The Routledge Companion to Marketing History

D.G. Brian Jones, Mark Tadajewski, D.G. Brian Jones, Mark Tadajewski

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781134688753
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

The Routledge Companion to Marketing History is the first collection of readings that surveys the broader field of marketing history, including the key activities and practices in the marketing process.

With contributors from leading international scholars working in marketing history, this companion provides nine country-specific histories of marketing practice as well as a broad analysis of the field, including: the histories of advertising, retailing, channels of distribution, product design and branding, pricing strategies, and consumption behavior. While other collections have provided an overview of the history of marketing thought, this is the first of its kind to do so from the perspective of companies, industries, and even whole economies.

The Routledge Companion to Marketing History ranges across many countries and industries, engaging in substantive detail with marketing practices as they were performed in a variety of historical periods extending back to ancient times. It is not to be missed by any historian or student of business.

1 The history of marketing practice

DOI: 10.4324/9781315882857-1

Mark Tadajewski and D.G. Brian Jones

Over the past 30 years, interest in the history of marketing has grown substantially. There have been many major contributions that have sought to highlight the origins of key concepts, theories, ideas, scholarly biographies and schools of thought (e.g. Jones, 2012; Jones and Tadajewski, 2011; Shaw and Jones, 2005; Tadajewski and Jones, 2008; see also the Journal of Historical Research in Marketing special issue on the evolution of key concepts, 2012). This body of scholarship cuts to the heart of marketing theory, often in a deeply critical fashion, arguing against current received wisdom regarding the emergence of the marketing concept, relationship marketing, market research, market segmentation, and self-service retailing to name just a few of the areas that have been contested by marketing historians (e.g. Cochoy, 2016; Fullerton, forthcoming).

We are, in short, a discipline that has moved on considerably from the days when Fullerton (1987, 1988) could argue that marketing was ahistorical. We are now rich with historical reflection. Whether this permeates mainstream marketing research and study is, however, questionable and it does seem as if marketing scholars are wilfully ignorant of their historical antecedents ( Jones and Richardson, 2007). The same can be said of other disciplines, of course, and there are many reasons for this. These include the turn towards the behavioural sciences of the 1950s and 1960s which marginalized historical study (Tadajewski and Jones, 2014); the desperate desire of scholars to make claims of originality through the neglect of their historical forebears (Tadajewski and Saren, 2009); limited academic attention spans that consider only literature produced in the last ten years to be worthy of merit, as well as possibly more understandable pressures to ‘publish or perish’ which encourage turning out ‘quick and dirty’ research. Historical research scarcely falls into the latter category and thus slips off the academic radars of those under pressure to perform in the various research assessment exercises that dominate our intellectual landscape.

Certainly, the idea that marketing history (i.e. the study of the history of marketing practice) and knowledge of the history of marketing thought (i.e. studying the conceptual and theoretical basis of many of our key ideas and traditions) should merit our attention is easy to justify. By not knowing our history we are probably going to repeat mistakes that our predecessors tackled and overcame (Jones and Shaw, 2002). Clearly, not knowing our history does have (dys)functional benefits. It enables the repackaging of ideas that have long been practised. It helps us cast our predecessors as working in intellectual and practical dark ages before the wisdom of the marketing concept lit their lives with the beacon of customer-centricity (Jones and Richardson, 2007).

If we were being charitable, we might say that this is a function of a lack of exploration of the history of marketing practice (Strasser, 1989). That is, the history of the actual activities of marketers, advertisers, retailers, wholesalers, market researchers and so forth in the marketplace, rather than just theoretical ruminations on what they should do. Rarely have scholars sought to focus their energies on the history of marketing practice as an object of attention in its own right, unravelling what has been done by practitioners from the origins of marketing in the ancient and medieval world all the way through to the present day. This was the task we set ourselves as editors. But we wanted to go beyond a contribution to the history of marketing practice. The history of marketing literature is still overwhelmingly dominated by US voices in terms of the companies being studied and the location that forms the historical, social, political, economic and technological backdrop for the mass of literature currently available. There have, naturally enough, been exceptions to this statement and some of this material has been of extremely high quality (e.g. Fullerton, 1988, 1990). Generally speaking, though, we wanted to look beyond the borders of the United States to examine other countries’ experiences of the development of marketing practice. We hope that this volume makes a first movement in that direction, but we are acutely aware that more research needs to be done.

