Markets and Marketing

Markets and marketing, in the broadest sense of exchanging or bartering goods and services, are likely prehistoric. They predate the origin of money as entire trade systems based on barter clearly existed. Z. S. Demirdjian, places the start of marketing more than nine thousand years ago in the Mesopotamian civilization of Proto-Armenia. He suggests that

ever since humankind settled to a sedentary life style, marketing may have emerged to facilitate the exchange process of either surplus or scarce food grown through agriculture and domesticated animals raised for food or for beasts of burden. (2005, 102)

Exchange is considered the key element defining marketing (Bagozzi 1975). According to Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations (1776), the propensity to “truck, barter, and trade” is common to all humans. Notions of property, ownership, and capital or surplus are necessary as well, but these can exist at a group rather than individual level. Indeed, the contemporary corporation is an instance of a group exchanging resources with other groups (B2B, or business-to-business marketing) as well as with individuals (B2C, or business-to-consumer marketing). Although Richard Bagozzi focused on the utilitarian exchange of money, goods, and services in marketing, he also recognized the symbolic exchange of intangibles such as the explicit and implicit promises of brand advertising. Philip Kotler and Sidney Levy suggested a broadening of the scope of marketing as well in urging that nonprofit organizations, such as governments, religious groups, politicians, hospitals, and charitable organizations, should also employ principles of marketing to engage in better exchanges with their various constituencies. This was a contentious suggestion from the start. Among the objections raised is that this broadened notion of marketing potentially makes everything and everyone another good to be marketed. Such “commoditization” may or may not preclude alternative motivational and inspirational frameworks, such as sincerity, art, love, education, and divine calling. But it gives people pause to ask, Is nothing sacred? That is, is there nothing—blood, human organs, warfare, babies, sex, prayer—that we want to keep outside the mechanisms of the market?

Attempts to answer this question have led some to try to demonstrate that markets and marketing are not the only means by which we give and receive tangible and intangible valuables. Marcel Mauss (1925/1967) in The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies suggested that the gift economy preceded the market economy and was characterized by the obligatory exchange of largely unnecessary objects to promote peaceful relations between clans and societies. Christopher Gregory characterizes such gift exchange as involving the transfer of inalienable objects between people in a state of reciprocal interdependence to establish a qualitative relationship between them. Commodity exchange, on the other hand, is seen by Gregory to involve the transfer of alienable objects between people in a state of independence to establish quantitative equivalence between the objects transacted. When goods are alienable, the previous and current owners can walk away from an exchange without obligations to ever see one another again. But the inalienability brought about by gift exchange binds the giver and receiver into an ongoing relationship variously characterized as debt, gratitude, or friendship.

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