He served as president of the American Marketing Association and was highly active in The Institute of Management Sciences.

He began his business career at the U.S. department of Commerce, founded the internationally prominent marketing consulting firm of Alderson Associates, and served as a professor at Wharton University of Pennsylvania after joining it in 1959.

From a methodological perspective, he emphasized inductive theorizing from market place events, providing a balanced to the neo-classical theories of firm behaviour.

[4] A significant element of his contribution to marketing thinking is his insistence upon an interdisciplinary approach, attracting the interest of scientists from other fields and borrowing from other disciplines such as psychology, philosophy and anthropology.

Amongst other accomplishments, he redefined the value-in-use concept as an alternative to the dominant value exchange theory, tracing it back through the ideas of Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas (the leading mediaeval theologian) and a variety of 17th, 18th and 19th century economists.