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The purpose of this study is to analyze the increasingly congenial relationship between business and government that developed in the immediate post Second World War period. This study explores the subtle, but systematic, uses of advertising for propaganda purposes to secure American political and commercial world dominance. It locates the relationship between the US Government and the Advertising Council as key components in a strategy to blur the lines between political and commercial messages. In addition to study the relationship between the two stakeholders, the study identifies some of the implications for both.

Scholarship on the government’s postwar relationships with other organizations is relatively scant and few other scholars have focused on the advertising industry’s role in this transformation. This paper draws on trade periodicals and newspaper accounts, and relies on archival material from the Arthur W Page and the Thomas D’Arcy Brophy collections at the Wisconsin State Historical Society and the Advertising Council’s papers at the University of Illinois. Charles W. Jackson papers, located at the Harry S. Truman Library, and the papers of Office of War Mobilization and Re-conversion, deposited at the National Archives, have also been consulted.

The Advertising Council’s “Peace” and “World Trade and Travel” demonstrate an acceleration of collaboration between business and government that continued into the postwar era. It shows the government’s willingness to trade on the Advertising Council’s goodwill and to blur the lines between political and commercial messages, in what can accurately be characterized as a duplicitous manner. Key conclusion includes a willingness among Washington’s policymakers to propagandize its own citizens, a strategy that it commonly, and disparagingly, ascribed to the Soviet Union, and a Council so willing to appease Washington, that it was putting its own reputation at considerable risk.

This paper is based on a study of two campaigns (“Peace” and “World Trade and Travel”) that the Advertising Council conducted in collaboration with the US State Department. While these were the first campaigns of this nature, they were not the only ones. Additional studies of similar campaigns may add new insights.

Recent political events have brought propaganda and government collusion back on the public agenda. In an era of declining journalism credibility, rising social media and unprecedented government and commercial surveillance, it is argued that propaganda demands scholarly attention more than ever and that a historical study of how the US Government collaborated with private industry and used advertising as a propaganda smokescreen is particularly timely.

This study adds to the scholarship on advertising, PR and propaganda in several ways. First, it contributes to the understanding of the advertising industry’s important role in the planning of US international policy after the Second World War. Second, it demonstrates the increasingly congenial relationship between business and the US Government that emerged as a result. Third, it provides excellent insights into the Adverting Council’s transition from war to peacetime. The heavy reliance on archival material also brings originality and value to the study.

This paper aims to examine the contents of the special issue, situating the material in appropriate historical context.

The account is based on a close reading of each manuscript. Links to the wider academic literature are created, and a narrative thread is provided to introduce readers to the imbrication of marketing with the Cold War geopolitical climate.

The debates surrounding the Cold War, marketing theory and marketing practice have been reviewed.

The purpose of this article is to explore how the (War) Advertising Council organized the advertising community to assist the US government's home front campaigns during the Second World War. It aims to discuss how the council urged individual advertisers to use their product‐ads to instruct the civilian population about behavioral changes that the government deemed essential to the war effort. The task required great ambidexterity: paying a high level of attention to the government's wartime needs while coaching and encouraging advertisers into compliance. As such, the article also aims to discuss the council's challenge in weighing the government's wartime needs against commercial pressures. A case study of the Advertising Council's 1944 campaign to “Stamp out VD” seeks to illustrate the latter concern.

The article comprises an historical account of the US advertising industry during the Second World War. Applying a qualitative approach, it relies on archival sources, industry trade publications, newspapers accounts and existing scholarship for its information.

While publicly framing its wartime contribution as a patriotic gesture, the council's underlying rationale was that of serving the advertising industry in a public relations capacity. Unsure of its standing as America entered the war, the donation of time and talent to the government's war effort helped strengthen the advertising industry's economic position and social standing. As such, the council was not only a pioneer of “social marketing”, but also demonstrated a sophisticated use of “strategic philanthropy,” long before it became a common marketing practice.

Analyzing previously un‐explored sources, the article sheds new light on the US advertising industry's public relations strategies during the Second World War.

A number of scholars have explored the US Government’s postwar efforts, often in collaboration with the business community, to “sell America” to Americans themselves; others have documented the means through which such information was aimed at audiences behind the Iron Curtain. Few scholars have explored the use of the US “propaganda” to secure political loyalty and financial markets among Western allies, and fewer still have studied the government’s use of commercial marketing methods for this purpose. Attempting to fill a void, this paper aims to explore the US State Department’s postwar collaboration with the Advertising Council, a non-profit organization funded and organized by American business, to “sell” the 16 countries that were receiving aid under the Marshall Plan on “the American way of life”.

