The Complete English Tradesman – business relations, trust, and honesty or ‘let’s rethink the history of relationship marketing’

Abstract

Purpose

This paper aims to provide a close reading of Daniel Defoe’s The Complete English Tradesman. It makes a case that many of the themes that Defoe engages with are consistent with later arguments offered by relationship marketing scholars.

Design/methodology/approach

This is a close reading of one of Defoe’s most popular texts, The Complete English Tradesman. It links this discussion with relationship marketing tenets.

Findings

Defoe pays considerable attention to key relational ideas, including the cultivation of a public perception of business honesty, the need to cater to customer requirements, treating the customer as the “idol” of the practitioner and undertaking a variety of actions to ensure that consumers trust the words and actions of the tradesman.

Practical implications

This paper highlights how ahistorical debates surrounding relationship marketing have been and calls for a return to the archives.

Originality/value

This paper supplements existing research that charts the implications for marketing thought of Defoe’s work, extending this via a juxtaposition of his writing with relational tenets.

Citation

Tadajewski, M. (2015), "The Complete English Tradesman – business relations, trust, and honesty or ‘let’s rethink the history of relationship marketing’", Journal of Historical Research in Marketing, Vol. 7 No. 3, pp. 407-422. https://doi.org/10.1108/JHRM-04-2015-0012