Our first chapter is provided by one of the most active contributors to the history of marketing practice as well as thought. Eric Shaw is uniquely positioned to write about ancient and medieval marketing practice by virtue of his distinctive record of publications on this topic. Specifically, Shaw argues that we need to look back to the origins of humanity and explore the use of bartering by Neanderthal man. Subsequently he turns his attention to surveying the role of marketing in antiquity, notably ancient Greece. There were various reasons for the emergence of markets, he suggests. One of the most important was the development and use of coinage. With exchangeable currency people no longer had to engage in long (bartering) negotiations about what items they were going to exchange and whether their value was commensurate.

Charting the history of the move from bartering to marketing, Shaw offers us close readings of philosophical tracts, biblical accounts and a wealth of business history and economics writings. As he illuminates, the development of marketing was contingent on a variety of factors including the division of labour as well as retailers operating in specific locations. From the medieval period, he outlines the growth of trade fairs, the development and usage of new financial methods for enabling transactions, and the power of the guilds. Marketing practice, for Shaw, has a history that spans at least 40,000 years.

Terry Witkowski telescopes us slightly closer to the present, moving us from Europe to the United States in the seventeenth century. Witkowski's chapter represents an impressive attempt to document a vast range of scholarship dealing with the history of consumption. In doing so, he encourages us to think differently about a number of areas, most notably with respect to the impact of gender on consumption habits, particularly shopping. This is an important historical review for those interested in consumer behaviour as well as those aligned with Consumer Culture Theory inasmuch as it engages with topics like the meanings associated with consumption, how consumption practice has historically been stratified by gender (and not necessarily in the way we would anticipate), and consumer reactions to consumption that historicize recent debates around anti-consumption, consumer resistance and regulatory control.

What is interesting about Witkowski's chapter, like several other contributions to this volume (e.g. Tamilia, Chapter 10; Gao, Chapter 19; Sreekumar and Varman, Chapter 21), is that it underscores that globalization is not necessarily the recent phenomenon that we would ordinarily assume. Some consumers of the seventeenth century were able to access global flows of products, often sourcing desirable items produced by British colonies for their households. This was particularly the case with the wealthy. Complementing this focus on global consumption flows, Witkowski examines the growth of retailing in the US, the rise of credit and the sexual segmentation of household labour. In the eighteenth century, for example, women were not necessarily most closely involved with retail purchases. Men might be more frequent buyers because they were able to access credit with provincial retailers.

But lest we think that those living in the eighteenth century were experiencing a consumerist dream, Witkowski does underscore that for many their possessions were quite modest. This underwent some degree of change in the nineteenth century with the growth of interest in outfitting the home in a manner consistent with the cultural valorization of gentility, accelerating further with the rise of the debates around the ‘leisure class’ (Veblen, 1899/1912) and the normative structuring of consumption (e.g. Tadajewski, 2013a). Importantly, the growth of consumption spurred a reaction: the growth in anti-consumption discourse which can be traced from the mid to late eighteenth century, spiking in the early twentieth century, and gaining ground today (Higgins and Tadajewski, 2002). Consumption and politics are not separate spheres of life, Witkowski points out. They implicate and imbricate.

Taking up the marketing practice gauntlet in the late nineteenth century, Stefan Schwarzkopf engages with a key conduit in the development, extension and proliferation of marketing practice, namely the market research industry. This industry became especially vital with the growth of the national market in the United States. What this basically meant in practical terms was that the producer and consumer were frequently far distant from each other. It was no longer the case that a manufacturer sold only to those in a fairly local area and could by dint of cultural socialization understand what the market would or would not clear. Some mechanism needed to be used to provide producers and retailers with the ‘voice of the customer’ and into this breach strode the market research industry (Tadajewski, 2009a).

Schwarzkopf points out that we should not consider market and consumer research the invention of American pioneers. The narrative is much more complicated than this. Many scholars have argued that the Second World War, the rise of Nazism and the Transatlantic movements (in both directions) of scholars and practitioners helped foster new concepts of the consumer as well as new methodological tools with which to probe their consciousness (e.g. Tadajewski, 2006). Less well known is the narrative that Schwarzkopf bases his discussion upon when he tracks the origins of market research within the broader orbit of the social sciences, especially more activist streams of social research that sought to engage with the problems accompanying industrialization such as poverty and social dislocation. Some of these engagements provided fertile ground for the development of survey methods and sampling techniques which found their way into United Kingdom-based market research during the first half of the twentieth century. Similar themes thread through the development of the industry on the US side of the Atlantic.

