Editorial

Citation

Brian Jones, D.G. (2012), "Editorial", Journal of Historical Research in Marketing, Vol. 4 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/jhrm.2012.41204caa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Journal of Historical Research in Marketing, Volume 4, Issue 3

Our target market for authors as well as readers of JHRM is intended to include a fairly wide range of disciplines including history, business history, and of course, marketing – including all those with an interest in marketing history and/or the history of marketing ideas. Entire special issues of this Journal have been drawn from papers presented at the Business History Conference, the seminars of the Centre for History of Retailing and Distribution (CHORD), and at the biennial Conference on Historical Analysis & Research in Marketing (CHARM). The forthcoming special issue in November on “Marketing sport through the ages” had its origins in a session devoted to that topic at a recent Business History Conference. We expect to publish a special issue of JHRM on “Italian marketing history” that will be based to some extent on papers presented at CHARM in 2013. The full Call for Papers for that special issue is included herein. CHARM is officially affiliated with JHRM and has had close ties with JHRM since the founding of the Journal in 2007. Since it is now August and the deadline for submissions to the 2013 CHARM conference is approaching in December, I hope readers of JHRM as well as potential contributors will include in their research plans a submission to the 2013 CHARM being held in Copenhagen, Denmark, May 30-June 2. The 2013 CHARM will also feature its first doctoral workshop which immediately precedes the conference. The full Call for Papers, “Varieties, alternatives, and deviations in marketing history”, is included at the end of this issue.

In this issue

The history of branding has been curiously overlooked by marketing historians until fairly recently. Wilson Bastos and Sidney Levy contribute to this growing literature with their study of the origins, uses, and meanings of branding in “A history of the concept of branding: practice and theory”. Bastos and Levy draw from a fascinating range of published and unpublished sources to explain the origins of branding and describe the forces behind the evolution of branding from a simple activity with limited application to the more complex, multi-dimensional, multi-functional concept of branding we know today. They discuss the significance of sign and symbol in the meaning of branding and describe how burning was an essential activity in the origins of branding. The more recent evolution of modern branding was influenced by theorizing and research into branding, and by business practice. In fact, one of the distinctive characteristics of Bastos and Levy’s article is its focus on the multiple perspectives of practitioners, scholars, and consumers. Looking forward, the authors speculate on the impact of technology on branding, the relationship between human senses and branding, and the role of branding in the future.

In “The US advertising industry’s self-regulation of comparative advertising”, Fred Beard examines that industry’s efforts during the twentieth century to respond to the widespread adoption of comparative advertising. Beard draws from a sample of 640 trade journal articles to answer the following questions. When did calls for reform and regulation of comparative advertising appear? Why did they appear? Why did advertisers and industry observers believe that comparative advertising should be regulated, and what were the consequences of their self-regulation efforts? Beard describes an extraordinary conflict that unfolded during the twentieth century between the advertising industry, its self-regulators, and the Federal Trade Commission.

I am a strong believer in the value and virtues of farmers’ markets. And coincidentally enough, I’m also Canadian. Those two facts had nothing to do with our publication of the next article in this issue. Michael Basil’s study of the history of farmers’ markets in Canada examines the social, political and economic contexts that shaped the appearance, growth, decline, and then resurrection of farmers’ markets in Canada. Basil describes three eras in the evolution of farmers’ markets from the early 1800s through today. If I may be allowed a personal reflection, as a graduate student in Kingston, Ontario, I frequented the farmers’ market there which Basil describes as the first in Ontario tracing its origins to 1801. Ironically enough, my first academic appointment was in Kitchener-Waterloo where, as Basil describes, one of the oldest continuously operating farmers’ markets in Canada can still be found – as I frequently did in the late 1980s.

There are two essentials for life: food, and books! There’s my segue from Michael Basil’s history of farmers’ markets to Rob Banham’sfascinating study of “Occasional publishers: producing and marketing books in England, 1771-1884”. Banham uses extensive archival research of books and ephemera printed by the Gye and Balne families in Bath and London from the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as well as period newspapers, journals, and biographies of printers and publishers to describe some remarkably sophisticated marketing strategies in use before 1850 including market segmentation, advertising, direct mail, and personal selling. Each title printed by these occasional publishers was conceived and produced with a particular market in mind providing further evidence that “modern” marketing was not some revolution that occurred in America during the twentieth century. Banham’s article includes extensive illustrations of products and advertising sampled from the archival materials used in this study and they are interesting in their own right.

Explorations and insights

This is the first issue including an E&I under Mark Tadajewski’s editorial guidance and it deals with a topic about which Mark himself has written extensively – critical marketing studies (Ellis et al., 2011; Tadajewski 2010a, b, 2011; Tadajewski and Brownlie, 2008; Tadajewski et al., 2010; Tadajewski and Maclaran, 2009). In his introduction to this E&I, Mark argues that taking a critical perspective means asking why particular topics, concepts, and subject matter become important at certain points in time and what power relations and dynamics continue to affect our understanding of marketing. The function of history in critical marketing studies is that of providing contextualization and context is essential to a critical perspective. Mark offers a brief history of critical perspectives in marketing to demonstrate that marketing history and the history of marketing thought are characterized by complicated, power-laden dynamics. That theme provides the basis for Mark’s introduction of the invited commentaries by Nikhilesh Dholakia on “Finanzkapital and consumers: how financialization shaped twentieth century marketing”, and by Pauline Maclaran on “Marketing and feminism in historic perspective”.

D.G. Brian Jones