This is a fundamental question for marketing policy analysts and decision- makers. The extent of public interest in transactions internal to vertically integrated consumer goods industries is very limited. If the answer is yes to the question, then we must find out how to accommodate the consequences of industrialization in our information-reporting and analyses. As an aside to this theme, two propositions about the origin of industrialization have been made. That is, the industrial organization of global markets has promoted the development of horizontal scale- increasing mergers and alliances.
Industrialization is consumer-driven.
That is, to better serve the segmentation of domestic and global markets, vertical coordination structures are necessary to transmit consumer preferences upstream to the farm and to farm input suppliers. 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.