New Perspectives on Marketing Systems: An investigation of growth, power, social mechanisms, structure and history

Abstract

How do marketing systems, which are often driven to grow over time, respond when their growth is limited? Barriers to growth can be endogenous in the form of a sustainability imperative or they may be exogenous to the system, such as legislation regulating commercial activity. Thus, actions in the adjacent and complementary systems at the micro, meso and macro level are critical to consider. These issues are all to be found in the focal case study of this thesis, the whale shark marketing system of Ningaloo. The first aim of this thesis is to explore how the Mechanisms Action Structure (MAS) Theory can explain these issues, using a range of empirical examples. MAS Theory is distinguished from its counterparts because it views marketing systems as interdependent and evolving. This thesis illustrates the combined influence of a marketing systems structure, functioning, the associated action fields and generating social mechanisms that shape and continue to form a marketing system in an ongoing process. To understand present day there needs to be consideration of how the system has evolved over time. The past has a significant impact on the structure, functioning and values of a contemporary marketing system. In order to advance the marketing literature there needs to be theoretically informed studies of the history of specific marketing systems. History is not simply background; the concept path dependency, shows us how the past and sequencing of events creates self-reinforcing processes that narrow future possibilities. A secondary purpose of this thesis is to make the influence of history explicit and present a generalizable, theoretically informed framework to study how causal dynamics interact over time. Empirical analysis revealed that MAS Theory alone was insufficient to study the specific marketing system explored, since it involves a common pool resource, where property rights differ from private goods. The associated action field must deal with a growth barrier that in turn influences the structure and function of the linked marketing system. The third aim of this thesis is to extend MAS Theory and enrich its capability to study marketing systems involving a common pool resource.