The Interdisciplinary Nature of Marketing

As a desipline, marketing is a late comer which is poised to control all the business and non business activities that are geared towards exchange transactions. It is essentially about people - their relationships their relationships with one another in other to satisfy needs.

Marketing is established itself as a full fledged discipline or body of knowledge as well as a department in organisations only recently. In some places and organizational set ups, it is even yet to be given it's deserved recognition.  In its ascension to recognition, marketing borrowed contributions from older established disciplines. Hence it's pervasive and adaptive nature.

Marketing is an interdisciplinary quasi-science like other business or management science, it takes its roots from economics which is social primarily concerned with how people organise scarce resources for production distribution and consumption purposes. The meaning of such basic concepts as demand supply, utility needs, prices and exchange are not far from those of economics. In its later development most especially since the adoption of morden marketing philosophy, marketing acquired some of the relevant contributions already made by such behavioural science as psychology, sociology, cultural anthropology and the quantitative techniques for application in its effort to better understand and satisfy the needs and wants of people. This has made marketing the host of multiple science.
 
 Psychology, the science concerned with how people think and learn, has contributed immensely towards enabling the market to have a better understanding of it's present and potential consumers' motives/needs, perception, learning, and attitudes disposition and experience,  among others.  Sociology, which is about how people socialize or realize or relate with one another, has contributed to the knowledge of marketing in areas of organizations, groups, social relationships their influence on people, and environment. Culture anthropology has greatly helped to enhance market's knowledge about man's development, costumers, artifacts, and beliefs which are very important determinates of people's consumption behavior. The quantitative techniques have lent to the marketing valuable knowledge which enables practitioners to better analyse consumers, conduct research, forecast the market, maintains stocks, and build  models which can help to simplify complex real situations in the market place,  among other things. All these other disciplines are much older than marketing.

     Marketing is a quasi (behaviour or social)science. It is a science because of it's systematic nature and application of the scientific method of investigation. It's principle and laws, prediction, like those of other behavioural science hold true for most people in most in most places and most of the time. But they are not rigid or perfect like the laws of the pure or natural sciences, such as chemistry and physics. This is as a result of the fact that the central subjects in marketing (people) are usually subject to changes which may fault the prediction made about them before the changes.