Sunday, March 1, 2009

Melaleuca Review - Exchange - Foundation of a Melaleuca Business

By Robbie Nodron

If exchange is the core theory of the discipline of marketing, what is the discipline's unit of measurement? The answer is a transaction. A transaction is made up of a trade of values between two individuals. We must be able to say A gives X to B and gets Y in return. Jones gives $400 to Smith and receives a television set. This is a typical monetary transaction, although transactions do not require money as one of the traded values.

A barter transaction would consist of Jones giving a refrigerator to Smith in return for a television set. A barter transaction can also consist of the trading of services instead of goods, as when lawyer Jones writes a will for physician Smith in return for a medical examination.

A transaction involves at least two items of value, conditions that are agreed to, a time of agreement, and a location of agreement. Usually a legal system evolves to support and enforce observance by the transactors. Transactions can easily give rise to support fights based on misunderstanding or malice. Without a law of contracts, people would approach transactions with some distrust, and everyone would lose.

Businesses keep track of their transactions and analyze them vigilantly. For example, sales analysis entails evaluating a company's sales transactions by product, customer, territory, and other precise variables.

A transaction fluctuates from a transfer. In a transfer, person A gives X to person B but receives nothing explicit in return. Transfers include gifts, subsides, and altruistic acts. It would seem that marketers should confine their study to transactions rather than transfers. However, transfer behavior can also be understood through the notion of exchange.

The transferrer furnishes a gift in the expectation of some benefit, such as a good feeling, relief from a sense of guilt, or the wish to put the other party under an obligation. Professional fundraisers are acutely aware of the "reciprocal" motives fundamental to donor behavior and try to present the benefits sought by the donors. If they ignore the donors or show no gratitude, they will soon lose the donors' support. As a result, marketers have recently expanded the concept of marketing to include the study of transfer behavior as well as transaction behavior.

In the larger sense, the marketer is seeking to bring about a response to some offer, and the response is not buying or trading in a narrow sense. A political candidate wants a response referred to as votes, a church wants a response referred to as joining, a social action group wants a response referred to as adopting the idea.

Marketing consists of actions undertaken to bring out a desired response from a targeted audience toward some object. Marketing goods and services on a worldwide scale can happen in an "engineered" way, but often it is as a result of good and meticulous planning. Transactions get executed quickly and for maximum value, regardless of location or market conditions.

About the Author:

No comments:

Post a Comment