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The purpose of this paper is to review the 1985-1991 project called “The Consumer Behavior Odyssey”, including a retrospective assessment of its context and role in influencing consumer research paradigms.

The study is based on personal recollections, introspective fieldnotes from the Odyssey and various publications and videos that emerged from the project. It also reflects on several subsequent “inside” and “outside” accounts of the project and its impact.

The paper concludes that the Odyssey was a critical event within a nexus of other critical events that helped precipitate what is now widely called Consumer Culture Theory. It was a highly visible project that acted as a lightning rod that attracted both supporters and opponents at the time, but that ultimately helped carve out a place for interpretive, qualitative, visual and ethnographic consumer research within business schools.

Although there were a number of methodological and research outputs from the Odyssey during the 1980s and early 1990s and there have been several recent “outside” appraisals of its influence since then, there has been only one subsequent “inside” account of its ontological and epistemological impact − a 2011 video made for the 50th anniversary of the major funding organization for the project, the Marketing Science Institute. This paper offers a more extensive appraisal by one of the project’s leaders.

The purpose of this paper is to recount the history of the marketing of the maritime passenger industry (known today as the cruise industry). This is a unique industry that has survived and thrived for almost 175 years despite dramatic environmental changes. This history focuses on passenger shipping in and out of the USA first from/to European ports, later focusing on cruises from the USA to the Caribbean, today’s most popular cruise destination.

This study adapts the Hollander et al. (2005) approach and incorporates primary data such as fare lists, advertisements and promotional materials, as well as secondary data from a variety of expert works and government reports.

This study finds that the industry’s marketing history can be divided into six periods or phases: immigration and luxury (mid-nineteenth century to 1914); World War I (1914-1918); tourism, alcohol and luxury (1918-1939); World War II (1939-1946); jet age emergence (1946-1970); and cruising for all (1970 to the present day). Continuing industry growth; increasing focus on new geographic, and every-smaller demographic and psychographic markets; promotional emphasis on cuisine and activities; and positioning as a mass-consumed luxury are trends for the future.

Space constraints limit the information mostly to Europe-to-North America sailings of British and German transatlantic lines early in the paper, and to USA-to-Caribbean cruises in later phases.

This study illustrates how an industry can completely reinvent all elements of its marketing strategy in response to changing social and technological forces. It adds to a growing body of industry marketing histories.

Although much has been written about maritime history, no known work has examined the history of the marketing of the maritime passenger industry. It augments the growing body of industry-specific marketing histories.

This paper aims to describe the development of forms of advertising on radio and internet when they were new media and propose a model of periodization through which the two histories can be understood and appreciated.

Two narrative histories were constructed based on data collected from numerous public and private, historical and contemporary and primary and secondary materials. The methodology of New Historicism informed the research.

When the two histories are viewed through the model, many similarities in terms of milestones and markers become apparent.

Perhaps when the next new electronic mass medium is invented, a future researcher may look back on this model and consider whether it applies.

For practitioners who consider history a relevant source of knowledge and inspiration, this research offers a way of organizing and understanding the history of internet advertising.

Today’s consumers, especially Millennials, continue to seek to avoid advertising on the internet. The use of ad blockers poses a significant threat to the business models of online content providers. This research demonstrates that resistance to advertising is nothing new and that it may be, in the end, futile.

The model is an original creation, based on an original view of history, and offered as a lens through which to understand this history.

The purpose of this article is to present an inside look at the history of a little‐known but interesting initiative in the marketing field, one that involved the infusion of marketing thought into public policy decision‐making in the USA. It aims to trace the interesting tale of how marketing academics came to be included in the activities of the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) through the FTC's “Marketing Academic Consultancy Program” (MACP) during the 1970s. This story also aims to include descriptions of the contributions made by those marketing academics and how those scholars were later phased out of the FTC.

An autobiographical approach is used since each of the authors was personally involved in the MACP. As participants in the program and as scholars whose careers were thereafter tremendously affected by that participation, these personal accounts provide considerable insight into the impact on both FTC operations and on marketing academic thought itself.

Over the decade of the 1970s some 30 marketing academics participated in this program, with considerable impact on both FTC operations and on marketing academic thought itself. Reflecting positive impact within public policy, for example, was a massive increase in the FTC budget for marketing and consumer research activities – from essentially zero at the start of the program to some $ 1 million in 1978. Benefits also flowed back into academia, as this program formed a prime basis for the development of today's “Marketing and Society” research area.

