Origins of marketing thought in Britain
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to document contributions to the early study and teaching of marketing at one of the first universities in Britain to do so and, in that way, to contribute to the literature about the history of marketing thought. Given that the first university business program in Britain was started in 1902, at about the same time as the earliest business programs in America, the more specific purpose of this paper was to explore whether or not the same influences were shared by pioneer marketing educators on both sides of the Atlantic.
Design/methodology/approach
An historical method is used including a biographical approach. Primary source materials included unpublished correspondence (letterbooks), lecture notes, seminar minute-books, course syllabi and exams, minutes of senate and faculty meetings, university calendars and other unpublished documents in the William James Ashley Papers at the University of Birmingham.
Findings
The contributions of William James Ashley and the Commerce Program at the University of Birmingham to the early twentieth-century study and teaching of marketing are documented. Drawing from influences similar to those on pioneer American marketing scholars, Ashley used an historical, inductive, descriptive approach to study and teach marketing as part of what he called “business economics”. Beginning in 1902, Ashley taught his students about a relatively wide range of marketing strategy decisions focusing mostly on channels of distribution and the functions performed by channel intermediaries. His teaching and the research of his students share much with the early twentieth-century commodity, institutional and functional approaches that dominated American marketing thought.
Research limitations/implications
William James Ashley was only one scholar and the Commerce Program at the University of Birmingham was only one, although widely acknowledged as the first, of a few early twentieth-century British university programs in business. This justifies future research into the possible contributions to marketing knowledge made by other programs such as those at the University of Manchester (1903), University of Liverpool (1910) and University of London (1919).
Originality/value
This paper adds an important chapter to the history of marketing thought which has been dominated by American pioneer scholars, courses, literature and ideas.
Keywords
Citation
Jones, B. and Tadajewski, M. (2015), "Origins of marketing thought in Britain", European Journal of Marketing, Vol. 49 No. 7/8, pp. 1016-1039. https://doi.org/10.1108/EJM-07-2014-0407
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2015, Emerald Group Publishing Limited