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The purpose of the paper is to investigate the writing style of Stanley C. Hollander, in order to better understand the power of his prose.

A line‐by‐line literary analysis of Hollander's publications, with a view to detecting his stylistic “signature” or “fingerprint”.

Four key elements are integral to Hollander's writing style – interrogatives, inventories, iconoclasm and irony. His single most characteristic literary device is litotes, a mode of ironic understatement.

Literary analysis is inherently idiosyncratic and tends to reflect the perspective of the interpreter. Another analyst is sure to find different features in Hollander's corpus (though this is less a methodological shortcoming than a testament to the richness of Hollander's writings).

All academics are writers and, by better understanding the technique of a much admired stylist, everyone's publications can be improved.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a briefly annotated bibliography of some 200 items that together constitute a “select list” of the available academic literature on the history of Canadian marketing from the seventeenth century to the beginning of Second World War.

After all the available academic literature on Canadian marketing the authors could uncover was examined, the most relevant, interesting, and accessible material was identified and annotated. In addition, all of the literature considered in any way pertinent was added to a more complete bibliography available on the CHARM web site.

Though existing Canadian business and economic history texts and courses tend to pay far more attention to other topics, there is a rich and varied literature on the history of Canadian marketing.

No selections are included from either archival sources or the popular press nor are unpublished theses or dissertations cited.

This appears to be the first annotated bibliography on the history of Canadian marketing ever to have been compiled and published.

The marketplace evolution associated with the development of the electronic marketplace provides the marketing discipline with a unique opportunity to examine the value of its early literature in the context of a changing market environment. The purpose of this paper is to use the early marketing literature to develop theoretical propositions related to the internet marketplace.

Seminal marketing thought is reviewed and used to provide a conceptual understanding of various aspects of electronic commerce.

Perspectives from the commodity, functional, regional, institutional, and functionalist schools of marketing are used to explain the evolution of the electronic marketplace as well as to provide propositions to guide future research.

The application of historical marketing thought to a contemporary business situation serves to validate the robustness of the early literature and demonstrates its ongoing value and usefulness to the discipline.

The purpose of this study is to assess differences between the guidance offered by cultural studies in the services literature and the retailing literature for emerging markets. To research these differences, the role that the contact person has towards South African township residents' willingness to buy is to be assessed.

A services quality survey of black (ethnic Xhosa) township residents was performed for two different retail types: new, small, independently owned grocery retailers located within the townships, and established, large, national chains located within the city centres. The influence of these services quality measures on willingness to buy was assessed using the partial least squares method for each of the two retail types. Differences between the model parameters for these two retail types were assessed using ANOVA.

The results show that, consistent with the retailing literature, the contact people in these new, small, local and independently owned retailers focus extensively on empathy to influence willingness to buy, while the contact people in the large, traditionally white‐owned national retailers jointly focus on assurance and responsiveness to influence willingness to buy, and spend very little effort on empathy.

Research implications are based on the usefulness of supporting theory, namely that the guidance offered by the cultural studies in the retailing literature is more predictive than that in the services literature for the emerging South African retailing market.

It is found that core elements in relationship marketing are well ingrained in collectivist Xhosa cultural norms. The results suggest that these cultural norms can, and should, be leveraged by the new independently owned grocery retailers.

The research addresses a key concern within emerging markets and offers practical help for retail development within this dynamic economic setting.

This paper aims to showcase the range of historical records held at The National Archives of the UK which are potentially highly useful to researchers in marketing and advertising history, but have so far been under-appreciated in these fields.

By taking key record collections, primarily intellectual property records and records of government publicity, and examining them from the perspective of different fields of study, the potential of these collections is brought to light. This paper also draws out key examples of past research with these collections to show both the effectiveness of these records as sources for research and at the same time the limited way they have so far been approached by academics.

This review of the records demonstrates how researchers working in advertising and marketing history fields might supplement their research or open up new research avenues with the benefit of new sources. It shows how assumptions about government archives need to be reconsidered to avoid missing research opportunities.

Sharing knowledge and increasing connections between government archives and academics in these fields may encourage archives to improve their own approaches to archival practice and academic engagement, to make records more accessible to these new research audiences. This would of course be beneficial both to researchers and government archives.

This paper provides a detailed examination of government records in the specific context of the field of marketing history. This unique focus makes a valuable contribution to the literature exploring historical sources for this field.

Target Corporation is concerned that the company might be left out of one of its most lucrative and attractive product categories, video games and game players, as these products increasingly migrate to digital distribution models. What steps should the company take to maintain its relevance and build sustainable competitive advantage as these trends play out? What are the implications for the company's multi-channel online and offline format portfolio going forward?

Students will develop a keen understanding of the challenges faced by contemporary retailers as consumer needs change, new product innovations emerge, market structures evolve, and format pressures escalate.

The purpose of this paper is to appraise the spread of supermarkets in Canada during the mid‐twentieth century. It examines how corporate chains altered the organization of distribution, reconfigured shopping experiences, and promised gains realized through greater business volume.

The paper utilizes a mix of primary and secondary sources to compare how companies responded to opportunities for mass marketing that emerged in the post‐war era. The perspective is grounded in the theory of managerial capitalism, which was originally elaborated by Alfred D. Chandler.

The paper highlights how mass food retailing in Canada shared some attributes normally associated with the rise of managerial capitalism, but it also reviews the variations and highlights the difficulties faced by firms despite their jump to giant size. In particular, it stresses how the leading companies did not build secure positions.

Corporate archives in Canadian retailing either did not survive or remain inaccessible. The essay therefore draws upon a mix of sources including company publications and government investigations. The paper highlights the inability of companies to realize permanent gains commonly associated with large firm size or mass retailing. It stresses that there was no one “model” of corporate development.

This paper illustrates the complexities associated with developing strategic leadership in retailing and therefore should be valuable to educators and practitioners.

By tracing the history of the links of financialization to consumer behaviors and marketer actions in the twentieth century, this paper aims to show that consumer market phenomena are often shaped by the imperatives of finance.

The paper employs selective historical overviews, mainly focusing on the USA, of four tranches of the past century: the run up to the Great Depression; from post‐Depression to the Second World War; the post‐Second World War Bretton Woods system and its collapse in the 1970s; and the increasingly risk‐charged last three post‐Bretton Woods decades of the twentieth century.

The historical review shows that the financial sector's interest in profiting from consumer markets emerged and grew fairly early in the twentieth century, experienced some slowdown and forced retrenchment due to the military‐industrial build up prior to and during the Second World War, and re‐accelerated in the post‐Second World War period – reaching an unsustainable risky zenith by the closing years of the century.

Findings and arguments from this paper can be of value to citizen and consumer advocates seeking to bring Finanzkapital activities under popular and democratic control.

Insights from this paper should motivate us to study in greater depth how established and seemingly autonomous consumer and marketer behaviors, in the ultimate, may be guided by, and have to conform to, the dictates of financial capital.

The main contribution of this paper is an elaboration of how financial capitalism has shaped consumption styles and marketing practices in the last century.