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This paper aims to provide a history of a number of intellectual debates in marketing theory and consumer research. It outlines the key arguments involved, highlights the politics and acrimoniousness that often accompanied the competition for academic prestige or practitioner remuneration. It weaves the contents of the special issue into its narrative.

This article engages in a broad historical survey of the history of marketing thought, as it pertains to intellectual debate and disputation.

While scholars often articulate objectivity as an intellectual ideal, many of the debates that are explored reveal a degree of intellectual intolerance and this is refracted through the institutional system that structures marketing discourse.

This account provides an introduction to the intellectual debates of the last century, highlighting the ebb and flow of marketing thought. It calls attention to debates that are largely under explored and highlights the politics of knowledge production in marketing and consumer research.

This paper describes the personal history and intellectual development of Morris B. Holbrook (MBH), a participant in the field of marketing academics in general and consumer research in particular.

The paper pursues an approach characterized by historical autoethnographic subjective personal introspection or HASPI.

The paper reports the personal history of MBH and – via HASPI – interprets various aspects of key participants and major themes that emerged over the course of his career.

The main implication is that every scholar in the field of marketing pursues a different light, follows a unique path, plays by idiosyncratic rules, and deserves individual attention, consideration, and respect … like a cat that carries its own leash.

In the case of MBH, like (say) a jazz musician, whatever value he might have depends on his originality.

Refers to the argument that examining political and electoral processes from a marketing perspective offers new insights into the behaviour of political parties. However, research into the marketing activities of political parties is still growing at this stage, and very few papers address the marketing orientation of political parties, while none address the marketing concept. Presents the findings of an exploratory research project carried out in Queensland. The results indicate that key political marketing decision makers within the party examined often have a limited understanding of the marketing concept. The researcher’s redefinition of the marketing concept into political terms received a high level of acceptance from certain groups of respondents within the study. Shows that the marketing concept with its customer centred orientation created a major concern from the perspective of the state executive decision‐making category interviewed in this study. This was so primarily because this key decision‐making category indicated the role and significance of the voter (customer) in developing the political product is negligible.

The issue of implementation consistently appears in both academic and practitioner literature as a problem for marketing. Attempts to address this problem have often adopted the notion of antecedents to enhanced marketing practice as a means of better understanding the issues involved. Within this, however, the link between what needs to be achieved and how marketing knowledge and skills can be utilized to deliver appropriate outcomes remains unclear. Analysis of this gap yields a number of research propositions which require investigation if such knowledge and skills are to influence managerial behaviour. Central to this is the idea that there are a range of competences, which include attitudinal issues, about which greater understanding is required if the implementation debate is to be progressed.

Presents a conceptual discussion concerning the academic/practitioner divide in marketing. States that the marketing concept and the way we teach marketing needs to be refocused to reflect practice. Presents two new developments in marketing that are ideal candidates for narrowing the gap between academia and practice. These are retro‐marketing and experiential marketing.

This special “Anbar Abstracts” issue of the Marketing Intelligence & Planning is split into seven sections covering abstracts under the following headings: Marketing Strategy; Customer Service; Sales Management/Sundry; Promotion; Marketing Research/Customer Behaviour; Product Management; Logistics and Distribution.

Recent global migration trends have led to an increased prevalence, and new patterning, of intercultural family configurations. This paper is about intercultural couples and how they manage tensions associated with change as they settle in their new cultural context. The focus is specifically on the role food plays in navigating these tensions and the effects on the couples’ relational cultures.

A qualitative relational–dialectic approach is taken for studying Polish–Irish intercultural couples. Engagement with relevant communities provided multiple points of access to informants.

Intercultural tensions arise as the couples jointly transition, and food consumption represents implicit tensions in the household’s relational culture. Such tensions are sometimes resolved, but sometimes not, leading to enduring tensions. Dialectical movement causes change, which has developmental consequences for the couples’ relational cultures.

This study shows how the ways that tensions are addressed are fundamental to the formation of a relational family identity.

Recommendations emphasise the importance of understanding how the family relational culture develops in the creation of family food practices. Marketers can look at the ways of supporting the intercultural couple retain tradition, while smoothly navigating their new cultural context. Social policy analysts may reflect on the ways that the couples develop an intercultural identity rooted in each other’s culture, and the range of strategies to demonstrate they can synthesise and successfully negotiate the challenges they face.

Dealing simultaneously and separately with a variety of dialectical oppositions around food, intercultural couples weave together elements from each other’s cultures and simultaneously facilitate both relational and social change. Within the relationship, stability–change dialectic is experienced and negotiated, while at the relationship’s nexus with the couple’s social ecology, negotiating conventionality–uniqueness dialectic enables them reproduce or depart from societal conventions, and thus facilitate social change.

This paper reviews the contributions of Harry Tosdal, a pioneer of sales and marketing management. It serves to puncture a variety of marketing myths and illuminate a completely neglected concept of the consumer.

This account is based on a close reading of Tosdal’s publications.

Tosdal articulated a highly nuanced interpretation of marketing management, market research and sales force management. Each of these elements was keyed into fostering goodwill between firm and customer. Perhaps most importantly, he provides a counterpoint to the idea that the consumer is sovereign in the marketplace. Instead, he makes a case that the ontology of the market is riven by compromise.

This paper highlights the concept of the compromising consumer. Arguably, this is a much more empirically realistic conception of the agency we possess in the marketplace than the idea that we move markets in ways absolutely consistent with our desires.

Discusses the nature and sometimes negative consequences of the dominating marketing paradigm of today, marketing mix management, and furthermore discusses how modern research into, for example, industrial marketing and services marketing as well as customer relationship economics shows that another approach to marketing is required. This development is supported by evolving trends in business, such as strategic partnerships, alliances and networks. Suggests relationship marketing, based on relationship building and management, as one emerging new marketing paradigm of the future. Concludes that the simplicity of the marketing mix paradigm, with its Four P model, has become a strait‐jacket, fostering toolbox thinking rather than an awareness that marketing is a multi‐faceted social process, and notes that marketing theory and customers are the victims of today’s mainstream marketing thinking.