Page 24 - The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

What Is Social Marketing? 17

definition and boundaries of marketing would become less precise and
would lead to “possible counter-incursions by economists, sociologists
and management scientists” (Enis, 1973).
Scholars who were for and against the broadened definition agreed that
the very essence of marketing was “the exchange,” as Kotler (1978) and
Shaw and Jones (2005) noted. Traditional marketing theorists such as
Wroe Alderson (1959) had set this forth as essential. The exchange, of
course, was a central element of the Kotler/Levy conception. Exchanges
happen when there are at least two parties, each having something of value
to the other, who are able to communicate and able and willing to accept
the transaction. Later scholars, such as Richard Bagozzi (1975, 1978),
agreed but sought to rethink the concept itself as allowing multiparty ex-
changes where one or more of the parties could be a nonprofit or social
entity. Bagozzi also proposed that exchanges could involve elements other
than economic components—such as products, services, and payments—
and could also include beliefs, feelings, and opinions. It could be argued
that this approach was consistent with Kotler and Levy’s original defini-
tion, which stated that broadened marketing included the “acceptability of
social ideas.”
Extending the components of an exchange, while seeming to support
the broadening movement, had the effect of highlighting a fundamental
challenge. Indeed, Enis (1973) suggested that there were three counterar-
guments to the Kotler/Levy definition of the field’s boundaries. The first, as
noted, is that the broadened approach minimizes marketing’s origins and
strengths in traditional commercial exchanges and that other disciplines
have their own exchanges to study—bribery by political scientists, loaning
money by finance scholars, and so on. Enis’s second argument is that the
“primary function” of an activity should determine its field. Thus, a suitor
seeking a marriage exchange is not involved in an economic enterprise—
although the transaction has economic implications—and would not be
carrying out a marketing activity. Third, there are “transactions” where the
exchange is not clear, such as an evangelist’s request for donations—what
exactly is offered in return? Enis is rather accepting of a wide range of ap-
plications as long as the marketing perspective is “useful.” He proposed
that a useful framework for evaluating ways a field may be broadened is
to ask whether it should apply to exchanges involving the following
elements:

• Economic goods and services or anything of value
• Profit payoff or other desirable outcomes
• Customers or other publics