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The purpose of this paper is to review and synthesise some of the main contributions of Donald F. Dixon to marketing theory and the history of marketing thought.

Personal experience, as well as a review of the major papers and the book Dixon co‐authored are used to highlight the development of his thought and contributions.

Dixon championed a broad hierarchical systems approach to understanding marketing and was able to identify the origins of concepts and ideas in history in a way that showed his depth of scholarship, the deep intellectual history of marketing thought and the misrepresenting of earlier theories that are present in some modern writings.

Dixon's contributions are of major importance but not well known in marketing. It brings together some of his major contributions and indicates their value.

The author sets out to achieve a better measurement of interorganisational power in distribution channels.

In the mid-1990s, market demands for around-the-clock (24/7) banking and financial transacting began to converge with advances in internet-based technologies. This confluence of forces gave rise to the birth of internet banking. Building upon the relevant literature, this paper aims to develop a set of propositions to address the following questions: what brand strategy or strategies were used at the birth of internet banking roughly 25 years ago? In the years since then, have merger and acquisition transactions involving internet or “direct” banking businesses only come to fruition where the direct bank was previously under a specific brand strategy? And finally, where there have been changes in internet banking brand strategy, have these invariably been in the ultimate direction of one particular brand strategy?

Because of the exploratory nature of the research question, this paper uses a case study examination as the research approach. In addition to gaining deeper insight into issues involving internet bank branding as these actually existed, this paper aims to propose preliminary and tentative conclusions that can later be tested empirically with larger sample size. The case studies specifically examine German commercial banks with direct bank businesses.

In the examination of the German commercial banks, this paper finds that their internet banking activities some 25 years ago were, in fact, never launched using an umbrella brand strategy but rather with a combined brand strategy or multi-brand strategy. Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) transactions involving internet-based direct banks were only consummated where the direct bank had previously been operated by the parent bank using a multi-brand strategy. Where the brand strategies of internet-based direct banks have been changed by their parent banks, this has invariably been in the direction of an umbrella brand strategy.

Within the marketing and banking literature, there are no in-depth examinations of internet banking brand strategies to be found. This paper, in addressing this research topic, marks the first full survey of German commercial banks with internet-based direct banking businesses. This survey, moreover, examines branding not only at the time that internet-based direct banks were first established starting in 1994 but also the subsequent development of internet banking brand strategies to the present day.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a historic perspective on the supermarket industry that has changed from the small Mom and Pop stores to major supermarket chains.

This study is a review of secondary information from trade literature, popular new media and academic publications.

The changes in supermarkets and food stores followed the trends in how consumers have changed and developed. As consumers around the world continue to change, so will food retailers.

The author could have included more on the development in underdeveloped countries.

This paper has practical implication in that to understand that food retailers must continue to follow consumer and technology changes if they want to grow and prosper. To quote Winston Churchill, “The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.”

Supermarkets must be responsive to consumer changes and as consumer become more demanding for convenience so must supermarkets must continue to provide it or disappear.

This study is original to the extent that it brought together the different eras in supermarket. The actual changes have been well known.

Of all the social phenomena that have been investigated in the distribution channel context – including power, conflict, dependence, role performance, and opportunism – one that has escaped attention until now is alienation. Borrowing from traditional behavioral science and consumer behavior, the following monograph defines the concept of distributor alienation and elaborates a method for its measurement. After surviving a validation regimen, the measure is applied within the confines of a test of a theoretical model. The results may provide a preliminary framework for a future structure of channel alienation theory.

To explore whether supposedly non-modern patrimonial arrangements ever advance the “modern” economy, this essay examines emergent state institutional practices in North America in relation to the domain of public lands from colonial times to the late nineteenth-century U.S. I deconstruct the Weberian model of patrimonialism into four elements – logic, setting, obligations, and resources – in order to show how state grants of land to individuals and corporations (notably railroad companies) constituted patrimonial practices embedded within modern structures. “Modern state patrimonialism” had its origins in royal patrimonialism. Monopolization of resources – by a state rather than an absolutist ruler – continued to offer the basis for patrimonial practice, but state patrimonial resource distribution became less personalistic and more connected to public goals (financing the state, rewarding state service, settlement of territory, development of a national economy, and construction of a transportation system). Recipients of patrimonial distributions often gained considerable control over disposition of resources that they received. In these patrimonialist practices, economic action was constructed in logics of action that occurred outside of “market” transactions. Future research should analyze patrimonial dynamics during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, by identifying state monopolizations of scarce and desirable resources (mineral rights; city water systems; electrical systems; telephone systems; radio, television, and other airwave bandwidth; the internet), and analyzing how the distribution of those resources are entailed, controlled, licensed, or otherwise managed. A research program in the study of modern patrimonialism helps build out an institutionalist sociology of the economy.

