Conceptualizing Personal Selling for International Business: A Continuum of Exchange Perspective |
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| Authors: | Alf H. Walle |
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| Affiliation: | Alf H. Walle (Ph.D. SUNY Buffalo) is a truly crossdisciplinary scholar with advanced degrees in Anthropology and English/Folklore as well as in Business. He is currently on the marketing faculty of the College of Business Administration, University of Akron. An active trade journalist and former magazine editor, he combines practitioner experience with scholarship. He has published in The Journal of Personal Selling and Sales Management, The Journal of Macromarketing, The Journal of Advertising, Akron Business and Economic Review, European Journal of Marketing, Journal of Consumer Marketing, Marketing News, and Carroll Business Bulletin, not to mention his continued contributions to other discplines in American Anthropologist, Journal of American Folklore, Journal of The Folklore Institute, Journal of Popular Culture, Journal of American Culture, Keystone Folklore, OHIO Reading Teacher, Technology Review, and Growth And Change. He has also appeared as a freelancer in popular magazines such as The Chicago Tribune Sunday Magazine, The California Horse Review, and the Courier Express Sunday Magazine. He has recently participated in a workshop held by the National Endowment of the Arts which sought to find ways of equitably marketing the arts, music, and crafts of traditional people to the larger, industrialized world. A lover of traditional music, Walle helped put on the 48th National Folk Festival held as part of the Statue of Liberty Centennial celebration in New York City in 1986. |
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| Abstract: | AbstractThe last twenty years has seen an extensive broadening of the terms “marketing” and “selling”. It is currently fashionable to consider marketing as exchange behavior, and selling to be personal “exchange facilitation” within any context. Justification for such all-encompassing definitions includes the fact that all cultures face certain prerequisites in order to survive: “marketing” and “selling” are means of satisfying them. Such paradigms increase the likelihood that we embrace ethnocentric perspectives and covertly equate various exchange situations which in reality are very different. When discussing selling and marketing, especially in the international arena, we must carefully guard against ethnocentrism and the distortion caused by such homogenizing tendencies. |
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