Although there are histories of the FTC, this is an original, first‐hand account of a little‐known era during which marketing academics and public policy decision‐makers were given a unique opportunity to work together and learn from each other. It offers personal insights into the workings of this innovative program and the benefits that accrued for both the FTC and for the marketing discipline.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate an unexplored part of advertising history; namely, the education of a large, mundane, nonelite group of advertising professionals, so-called advertising technicians and the knowledge they acquired. Examining correspondence courses in the technology of advertising, we focus particularly on the production of technified knowledge and mass personas.

The study is based on a qualitative analysis of course material from Sweden’s two largest correspondence schools in the 1930s and 1940s. Two theoretical concepts guide the analysis: the concept of market devices and the notion of personas, both of which we use to show how the courses crafted a particular kind of advertising professional as well as knowledge.

The study shows that courses created a template-based persona of the advertising technician, who possessed what we call bounded originality characterized by diligence, modesty and rule-governed creative imagination. Similarly, the courses created a body of knowledge that was controllable and highly practice-oriented. The advertising technician was expected to embody and internalize the advertising knowledge, thus, becoming an extension of this knowledge on the market.

By directing the searchlight at the cadre of ordinary, middle-class advertising professionals instead of the high-profile “advertising creatives” and innovators, the paper brings to the foreground the nonelite level of the advertising industry. These practitioners went to work in the business world to produce the everyday advertising that was not necessarily groundbreaking but was needed in a growing mass-consumption society.

This paper aims to be a reflection on the production of The History of Marketing Thought.

Historical review.

Marketing has been largely ahistorical. Hopefully with the production of this collection, it will become less so as students and scholars alike engage with the history of marketing thought.

Some possible limitations of the collection are outlined.

The major work articulates the value of historical research for marketing and management practice.

This paper reflects a personal perspective on the production of a collection of scholarly articles.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the way in which a series of related printing businesses, owned by members of the Gye and Balne families in Bath and London from 1771 to 1844, selected and marketed their titles when they ventured into book printing and publishing.

The basis of this research is extensive archival research analyzing primary sources, mainly the books and ephemera printed by the various firms, supported by information in contemporary newspapers and journals and in biographies of printers and publishers.

The focus of these businesses was not solely on production, but marketing was also considered, and each title was conceived and produced with a particular market in mind. In doing so evidence is provided of relatively advanced marketing strategies in use before 1850 and thus the paper questions the validity of the four eras model of marketing history.

The available primary sources are limited; while a number of books and other printed items have survived there are no extant accounts, correspondence, or other records for any of the firms that were studied.

There has been very little research into the way small businesses during this period approached the marketing of their products. This paper is a potential model for further such historical research and also provides an example of how research into specific companies can illuminate the larger history of marketing, potentially changing the way in which we understand the development of consumer society.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the historical contributions of complex innovations (both creative and tactical components) in a formative period in a major Australian department store, David Jones Ltd.

The study uses a context-specific lens to examine complex retail innovation. The study adopts a longitudinal design with the focus on a single firm, which met the inclusion criteria. Data collection was predominately from company archival materials and publicly available documents, including newspapers.

An in-depth analysis of two complex innovations demonstrates the retailer’s successful management of both marketing exploration (innovation) and marketing exploitation of that innovation. Effective marketing requires operational, tactical marketing exploitation to dovetail marketing exploration.

The study is limited to one successful department store. Notwithstanding, there are expectations that the lessons extend to many other retailing organizations.

The practical relevance is clear, with the emphasis on retail innovation (and especially complex innovation) as a basis for both surviving and thriving in an ever-changing marketing environment.

The use of a complex innovation approach is a novel way of examining marketing history. The study concludes that both marketing exploration and marketing exploitation are essential for retail longevity.

This paper aims to use Brown and Hackley's contribution to the Journal of Historical Research in Marketing as a springboard for further discussion. It seeks to argue that we can put aside their suggestion that they intend to “stress test the contention that Cowell is Barnum reborn”. This is not what they are trying to do at all. Their point is more elemental. They aim to provoke readers to think critically about the production of marketing histories and histories of marketing thought.

This paper adopts a viewpoint approach.

Given that Brown and Hackley arguably intend to encourage a response to their work and this is a response to their paper means they have been successful in their efforts. They have secured readers for their scholarship in an academic marketplace where many papers go unread, are never cited and whose only worldly “impact” is in terms of the carbon footprint they leave. This said, this paper takes Brown and Hackley seriously, engages with their ideas and offers a variety of ways we can think beyond their “thematic analysis”.

The paper situates Brown and Hackley's account within the wider sphere of marketing thought.