The Japanese have done less in the field of marketing geography than have their colleagues in the United States. Certain of the more important recent works in the marketing field in the United States are published by D. A. Revzan, J. E. Vance, Jr, and D. F. Mulvihill and R. C. Mulvihill, but without any attempt at systematic coverage.
Originally, economic geography consists of the fields of primary production, manufacturing, marketing and transportation. The well-developed fields of economic geography are concerned with the production of material goods. However, production represents only one side of economic activities. For those geographers who view the core of geography as primary the analysis of spatial connections and interactions, the study of marketing and, in broader sense, of spatial structure and pattern of distribution of goods is of crucial importance. In view of the obvious importance of marketing to geography, it is surprising how little work concerning it has been done by geographers, and marketing has until recently been considered by geographers as hardly more than incidental to the various topics concerned with material production.
The field of marketing geography is undergoing a new development, although it is still in the stage of seeking the most effective procedures for carrying out geographic analyses and for arriving at useful concepts of spatial association and interactions.
Studies in various aspects of marketing geography are undertaken for a number of different objectives. Goods must not only be transported from the areas of production to those of consumption, but they also must be transferred from the hands of producers, by collection and subsequent distribution, into the hands of consumers. That is to say, many products used by industry are sold directly. Most goods, however, follow a less direct course of distribution and go through several channels before reaching consumer. Thus, marketing geography is concerned with the delimitation and measurement of markets and with the channels of distribution through which goods move from producer to consumer. In order to analyse the structure and pattern of distribution of goods, it is necessary to find some way of measuring the flow of traffic, including its volume of movement, its origin and destination, and the channels of distribution and its whole link. In the study of channels of distribution that perform functions in transfer of goods and services from producer to consumer, the market geographer is primary concerned with the location of these channels, and he determines the trading areas served by the various channels. As some of urban functions are devoted to the structures of wholesale and retail trade, the various cities with the complex channels of distribution and their trading and selling areas can be considered as forming a hierarchy of nodal regions of different ranks.
Thus, some of problems that need to be investigated are discussed under four heads:
1) Spatial analysis of respective traffic flow of goods.
2) Delineating of trading and selling areas of wholesaling.
3) Comparative study of cities with various channels of circulation of goods.
4) Analysis of a hierarchy of ranks of cities, viewed from the function of channels of distribution.
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