Marketing In The Land Of Hudson Bay Summary

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The Hudson’s Bay Company was in the business of trading European goods for furs with native Indians. Although it was a simple exchange of one good for other, it showed interesting patterns in terms of consumer behavior. The transaction also involved a series of marketing decisions on part of the Company in terms of which good to produce more, the price to be set for the goods, etc. This was primarily evident from the fact that the data on actual purchases which has been retrieved from the company archives. The article “Marketing in the Land of Hudson Bay: Indian Consumers and the Hudson’s Bay, 1670 -1770” by Ann M. Carlos and Frank D. Lewis shows how the good’s marketing characteristics like price, quantity, quality, etc. effected the volume …show more content…

Summary of Articles 1. The article “The consumption of Native Americans in the Eighteenth Century: Lessons from York Factory, Hudson Bay” by Ann M. Carlos and Frank D. Lewis aims at studying the economics behind the trade patterns of exchange of furs for European goods between native Indians and European manufacturers. The article studies the shift in the consumption patterns and how consumer buying behavior developed during the period. It states that the increased consumption of European goods was not a mere function of price by a complex function of determinants of demand which encouraged natives to forego leisure and produce more fur to buy more goods. The article examines the trade pattern in terms of percentage share of different kind of goods in the overall buying by natives and also states that even in that era the accounting system was very developed as is evident from the fact that the company used MB as a unit of price. In the section on “Gift-giving ad …show more content…

In the book “Commerce by a Frozen Sea: Native Americans and the European Fur trade”, authors Ann M. Carlos and Frank D. Lewis explore the social and economic behavior of the parties involved in the fur trade. The authors study how the Hudson’s Bay Company evolved, how native Indians behaved as consumers and the decline of Beaver hunting and industrialization. In chapter 3 of the book, the authors talk about how Indians were a replica of modern consumers who base their purchasing decisions on price, quality, quantity, availability of substitutes and finally their willingness to trade-off their leisure for more consumption goods. The authors analyze the use of alcohols in gift ceremonies to mark the opening of trade. They state that gifts were a mere gesture by the companies who aimed to transfer some of the overplus to the natives. Although they wished to get more trade in the particular good given as gift, it was seen from the data that gifts did not have any impact on increase in consumption pattern of a particular

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