Regardless of whether one or both of these propositions is valid, it is important to remember that this trend is endogenous to the marketing system . If marketing policy analysts are uncomfortable with this trend or cannot cope with it, then we need new tools in the analytic toolbox, not intervention to redress it. The received wisdom for the past two days is that the former is bad and the latter is good. This is far too facile. The rent-earning human and organizational capital that was invested by the alliance may have zero salvage value after this intervention.
Globalization means that marketing research is really competitiveness research.
If competitiveness in global markets is now of paramount importance because of the loss of national sovereignty and the globalization of agri-food markets, then marketing research and marketing policy are, respectively, competitiveness research and competitiveness policy. If this is so, then there is a huge problem that faces us. There is no coherent conceptual, methodological, and policy approach to competitiveness to replace the current ad hoc approaches. We don't even have a definition of competitiveness that is universally accepted. See the proceedings of the 1992 International Agricultural Trade Research Consortium for a bewildering list of definitions and rationalizations.