Authors: Kajsa Hulthén; Lars-Erik Gadde
‘Usually, upon hearing a mention of Wroe Alderson, the student of marketing feels vague stirrings in his mind of an almost mysterious notion known as sorting?’ (Hostiuck & Kurtz 1973, p. 141). This paper deals with this ‘mysterious’ notion of sorting, which we consider to be one of the most important and useful concepts in marketing. According to Alderson (1957) the whole marketing process is at bottom a process of sorting. The sorting concept has been used mainly to explain the creation of assortments in distribution channels in terms of ‘sorting out, allocation, assorting, and accumulation’. However, this is a partial interpretation only, because Aldersonian sorting is, in fact, a much richer concept. The aim of this paper is to illustrate the relevance of the sorting concept. We use sorting as a basis for the development of an analytical framework that can be used to better understand some of the recent developments in distribution channels for industrial goods. The framework is illustrated by examples from the distribution network in the PC industry. Finally, we provide some theoretical and practical conclusions and implications on the basis of our re-interpretation of sorting.
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Publish Year: 2003
Conference: Lugano, Switzerland (2003)