Illuminating the early history of market research, Schwarzkopf discusses the roles of a number of prominent applied psychologists who were notable contributors to early debates about advertising attraction, effectiveness and efficiency, plying their trade within scholarly circles, seeking funding from industry, and keen to articulate how they could contribute to managerial, profit-driven agendas. He underscores the important contributions made by advertising agencies in studying the consumer marketplace, the pioneering efforts of Charles Coolidge Parlin (see also Ward, 2009, 2010) in explicating the markets for a huge range of offerings and industries, as well as the novel methodological strategies employed by Parlin and his team.

Some of the narrative threads that follow will be familiar to those with a keen interest in the history of market research, especially the prominent position accorded to academic entrepreneurs like Paul Lazarsfeld (e.g. Fullerton, 1990), highly successful practitioners like Herta Herzog and Ernest Dichter (e.g. Tadajewski, 2006), as well as the role played by Social Research Incorporated in advancing our knowledge of brands, consumer-brand relations, symbolism (e.g. Levy, 2003, 2012), and ideas related to the extended self that would be picked up by influential consumer researchers (see Ladik et al., 2015). For those interested in non-US-based contributions to marketing research practice, Schwarzkopf delves deeply into the history of German marketing research.

Usefully, he explores the emergence and application of a number of frequently invoked methodological tools used within industry, including panels, focus groups, market simulations, then turning his analytic attention to the role of key actors within the research service sector as a whole. Importantly, he articulates future directions for historical research, stressing that too much scholarship to date has paid attention to the market research industry itself, without exploring consumer reactions to industry initiatives. The danger of this is that such narratives often appear quite deterministic, stressing marketer power without factoring in consumer agency to resist marketer interventions – as Witkowski's chapter highlights very clearly, the consumer is not a passive target for marketing activities.

Our next contribution can be read as a response to a narrative that features all too prominently in marketing textbooks and journal articles on segmentation, namely that it was only truly appreciated in 1956 when a paper on the topic appeared in the flagship marketing outlet, the Journal of Marketing (Smith, 1956). This, clearly, is a seriously misleading argument which neglects to register the acuity of marketing practitioners who have – for a very considerable time – appreciated the need to segment the market and differentiate their offerings accordingly if they were to produce goods likely to satisfy the ultimate consumer.

There are many ways, Ronald Fullerton asserts, that the 1956 ‘origin’ narrative can be deflated. We could turn to the fact that there were books dealing with the topic of segmentation in the 1920s. Alternatively, we could look closely at industry practice. The eighteenth century, for instance, reveals that British industrialists appreciated that the needs of their audience were often markedly different, most obviously in terms of income. Selling products at different price points simply made good business sense and was practised by many clothing producers and retailers. Josiah Wedgwood, likewise, was attentive to the need to target market his offerings, paying attention to the influence of the gentry as conduits for fashion and patronage. He was absolutely aware that different national markets had divergent ideas about what was desirable, fashionable and cutting edge. This required product modification in line with consumer sensibilities. As if this were not enough evidence to persuade us that marketing practitioners were engaged in market segmentation, Fullerton provides illustrations from a number of different industrial contexts – gun production, fountain pen manufacture, bicycle production and, in most detail, the book publishing trade – to firmly consign to the trash can of history the idea that segmentation is only a twentieth-century phenomenon.

Branding, roughly speaking, is concerned with the linkage of a name, sign, identifying mark or symbol with a product offering. It serves as a shortcut for consumers, enabling them to identify the products and services that have satisfied in the past, easily and quickly. For brand owners, it helps them cultivate a stream of revenue that is associated with their specific product. They do this by crafting a constellation of meanings around an item that are valued by the customer. Diving into this topic, Ross Petty provides a highly innovative and timely contribution to debates dealing with brand identity, the legal protections available to brand owners, and a historical overview of the development of branding back to antiquity. It thus complements Eric Shaw's chapter in terms of providing the interested reader with appropriate citations to studies which engage with the development of branding many thousands of years ago.

Antiquity is not, however, Petty's focus. His interest is directed to the development of trademark, branding and brand protection from the 1500s onwards, ending in the middle of the twentieth century, but even so offering valuable guidance about contemporary research to take the narrative through to the present day. We should note that he is attentive to the conceptual evolution of these terms, illuminating the conceptual dynamics from trademark to brand over the course of his contribution. This is worthy of consideration in its own right.

Petty's scholarship is first rate. He excavates the contents and themes of court cases dealing with trademark infringement, moving on to the nineteenth century and the steady growth in the use of imagery and naming to identify products as well as the court system to contest trademark infringement. Impressively, his chapter ranges across the world, engaging with trademark law and protection in the US as well as Europe...