Drawing primarily from archival sources, the underlying research here is heavily based on various State Department collections housed at the National Archives in Washington, DC, and College Park, Maryland, as well as documents from the Harry S. Truman Library in Independence, Missouri, and the Advertising Council Archives at the University of Illinois.

In contrast to its many successes during the Second World War, the Advertising Council’s first international project was plagued by erroneous assumptions and unforeseen problems, making the “Overseas Information” campaign far less successful than its previous projects. Thus, the case study holds lessons for the US Government in any future attempts to use the assistance of commercial advertisers in attaining its “soft power” objectives.

The study explores the “Overseas Information” campaign from an institutional perspective only. Future research should focus on public perceptions of the campaign and possibly a rhetorical analysis of the actual advertisements.

The case study holds lessons for the US Government in any future attempts to use the assistance of commercial advertisers in attaining its “soft power” objectives.

The study reveals interesting, and heretofore, unrevealed information about collaborations between the government and US business in the postwar era.

Up till this point, the Advertising Council’s “Overseas Information” has received very scant scholarly attention and few, if any, have recognized its importance in the ongoing quest for government “soft power” in the postwar era.

This paper aims to explore the market dynamics that led to a shift in Swedish consumers' alcohol preferences from schnapps to wine. Specifically, the study investigates how the Swedish state influenced consumers' alcohol habits and highlights the role of governance units in shaping consumer culture.

The study reconstructs the historical memory of the “Operation Vin”, a strategic marketing campaign implemented by Systembolaget from 1957 to 1985, to conceptualize the past and to uncover the structures and change dynamics of the Swedish alcohol market system. Following this approach, the research contrasts historical data from multiple sources with market-oriented ethnographical data and traces the trajectory of how the consumption of alcohol has changed as a consequence of the Swedish state’s initiatives.

The study offers two contributions to the literature in marketing and consumption history. Firstly, it uncovers the lines of actions (framing and settlement) involved in creating marketing systems and shaping consumer culture. Secondly, it explores how the state strategically leveraged its social skills to promote a specific type of alcohol consumption (wine) and to induce the Swedish consumer to cooperate in the refashioning of the alcohol field.

The authors aspire for this paper to offer valuable insights into how a state, as a governance entity, can shape consumer culture through a strategic blend of various regulatory measures, both gentle and forceful. The authors emphasize the pivotal role of social skills in fostering cooperation during the implementation of a new alcohol policy.

This paper provides valuable insights into the role of the Swedish state in shaping consumer culture and explores the strategic actions and marketing systems involved, contributing to marketing and consumption history literature.

SEPTEMBER sees the holiday season waning and the summer irrevocably over. It sees the progressive librarian, as one of our correspondents suggests, making plans for the winter. Possibly it may be said that the really alert one has had them made for some time, because it is immediately on return from holidays, when there is a hint of winter in the air, and daylight saving is over, that the average man thinks of how he will spend his leisure in the darker days. That, at least, is the theory and many librarians have already set up their displays of suggestions to would‐be Students.

The purpose of this paper is to explore open innovation (OI) collaborations between high-tech small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and large customers. The research aims to add new insights into how smaller firms attract and build trusting relationships with larger customers for the purpose of innovation, and to highlight customers’ contribution in SMEs’ innovation process.

This exploratory research is based on three case studies and adopts a process perspective to gather qualitative data on OI collaborations, focusing on the inherent dynamics, and evolution in long-term relationships.

The study provides insights into how SMEs develop OI relationships with both industry and research customers by building trust through various mechanisms. Motivated by the potential benefits of OI in strengthening the firms’ technological edge, the SME managers proactively and strategically developed and managed their OI relationships. The results proved that large customers contributed greatly to the SMEs’ innovation processes both directly and indirectly.

The research provides advice for smaller firms which are considering adopting an OI strategy with customers through mechanisms such as trust building and enhancing legitimacy.

The research adds to the OI literature on SMEs by exploring how smaller firms manage OI challenges, exploit benefits, and develop trusting relationships with larger customers and research institutions.

DURING the three years I have attended the meetings of this branch association, papers of so interesting a character have been read that I am well aware of the difficulty each paper reader must have in keeping up the standard. But as my subject seems a good one, you may be inclined to overlook an indifferent treatment of it.

Few areas of public service exist in which those who work to provide them receive the recognition their efforts justly deserve, and regretably no where more so than in the local health and consumer protection services. These services have a long history of public indifference, which in years past bordered on contempt. They were labelled “public servants” in a manner that implied they were the personal servants of ratepayers, apointed by them and paid from monies they provided.