Editorial

Citation

Jones, B. (2015), "Editorial", Journal of Historical Research in Marketing, Vol. 7 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/JHRM-09-2015-0035

Article Type: Editorial From: Journal of Historical Research in Marketing, Volume 7, Issue 4

This is likely the last conventional editorial you’ll read in JHRM or in any Emerald journal for that matter. Beginning in 2016, Emerald Publishing will make several changes to the publication scheduling of their journals that will affect, among other things, the nature and role of the editorial.

In recent years, reader behaviour has become primarily focussed on digital access, with journal content now overwhelmingly discovered at an article level as opposed to browsing of online or print issues. In the past, the editorial has often been used to draw together comment and often expand upon themes within an issue. Online readership and discovery of articles on an individual level has seen the more traditional editorial decline in impact and readership in recent years. [Is anyone actually reading this editorial, for example?] Instead of the conventional commentary on the contents of the issue which you will find below for this issue, the editorial may evolve into a less frequently published, longer review-type article focussing on current topics or themes in historical research in marketing. In anticipation of that likelihood, two of my earlier editorials dealing with the founding of JHRM and with what makes a good history article – have been linked on the JHRM home page under the heading “Editor Reflections”. Hopefully more of that will appear in the future.

The exception will be editorials for special issues which, for obvious reasons, do benefit from commentary by guest editors about the theme(s) in those issues. Thus, for special issues, we will continue to publish issue-specific editorials. We have two of those forthcoming in 2016 – Volume 8, Issue 1 on “The Cold War and Marketing” and Issue 3 featuring “Australian Marketing History”.

In this issue

This issue features seven full articles covering a wide range of topics, and also under the banner of Explorations & Insights section, there are two entries in our growing series on “Forgotten Classics”.

The history of marketing regulation is one of those topics that is underappreciated by marketing scholars, in general, and even by marketing historians, more specifically. With two of the leading scholars in that field on our editorial advisory board (Ross Petty and Andrew Pressey), JHRM has been and continues to be a rare source for such work. Both Petty and Pressey contribute to this issue. Pressey looks at the activities of the US Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly between 1957 and 1963 under the chairmanship of Senator Estes Kefauver, who broadened the committee’s original mandate – which was to examine pricing in the pharmaceuticals market – into a systematic critique of the marketing activities and practices of the entire American pharmaceutical industry. Estes Kefauver became the “man who managed your marketing”. And as Pressey notes, the hearings over which Kefauver presided were an important precursor to the consumer rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s. I may be wrong about this, but I believe that Ross Petty may be the only scholar anywhere with the title “Professor of Marketing Law”. In this issue, Petty provides a sweeping review of the history of advertising regulation, formal and informal, private and public, in the USA. It is the first comprehensive history of the US advertising regulation from the perspective of advertisers and consumers.

In “Basket to Shopping Bag: Retailers’ Role in the Transformation of Consumer Mobility in Sweden, 1941-1970”, Johan Hagberg and Daniel Normak describe the gradual transformation of consumer mobility in connection with the introduction of self-service retailing during the mid-twentieth century in Sweden. This article is an important contribution to the marketing history literature in at least two ways. It focuses on marketing history in Sweden about which we know too little. More specifically, it focuses on the history of consumer logistics which is also an understudied topic. Hagberg and Normak make use of actor-network theory in their analysis and include suggestions for its application to marketing history more generally.

Stefan Schwarzkopf examines the interface between market/consumer research and social research by re-examining the seminal Middletown studies by one of America’s earliest social researchers, Robert Staughton Lynd. Schwarzkopf uses archival data and a biographical approach to provide insights into the developments that led to publication of Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture, published in 1929, and Middletown in Transition: A Study in Cultural Conflicts, published in 1937. From Lynd’s work, important implications are drawn for critical consumer research and consumer culture theory today.

