奧爾德遜

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奧爾德遜（Wroe.Alderson）

　　奧爾德遜（Wroe.Alderson），50年代美國最偉大的Marketing理論家。營銷功能主義學派的創始人。

• 1953年：MIT教授

• 1959年：賓夕法尼亞大學教授

　　奧爾德遜的主要著作包括：

• 1957《市場營銷行動與經營行為》 (Marketing Behavior and Executive Action)60年代以前，最偉大、最系統的Marketing學術論著

• 1965《動態市場營銷活動》

• 基本方法：
  • 依據 Parsons 的功能主義，綜合分析市場營銷體系。即從經營者行為的角度把握市場營銷活動。

• 分析理論依據
  • 目的與資源（技術層面）：成功的條件與費用，即投入產出問題。
  • 經濟層面：多元目標與資源分配決策過程。
  • 權力層面：利益分配權的最大化（競爭與壟斷、差別化）。

Wroe Alderson (1928-1968) is widely recognized as the most important marketing theorist of the twentieth century^[1] and the “father of modern marketing”^[2].

Alderson’s academic training was at George Washington, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania. He served as president of the American Marketing Association and was highly active in The Institute of Management Sciences.

He began his business career at the U.S. department of Commerce, founded the internationally prominent marketing consulting firm of Alderson Associates, and served as a professor at Wharton University of Pennsylvania after joining it in 1959. While always deeply involved in the advancement of marketing science he also believed that theory and practice go hand in hand. This also suited his scientific method. From a methodological perspective, he emphasized inductive theorizing from market place events, providing a balanced to the neo-classical theories of firm behaviour^[3]. He also had the ability to communicate in the language of many disciplines and to bridge the business and academic communities^[4].

A significant element of his contribution to marketing thinking is his insistence upon an interdisciplinary approach, attracting the interest of scientists from other fields and borrowing from other disciplines such as psychology, philosophy and anthropology^[5].

He argued that firms are ecological systems that grow and adapt to change; each seeks its own niche based on organised behaviour systems: “All marketing activity is an aspect of the interaction among organized behavior systems related to each other in what may be described as an ecological network. Operating systems are a subclass of behavior systems, distinguished by inputs and outputs and the structuring of processes to achieve efficiency.

“The functionalist approach is concerned with the functioning of systems, and the study of structure is essential to the analysis and interpretations of functions. Every phase of marketing can be understood as human behavior within the framework of some operating system. Survival and growth are implicit goals of every behavior system, including most particularly those that operate in the market place.”^[6]

He also argued for heterogeneity of both supply and demand, introducing the ideas of market segmentation and niche marketing and the status of the brand. Increased product variety provides consumers with offerings nearer their ideal points. Firms can strive for differential advantage through product variety.

Amongst other accomplishments, he redefined the value-in-use concept as an alternative to the dominant value exchange theory, tracing it back through the ideas of Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas (the leading mediaeval theologian) and a variety of 17th, 18th and 19th century economists^[7]. Wroe Anderson also rejected the idea that different aspects of utility should be attributed to production and marketing[^[1].

Wroe Alderson many established the Annual Marketing Theory seminars, founded the Management Science Center at the University of Pennsylvania, and received the Pabst Award in 1944, Hall of Fame in Distribution in 1953, the Charles Coolidge Parlin Award in 1954, and the Paul D. Converse Award in 1955.

Marketing was once considered a trade. Wroe Alderson proved it was a science as well.

After beginning his career as a consultant, Alderson joined the Wharton faculty in 1959. He quickly became the leading marketing theorist of his time. Alderson saw that mathematical models and quantitative techniques could be used to research and analyze consumer taste, the size of advertising budgets and sales forces, and in distributing marketing messages across media — techniques that helped create the field of market research.

Wharton Marketing Professor Paul Green calls Wroe Alderson an “intellectual monarch of marketing research.” But Alderson, he affectionately adds, was a Quaker with little time for monarchies. Today Wharton’s Marketing faculty comprise the most cited department in the world.

Under Alderson’s leadership, Wharton began to build a more scientific basis for marketing research and became a major force in applying analytic models to marketing challenges. With a firm belief that theory and practice go hand in hand, Alderson wrote the book, Marketing Behavior and Executive Action, which focused on social science rather than institutional economics.

Alderson, with his young colleague Green, opened a Management Science Center at Wharton in 1962. He used the center as part of his MBA course in Marketing Management, giving his students a chance to act as consultants and to practice new techniques on real-world problems — now common practice in MBA education. Alderson also established Wharton’s Annual Marketing Theory seminars, served as Trustee of the Marketing Institute, and engineered the migration of the famed Operations Research group at Case Institute to Wharton in 1963.

“He carved a course through which marketing theory would develop, drawing in streams of research from other researchers and other disciplines, eroding and shaping the assumptions of marketing research, carving out an indelible path of the landscape of marketing,” wrote Terry Beckman of Queens University in a paper titled “The Wroe River: The Canyon Carved by Alderson.”