Information and communication technology and marketing science: a long term perspective on evolving consumer behaviour

Wroe Alderson became a Wharton faculty member in 1959. There he founded the Management Science Center and wrote Marketing and the Computer. This paper picks up the marketing science strand of Alderson's intellectual legacy and reviews the insights and challenges presented by scanner data and, more recently, the impact of the Internet on purchasing and consumption. Almost all the leading work in these fields has been undertaken in North America. It is suggested that there is a need for systematic work to establish to what extent these results hold in other geographic and cultural settings as well as to study the impact of social networking and other virtual communities on consumer behaviour and consumption. It is suggested that a weakness of UK research in these fields is that it is piecemeal and small-scale. The UK National Clinical Research Network in medical research might be a model for co-ordinating largescale consumer behaviour research in the UK.