In “Charting Relationship Marketing Practice: It Really Didn’t Emerge in the 1970s”, Mark Tadajewski adds to his impressive body of work on the history of relationship marketing (RM) by examining the writings of several well-known merchant princes to unravel their business philosophies, comparing and contrasting those to well-accepted characteristics of RM. Tadajewski’s work challenges the received wisdom about just when RM became an important part of marketing and provides textbook authors with examples and a means of fundamentally revising the way they teach RM. This adds to what is now an impressive body of historical work that should, once and for all, move us beyond the myth that RM was an invention of the late twentieth century.

“The Beginnings of Motivation Research, 1934-1954” by Ron Fullerton is a prequel to his 2013 JHRM article (volume which focused on a later (1950s-1960s) era when motivation research (MR) was at its peak of popularity. In this article, Fullerton backfills that story by examining the origins of MR, especially through the early work of European depth psychology by Lazarsfeld and others in Vienna. Taken together, this article and Fullerton’s earlier one in 2013 (Volume 5, Issue 2) provide researchers with a fairly comprehensive look at the history of MR.

Roger Layton’s article “Marketing, Marketing Systems, and the Framing of Marketing History” argues for a broadening of historical studies of marketing by framing them in terms of marketing systems concepts and drawing on the logic of comparative historical analysis. This “Big History” view provides a valuable and much needed contribution. It draws together important contributions from a number of disciplines to help articulate and support this perspective, and it outlines more recent and important theoretical developments aimed at better understanding the dynamics and evolution of marketing systems, such as complex systems, analytical sociology and theories of processes, events and mechanisms.

Explorations & insights

JHRM does not publish and never has published traditional book reviews as are found in many other scholarly journals. It was originally a competitive decision, a move to try and differentiate JHRM from other history journals some of which publish more book reviews than original research. Instead, under the banner of “Explorations & Insights”, we publish invited commentaries that explore current issues in marketing history and the history of marketing thought and offer insights into those fields of work. More recently, as a part of our E&I section, we began to invite what we call historical review essays that feature classic, important marketing books that have nevertheless dropped out of our collective consciousness. They are forgotten classics in marketing. These essays are intended to highlight the historical importance and context of the books selected for review. To date, these have included E.T. Grether’s (1966) Marketing and Public Policy; Vaile, Grether and Cox’s (1952) Marketing in the American Economy; and Ralph Breyer’s (1934) The Marketing Institution. If your historical research in any way involves one of these important books, then you really must include in your reading the historical review essay. In this issue, we add to that collection with Fred Beard’s review of Earnest Elmo Calkins’ (1915) The Business of Advertising, and Tom Powers’ review of Ralph Starr Butler’s (1918) Marketing Methods, which is considered by some historians to be the first textbook about marketing.

Calkins was an influential figure in the development of the modern advertising agency and has been the subject of published biographical and autobiographical work. Advertising Age described Calkins as a “giant of creative advertising”. His beliefs about, and approaches to, market research, advertising campaign planning, branding, message strategy and creativity in advertising anticipated late twentieth-century practice and remain highly relevant today. Beard’s review argues the case for The Business of Advertising as a true classic and provides new insights into the book and its author.

Marketing Methods wasn’t just the first, or one of the very first, marketing textbooks. It has been hailed by historians of marketing thought, beginning with Robert Bartels as a seminal contribution to the marketing literature. As Powers notes, Butler’s book was the first to use the term “marketing” in its title and among the first to recognize that the whole of marketing was greater than the sum of its parts. Powers personalizes his review by discussing the role that Butler’s book played in a doctoral course on the history of marketing thought taken by Powers at Michigan State University. It reminded me of my own similar experience as a doctoral student and led me to wonder about what is missing from graduate education in marketing today.

Each of these historical review essays reminds us of the content and historical importance of these books and adds important biographical and historical context that should be useful to scholars whose research touches on the books and their authors. They also simply give us a good read about historically important and interesting subjects.

Brian Jones

Editor