marketing is concerned with the changes in place, time and ownership through which goods pass in consumption processes. The concern of marketing is thus consumption whether consumption is by manufacturer in the production of more materials or by middlemen or by ultimate consumer.

Acceptance of this definition implies a change in attitudes to the study of marketing from the stereotype views of the 1950s and early 1960s. It implies a much wider concept than most previous definitions and necessarily means that workers began to look to other disciplines to understand the processes involved in marketing. Thus the same trends have affected marketing as h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Dedication
• Preface
• 1. The Economic Role of Marketing
• 2. Channels and Power Relationships in Marketing Systems
• 3. Demand and the Behaviour of Consumers
• 4. The Organisation of Retail Distribution
• 5. Conflict and Response in the Wholesale Sector
• 6. Marketing by Producers
• 7. Land Use Complexes-Two Examples
• 8. Government Influences in Marketing
• 9. Conflict, Response and Marketing Change
• Subject Index
• Author Index
• Place Index