A taxonomy for marketing: Distinctions between exchange and non-exchange, and governance adaptations and need satisfying behaviors

Summary

The idea of value passing between and among parties for the purpose of achieving one’s own goals is at the heart of marketing’s management function. This is the core of the discipline. It is important, however, for the marketer to understand the alternatives to marketing exchange, so that we know when marketing might be appropriate and when our needs might be better addressed through non-marketing behaviors. Further, we need to have a better understanding of how one might displace some forms of behavior (e.g., coercive behaviors) with exchange. This is of grave importance today in some Eastern European countries emerging from the he USSR.

The tradition within marketing has been to study function, behavior, and need satisfaction. The interest in studying various organizational forms is owed to other disciplines. Marketers do need to address how best to organize themselves to achieve their ends. The perspectives derived from other disciplines provide valuable insights to those marketers studying form. We hope that by distinguishing between need satisfying solutions and relating need satisfying solutions to governance adaptations, we are better able to understand and apply these concepts to organizational needs and provide appropriate problem solutions.

Marketers are not limited to the study of anonymous spot markets but also recognize and address markets found in a relational context. The idea of cooperation is not foreign to marketers. To the extent that marketers study within-hierarchy transfers, marketers study non-exchange behavior. Management of the internal function is different from inter-firm operations in that internal management has different objective functions and different assessment criteria, and makes use of different media. Understanding and managing transfer behavior requires more attention to a political science knowledge base than market behavior (Webster 1992). This istrue even if the intra-company transactions we are examining consists of firms working in cooperation with each other. Webster (1992) makes clear distinctions between two firms creating a joint venture and two firms forming a strategic alliance. In the latter case the coming together of the two firms is for a specific purpose, although it may be for an indefinite time. In the former case the firms formalize their relationship by way of a new entity which will continue to exist into the future. And what we elect to define as good marketing practice will be directly tied to the setting and what is appropriate for the particular form of governance.