The Intangible Side of Agricultural Marketing: A Neglected Area of Research

Abstract

PUBLICLY supported research in agricultural marketing has been predominantly focussed upon the physical marketing functions: processing, transportation, storage, and related handling operations-their costs and ways to improve their efficiency. Being so focussed, its reports have built up a popular notion of marketing as being made up essentially of the performance of physical functions. Yet the intangible functions of pricing and guiding products to consumers in place, form, and time are at the very heart of marketing. Failure to recognize this has caused a distorted understanding of agricultural marketing, and has hampered research in an area where it is much needed. Important practical consequences flow from this neglect. The size and complexity of agricultural marketing is greatly underestimated in popular thinking, and credit is denied for essential services actually rendered by marketing agencies. The warped notion distorts popular understanding of the farm problem and hinders government programs to solve it. Such disadvantages offset much of the substantial benefits derived from the study of the physical side of agricultural marketing. Agricultural economists are increasingly aware of the importance of the intangible side of marketing, as evidenced especially by the widespread current interest in market structure research. Efforts in this direction, however, are hampered by the popular notion that agricultural marketing consists almost entirely of physical functions, with the corollary that other analysis is merely an extension of current research. So the popular notion should be corrected by pointing out that agricultural marketing has also an intangible side, even more essential than the physical side and significantly different. This paper contends that the intangible functions are the heart of agricultural marketing, stemming from the transfer of ownership which is part of specialized production under private ownership, and differing significantly from the physical functions. It is a distinct field for research. The paper argues that the physical functions were attacked first in public research because they were easier to describe and analyze; then they continued to be stressed in the reports of that research. The major dis-