Wroe Alderson

Towards a Theory of Marketing

Editors Note: The authors explain the need for the development of marketing theory and indicate some of the sources from which such a body of knowledge will come as well as some of the directions ...

A twenty-first century guide to Aldersonian marketing thought

Wroe Alderson a Life.- to Part II: Wroe Aldersons Theory of Market Behavior - Selected Writings.- Towards a Theory of Marketing.- The Analytical Framework for Marketing.- Survival and Adjustment in Organized Behavior Systems.- Survival and Growth of Systems.- The Power Principle.- Marketing efficiency and the principle of Postponement.- Competition for Differential Advantage.- Matching and Sorting: The Logic of Exchange.- to Functionalism.- Functionalism: Descriptive and Normative.- The Heterogeneous Market and the Organized Behavior System.- Information Flows in Heterogeneous Markets.- Transactions and Transvections.- Cooperation and conflict in marketing Channels.- to Part III: Wroe Alderson - Writings on Management Practice and Ethical Behavior.- Alderson, Sessions and the 1950s Manager.- A Basic Guide to Market Planning.- Researcher Finds a Void in Freud... Advertisers Urged to Follow Path of Rational Problem Solving Rather than of Instinctive Drives.- Ethics, Ideologies and Sanctions.- The American Economy and Christian Ethics.- Planning and Problem Solving in Marketing: A Book Review.- to Part IV: Aldersons Market Behavior Theory with its Links to Other Theories.- Alderson and Chamberlin.- Aldersons General Theory of Marketing: A Formalization.- Marketing Behaviour and Entrepreneurship: A Synthesis of Alderson and Austrian Economics.- An Alternative Paradigm for Marketing Theory.- Aldersons Transvection and Porters Value System.- to Part V: Original Contributions to This Publication.- The Wroe Alderson I Knew.- Wroe Alderson as Academic Entrepreneur: The Wharton Years.- Toward a General Theory of Marketing: Resource-Advantage Theory as an Extension of Aldersons Theory of Market Processes.- Placing Alderson and His Contributions to Marketing in Historical Perspective.- Wroe Aldersons Vision Renewed and Rehabilitated: Social Structures and Marketing Theories.- To Teach or Not to Teach Alderson? There is No Question.- List of Publications by Wroe Alderson.- A Select List of Authors Who Have Commented on Aldersonian Marketing Thought.

Survival and Adjustment in Organized Behavior Systems

Marketing behavior embraces a wide range of organized activities in the distribution and exchange of goods and services. In the American economy, distribution provides the link between mass production and individualized consumption. Marketing must adjust itself to continuous changes in production techniques and in patterns of consumer demand. Marketing specialists administer a dynamic segment of economic life. Paralleling the day-to-day administration and control of marketing processes, marketing analysis and planning are directed toward constant improvement. The forms of market organization must be altered to serve new objectives or to meet established needs with greater efficiency. Effective performance of such an exacting role requires a rich perspective. Marketing practice needs to be oriented to the principles of group behavior developing out of such fields as social psychology and cultural anthropology. It needs to be aware of the main lines of thought that have emerged in economics as a more abstract and generalized approach to the study of markets. Marketing needs an ordered framework for a broader and more significant organization of its own empirical findings. In short, marketing theory is essential to the scientific approach that has long been the guiding ideal of the professional marketing specialist. Marketing theory that will meet these requirements is not the same thing as economic theory. The science of marketing must progress through constructive interaction between fact finding and deductive analysis. Economic theory in its purest form has not been contaminated by contact with fact finding. Marketing necessarily concerns itself with the organizing effort that makes possible the orderly flow of goods. Economics assumes as already given the results labori-

Mass Audience Capable of Improvement in Taste

Wroe Alderson is an outstanding figure in American Marketing. He is the author of numerous books, texts and monographs, founder of the consulting firm bearing his name, professor of marketing in the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce of the University of Pennsylvania and a past president of American Marketing Association. He was in Filene lecturer at Roosevelt University in the Autumn of 1961. A historian describing life in ancient Rome tells how commercial messages came to be a distraction and a nuisance during the popular entertainments at the Coliseum. The average Roman, settling into his seat to enjoy the gory spectacle in the arena, was bombarded by the sales talks of wine sellers, sausage venders, brothel keepers, and others with goods and services for sale. One can imagine his complaining to his wife after