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This paper aims to investigate three promotional publications produced by the Postum Cereal Company – A Trip Through Postumville (1920), How I Make Postum (1924) and The Wonderful Lunch Boxes (1925) – with the aim of understanding how language and other semiotic resources are used to promote its products as good and healthy choices.

The three publications were collected from the HathiTrust Digital Library and University of South Florida Tampa Special Collections. They were subjected to multimodal critical discourse analysis to tease out their subtle characteristics and how a combination of language, image, colour, typography and composition are used to represent certain ideas and values related to health and well-being.

The publications subscribe to three distinct genres – “inside the factory”, “friendly spokesperson” and “fictional world” – each of which are aimed at different target audiences. The first seeks to promote Postum as an open and transparent company; the second to promote Postum as a company that cares about its consumers; and the third to promote the health benefits of Postum in a fun and accessible manner. Nonetheless, they are united in their overall objective to link the regular consumption of Postum as essential for good health.

To date, few studies have been conducted on the Postum Cereal Company, while the limited research conducted on promotional publications has tended to overlook discourses of health and well-being. The three genres outlined in this study, thus, have the potential to foster a reappraisal of promotional publications and showcase their ability to offer new understandings on historical approaches to marketing, particularly the link with health and science.

Packeted, ready‐to‐eat breakfast foods, instant no‐work nourishment before you start the day, are such a part of the modern way of life that it's hard to believe they are now nearly 100 years old. And it all started with the so‐aptly‐named Mr Perky.

Purpose – We show that, although most private employer establishments are small, much reported research (and subsequent suggestions for practice) in management comes from large firms. In turn, we wanted to explore if organizational knowledge gained from studying one or more large firms is necessarily applicable to numerous smaller firms.

Design/methodology/approach – We computed firm size in the United States using existing databases, and we then considered published literature in human resources and strategy to see if the large sample results logically applied to smaller firms.

Findings – At the job-analytic level, it is suggested that jobs might be defined differently and more broadly in smaller establishments than in large organizations. Also, the feasibility of best corporate strategies may be moderated by the size of the firm. In addition, we noted that the underlying model of selection utility in human resource management (HRM), and several factors in its numerical estimation, might need to be modified as a function of firm size.

Originality/value – We hope that this chapter inspires HRM and strategy researchers by helping to focus future evidence-based efforts, creating new initiatives, and providing results that are useful (or scalable) to the large number of small, private-sector U.S. firms.

This paper aims to examine the marketing strategies designed by three innovative early 1900s food companies. It traces the coordination of these businesses’ research funding, advertising, direct mail and promotional tactics to show how they intersected and impacted consumers and health professionals in the period when scientists were first able to quantify the relationship between good health and food. The paper analyzes internal company documents, advertisements and marketing materials from Knox Gelatine, Borden and Sunkist.

Research for this paper benefited from the author’s unlimited access to the private documents of the Knox Gelatine Company and its executives. These documents were analyzed chronologically and thematically. They chronicled the company’s attempts to influence the medical world and the ways it cultivated home economists. The paper also used publicly available digitized documents from Sunkist and Borden. The paper would benefit from further detailed analysis of these documents to parse Knox’s targeting by race and ethnicity.

In the 1920s, Knox, Borden and Sunkist developed a marketing strategy which leveraged a new class of experts – the hundreds of thousands of medical professionals, home economists, teachers and government agents who advised American women. By distributing specific laboratory research on the nutritional benefits of their products to this emerging class of health professionals and the consumers who trusted them, these companies developed relationships with opinion leaders designed specifically to influence product sales.

This research benefited from access to the private documents of Knox Gelatine Company which divulge the company’s attempts to influence the medical world and cultivate home economists. The paper would benefit from further analysis of these documents to parse the company’s targeting by race and ethnicity as well as a deeper comparison to companies that tried to work with health professionals unsuccessfully and companies that adopted this tactic in the household products or tobacco area. Opportunities also exist to do a fuller analysis of variations in food marketing by rural versus urban as well as race.

By reconstructing the sequencing and content of these three companies’ 1920s marketing strategies, this research uncovers a form of early 20th century food marketing directed at health and science professionals which has been neglected in advertising histories.

Today′s high‐technology, global marketing environment has made consumer product information available across national boundaries. Explores how six multinational consumer product firms (Colgate‐Palmolive, Kraft GF, Nestlé, Procter & Gamble, Quaker Oats and Unilever) maintain, change or adapt different brand names for identical or similar products. Field research was conducted in supermarkets, medium‐sized grocery stores, department stores and drug stores from 1993‐1995 in 67 countries on five continents. Brand and country data were utilized to identify global, regional, spillover and single country brands. Additional information was collected on country of origin as well as point of sale. Product and brand distribution were analyzed by firm and product type. Less than 1% of brands were global brands (those found in 90% or more of the countries surveyed). Procter & Gamble has the most global brands, with 8% of the brands studied distributed in 50% or more of the countries. The majority of brands (50‐72%) are available in three or fewer countries.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a retrospective review of an early marketing text, Marketing Methods (1918) by Ralph Starr Butler.

Marketing Methods is summarized, and perspectives of scholars that have occurred since its publication are provided.

Marketing Methods represents the first college textbook to use the term “marketing” and, thus, represents a major and important early work in the field.

This review of Marketing Methods provides a retrospective on the development, structure, critical reviews and influence of this text.