This paper seeks to identify empirically the factors underlying the decision to adopt online banking in Poland.

The sample used in this study is based on 3,519 interactive questionnaires completed by Polish internet users. The dichotomous decision of whether to adopt internet banking services was linked, via Binomial Logistic Regression, to numerous explanatory variables.

Generally, the behaviour of Polish internet users and that of consumers in more developed countries exhibit similar traits. One of the dominant relationships that has been observed in our study is the link between the decision to open an online account and the perceived level of security of internet transactions. Experience with the medium of internet and certain demographic variables also proved to be robust predictors of the adoption status. Moreover, this inquiry documents that advertising appears to be efficacious and that online banking interacts with consumption of other products offered by banks. These findings imply that financial institutions can encourage customers to use this cost‐effective distribution channel through carefully‐planned actions.

The results presented in this paper can be of assistance to banks that either operate in Poland or intend to design a pan‐European strategy. Useful insights are also provided with regard to market segmentation, security and strategies fostering the acceptance of online banking.

The analysis is based on a large sample and broadens our understanding of the attitudes towards innovative financial products by considering factors rarely discussed in prior literature.

This paper aims to analyze the evolution of the marketing of paintings and related visual products from its nascent stages in England around 1700 to the development of the modern art market by 1900, with a brief discussion connecting to the present.

Sources consist of a mixture of primary and secondary sources as well as a series of econometric and statistical analyses of specifically constructed and unique data sets that list nearly more than 50,000 different sales of paintings during this period. One set records sales of paintings at various English auction houses during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the second set consists of all purchases and sales of paintings recorded in the stock books of the late nineteenth-century London art dealer, Arthur Tooth, during the years of 1870/1871. The authors interpret the data under a commoditization model first introduced by Igor Kopytoff in 1986 that posits that markets and their participants evolve toward maximizing the efficiency of their exchange process within the prevailing exchange technology.

We found that artists were largely responsible for a series of innovations in the art market that replaced the prevailing direct relationship between artists and patron with a modern market for which painters produced works on speculation to be sold by enterprising middlemen to an anonymous public. In this process, artists displayed a remarkable creativity and a seemingly instinctive understanding of the principles of competitive marketing that should dispel the erroneous but persistent notion that artistic genius and business savvy are incompatible.

A similar marketing analysis could be done of the development of the art markets of other leading countries, such as France, Italy and Holland, as well as the current developments of the art market.

The same process of the development of the art market in England is now occurring in Latin America and China. Also, the commoditization process continues in the present, now using the Internet and worldwide art dealers.

This is the first article to trace the historical development of the marketing of art in all of its components: artists, dealers, artist organizations, museums, curators, art critics, the media and art historians.

The paper seeks to review recent developments in theory and research regarding the nature and role of relations and networks in business markets and to argue for a more dynamic, interactive and evolutionary view.

Complexity theory, as well as theories of distributed cognition and control, is used to show that business markets, relations and networks are complex adaptive systems of interacting people, firms, activities, resources and ideas in which no one player is in control.

The theoretical perspective described has profound implications for management practice, policymaking and research. In particular it leads to the concept of soft assembled strategies in which management and firms utilize the inherent response properties of the relations and networks in which they operate to extend what they can do, sense, know and think.

Relevant research methodologies for addressing the academic, management and policy issues arising from this perspective are described.

The paper shows the relevance of developments in the complexity sciences and distributed cognition to business marketing and management.

The case looks at the Sethusamudram Shipping Canal Project from its inception in the year 1860 to 2012 when the Pachauri Committee was about to submit a report on the latest canal alignment (4A) as suggested by the Supreme Court. It takes the reader through a series of developments starting from the initial proposals and alignments to formation of Sethusamudram Corporation Limited and highlights the impact of National Environmental Engineering Research Institute Report, Tsunami Detailed Project Report, and Subramaniam Swamy Report on various issues including environmental, political, religious, security and legal. The case brings out multi-dimensional aspects involved in an Indian infrastructure project and gives both students and the faculty an opportunity to explore the complexities faced by the Indian decision makers in today's context.