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Dominic F. Wilson: The Management School, University of Salford, UK
Introduction
Organizational marketing theory as a whole has been developed around several theoretical demarcations distinguishing it, sometimes artificially, from consumer marketing theory. Examples of such demarcations can be found in all elements of the marketing mix and also in exaggerated distinctions between service and product marketing, international and domestic marketing, and between marketing planning and implementation. This exaggeratedly "dualist" approach to organizing our perceptions is also evident in a wide range of contemporary analyses of complex social phenomena and has generated critical attention from deconstructionists and post-modernists (Law, 1994) - but noticeably less so in the context of marketing. While providing a necessary simplification function for teaching and planning purposes, an aspect all too easily trivialized or overlooked by purists, the effect of these dualisms, demarcations or polarizations can also be to reduce the potential for more generic theory development through over-simplified and inflexible pigeon holing.
Perhaps the most axiomatic of these potentially distorting demarcations is that between organizational and consumer buyer behaviour, founded on the apparent assumption that consumers buy as wilful individuals while organizations purchase as a rational group. This distinction between "buying" and "purchasing" is itself indicative of the dichotomised approach and conceals a nest of implicit assumptions about the relative idiosyncrasy and professionalism of these behaviours. Why should we assume that separate theories are necessary to explain the exchange behaviour adopted by the same individual when placed in different contexts? Surely the differences that are observable between these contexts are more likely to be usefully conceptualised as differences of degree than of genus, especially so given the fundamental similarities within human choice-making, and the probability of cross-context learning processes. Furthermore, it can be argued that developments in customer sophistication and in information and communications technology (ICT), coupled with increasing competitive pressures amongst suppliers, have all served to erode whatever differences there may once have been between these contexts.
The paper argues that individual consumers purchase not only for themselves, in response to their own perceptions and wishes, but also collectively on behalf of others and under many powerful societal (i.e. organizational) influences. Furthermore, although organizational buyer behaviour theory is based largely on research into exceptional examples of purchasing (e.g. expensive or...