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The purpose of this paper is to explore the value of oral history for marketing historians and provide case studies from projects in the Australian context to demonstrate its utility. These case studies are framed within a theme of market research and its historical development in two industries: advertising and retail property.

This study examines oral histories from two marketing history projects. The first, a study of the advertising industry, examines the globalisation of the advertising agency in Australia over the period spanning the 1950s to the 1980s, through 120 interviews. The second, a history of the retail property industry in Australia, included 25 interviews with executives from Australia’s largest retail property firms whose careers spanned from the mid-1960s through to the present day.

The research demonstrates that oral histories provide a valuable entry port through which histories of marketing, shifts in approaches to market research and changing attitudes within industries can be examined. Interviews provided insights into firm culture and practices; demonstrated the variability of individual approaches within firms and across industries; created a record of the ways that market research has been conducted over time; and revealed the ways that some experienced operators continued to rely on traditional practices despite technological advances in research methods.

Despite their ubiquity, both the advertising and retail property industries in Australia have received limited scholarly attention. Recent scholarship is redressing this gap, but more needs to be understood about the inner workings of firms in an historical context. Oral histories provide an avenue for developing such understandings. The paper also contributes to broader debates about the role of oral history in business and marketing history.

This study focuses on the marketing strategies of the two most successful discount department store chains in Australia between 1969 and the late 1980s when consumer acceptance of both brand and format were being determined. It examines how they approached marketing a new-format national retail chain to the Big Middle of the market and the ways in which brands were differentiated.

Archival sources and oral histories provide evidence about the marketing strategies of each firm. These are integrated with press coverage, advertising and promotional activity to analyze marketing programs. Consumer research from the time offers insights into the effectiveness of campaigns.

The Coles and Myer retailing firms pursued similar marketing strategies to encourage adoption of their Kmart and Target discount department store chains, educating consumers about the links between their operational efficiencies and lower prices. Both firms not only formulated national standardized marketing strategies but also differentiated their positioning to maximize their appeal to consumers.

This article expands understandings of the ways in which new national retail chains are developed and marketed. It explores the intersection between public relations material and media coverage and the ways in which existing brands can be leveraged to legitimize new formats and encourage adoption. More broadly, it contributes to a literature on the “Big Middle”, a space occupied by dominant, volume-oriented retailers. In doing so, it demonstrates that foreign adopters can draw on Big Middle retail formats to quickly gain access to large population segments in their home markets.

This paper aims to join a growing movement in marketing history to include the voices of consumers in historical research on retail environments. It aims to show that consumer perspectives offer new insights to the emergence and reception of large-scale, pre-planned shopping centers in Australia during the 1960s, and allow one to write a history of this retail form from below, in contrast to the top-down approach that is characteristic of the broader literature on shopping mall development.

Written testimonies by consumers were gathered using a qualitative online questionnaire. The methodology is related to oral history, in that it seeks to capture the subjective experiences of participants, has the capacity to create new archives, to fill or explain gaps in existing repositories and provide a voice to those frequently lost to the historical record.

The written testimonies gathered for this project provide an important contribution to the understanding of shopping centers in Australia and, particularly Sydney, during the 1960s, the ways that they were envisaged and used and insights into their reception and success.

As with oral history, written testimony has limitations as a methodology due to its reliance on memory, requiring both sophisticated and cautious readings of the data.

The methodology used in this paper is unique in this context and provides new understandings of Australian retail property development. For current marketers, the historically constituted relationship between people and place offers potential for community targeted promotional campaigns.

The purpose of this article is to introduce the theme of this special issue. In doing so, the paper argues that marketing historical research is in need of a paradigmatic shift. Rather than privilege primary and secondary sources that preserve the perspectives and actions of corporate managers and of marketing academics, marketing historians need to open the historical narratives they construct much more than before to the experiences and voices of ordinary consumers, i.e. of those who actually shop and buy and choose. They also need to do more to incorporate into their narratives examples of the value-creation that consumers themselves enact, both inside and outside the sphere of the market.

By reviewing the state of the marketing historical literature, this paper introduces the “History from Below” school of historical thought into marketing historical research. It also tests to what extent a stronger consumer focus might be able to enrich historical research in marketing.

Although contemporary marketing historiography is characterized by a richness of themes and methodological approaches, there is still a marked difference between the way marketing academics and historians write the history of marketing and consumption. While, surprisingly, the former often tend to ignore the voices of ordinary consumers, the latter often lack the marketing-related “technical” knowledge to fully understand the significance of specific archival sources they discuss. This means that a genuine “People’s History of Marketing” has yet to be written.

Findings from the paper will be of value to marketing historians who wish to expand the scope and agenda of their research and help historical research move away from narrow managerial perspectives and other “privileged” accounts of marketing.

This paper makes two original contributions. First, it introduces historiographical innovations associated with “History from Below” (social history) into marketing historical scholarship. Second, it attempts to help marketing historians identify alternative sets of primary and secondary sources, e.g. oral history archives, which would allow them to be much more optimistic about their own ability to reconstruct the perspectives of those whose voices are all too often ignored.

Twenty-first century education has been reconfigured to keep up with growing societal shifts in an effort to support a wide variety of learners. As changes occur, the workload for teachers continues to expand with little to no support and resources within classroom spaces to keep up with the current times. Post pandemic, the expectations and systems have shifted emphasizing the need for more programming around social emotional learning and systems to help mitigate the learning disruption. The insurmountable pressure placed on teachers has led to a robust and persistent departure of the profession causing the entire education system to rethink the policies, structures, and systems that influence teacher burnout.

A significant proportion of corporate real estate tends to be owned by corporate occupiers for historic reasons. This may be as a result of financial planning, the use of property as a hedge against inflation or the chance of capital gains from property redevelopment. Very often, however, property has accumulated through pure inertia or lack of management focus. Consequently, for many companies, real estate is not adding shareholder value and it is perceived to be ‘an operational pain’. This paper focuses on how corporate occupiers can manage the contribution their operational properties make to shareholder value.

Health anxiety is a multidimensional trait characterized by a predominant fear of having a serious illness. This study aims to examine the impact of somatosensory amplification on health anxiety and explores the mediating role of metacognitive beliefs.

Participants (n = 307) were recruited online from university students to complete the measures of health anxiety (C-HAQ), metacognitive beliefs (MCQ-HA) and somatosensory amplification (SSAS).

The results suggest that somatosensory amplification is a significant predictor of health anxiety. Each of the three dimensions of metacognition partially mediated the effect of somatosensory amplification on health anxiety. In the parallel mediation model, two metacognitive beliefs partially mediated the relationship between somatosensory amplification and health anxiety, while the mediation effect of biased thinking beliefs did not reach significance. In summary, individuals with a higher tendency toward somatosensory amplification exhibit more health anxiety-related metacognitions and subsequently experience higher levels of health anxiety, supporting the Self-Regulatory Executive Function (S-REF) model.

This study validates the importance of metacognition in the maintenance and development of health anxiety, demonstrating the utility of metacognitive therapy for individuals experiencing health anxiety.