Comments on Roger Layton's “There could be more to marketing than you might have thought!”

• Published in: Australasian marketing journal Vol. 24; no. 3; pp. 250 - 251
• Main Author: Mittelstaedt, Robert A.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Elsevier Ltd 01.08.2016; Sage Publications Ltd
• Subjects: Climate change; Layton, Roger A; Marketing; Philosophy; Writers; Australia
• ISSN: 1441-3582; 1839-3349; 1839-3349
• DOI: 10.1016/j.ausmj.2016.08.007

Roger Layton is to be commended for his call for a repositioning of the discipline of marketing. As marketing scholars they have always been borrowers, but they have much to contribute and the time has come to explore ways for intellectual interchange with other disciplines as partners. To be fruitful, interchange must involve commonalities -- commonalities of phenomena of interest, of concepts and of basic philosophy. With respect to phenomena, it is apparent that no two disciplines can concern themselves with exactly the same phenomena of interest, so whether or not there are potential commonalities depends on how one defines the phenomena. At first glance the commonalities may not appear obvious; the units of analysis are quite different. But ecology, like marketing, is concerned with the interactions among units existing in the same environment with access to the same set of resources.