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Despite 40 years of research by many social science disciplines, the conduct of planning in the business firm is not well modelled or understood. For marketers, this presents a particularly important problem. Marketing planning is particularly susceptible to the heirarchical nature of the planning process and the need to develop both deliberate and emergent plans. Since marketers provide the interface between the firm and its markets and customers, they must provide the essential strategic and tactical planning direction to the firm's overall strategic planning process. Marketing planning has a strategic and tactical component. Marketers must be precise with their use of terminology, being careful to identify exactly what they mean when they use the terms planning, marketing and strategy.

The purpose of this paper is to describe Stanley C. Hollander's doctoral seminar in the history of marketing thought and offer some insights into its uniqueness.

The paper presents a combination of personal reflections, personal interviews, and documentation from the final offering of the course.

Hollander's course was distinctive among such efforts at doctoral education and probably one of the last such seminars in North America.

There has been little written about teaching the history of marketing thought and to date no published account of Hollander's seminar.

The purpose of this article is to introduce the theme of this special issue. In doing so, the paper argues that marketing historical research is in need of a paradigmatic shift. Rather than privilege primary and secondary sources that preserve the perspectives and actions of corporate managers and of marketing academics, marketing historians need to open the historical narratives they construct much more than before to the experiences and voices of ordinary consumers, i.e. of those who actually shop and buy and choose. They also need to do more to incorporate into their narratives examples of the value-creation that consumers themselves enact, both inside and outside the sphere of the market.

By reviewing the state of the marketing historical literature, this paper introduces the “History from Below” school of historical thought into marketing historical research. It also tests to what extent a stronger consumer focus might be able to enrich historical research in marketing.

Although contemporary marketing historiography is characterized by a richness of themes and methodological approaches, there is still a marked difference between the way marketing academics and historians write the history of marketing and consumption. While, surprisingly, the former often tend to ignore the voices of ordinary consumers, the latter often lack the marketing-related “technical” knowledge to fully understand the significance of specific archival sources they discuss. This means that a genuine “People’s History of Marketing” has yet to be written.

Findings from the paper will be of value to marketing historians who wish to expand the scope and agenda of their research and help historical research move away from narrow managerial perspectives and other “privileged” accounts of marketing.

This paper makes two original contributions. First, it introduces historiographical innovations associated with “History from Below” (social history) into marketing historical scholarship. Second, it attempts to help marketing historians identify alternative sets of primary and secondary sources, e.g. oral history archives, which would allow them to be much more optimistic about their own ability to reconstruct the perspectives of those whose voices are all too often ignored.

A range of previous studies show that large numbers of practitioners do not adopt the prescriptive model of marketing planning. The research objective was to determine how marketing managers actually do go about making marketing planning decisions and what the consequences of this are for marketing educators.

The research methodology is based on a series of in depth interviews carried out with senior marketing managers in a diverse range of business organisations.

Results show that marketing in practice is about a local logic of action, rather than the implementation of systemic theory. Marketing expertise is shown to consist of a broad range of skills, knowledge and experientially‐based judgements. As a result of this it is argued that significant implications exist for marketing education.

This was a relatively small scale study and the issues it raises could be usefully explored with a range of other respondents who practice marketing in order to uncover their approaches to strategy development and implementation.

It is argued that marketing education should take possession of a pedagogic framework based on the concept of situated learning, where full account is taken of the experiential and social basis of knowledge. The paper goes on to outline some approaches based on the idea of situated learning, indicating how they might be best used by marketing educators.

This paper shows that the curriculum needs to take account of the argument that marketing reality is constituted by individual interpretation and language and not by a structural framework which sees the person as being conditioned by a rational technical system of marketing knowledge.

Philip Kotler is one of the pioneers who has contributed to the broadening of academic inquiry in the field of marketing. He has had a significant role in shaping how marketing is taught to and practised by students and managers of marketing. By examining the personal and macroenvironmental influences that have come to shape his work, this paper seeks to explore how Philip Kotler has achieved such influence in the field of marketing.

The research was driven by a desire to understand the context in which Kotler developed his work, including the personal influences on his life as well as the macroenvironmental forces within which his work has emerged. To this end, the reseaerch employed qualitative techniques to analyze a number of data sources including depth interviews with Philip Kotler and nine of his colleagues, participant observation at Kotler's 75th birthday celebration hosted by the Kellogg School, a review of marketing textbooks, and a review of relevant literature.

The research reveals the keys to Philip Kotler's success are his ability to learn from the people around him and the events of the times, and his ability to integrate this knowledge into succinct, well‐communicated, timely lessons for others to follow. Kotler's work emerged within a period of time that has witnessed a thrust towards marketing as a science and the rise of the managerial school of thought. Given this context, the significance of Kotler's work is that it has contributed to the legitimacy of the field of marketing as both a rigorous academic discipline and a managerial domain of strategic importance within organizations.

Gaining an understanding of Philip Kotler and his work contributes to our understanding of how the marketing field has been shaped, including the kinds of academic inquiry marketers deem legitimate and the nature of how we teach students to practice marketing management.

Little attention has been paid to the factors that have influenced the work of Philip Kotler and how he has, in turn, come to shape the field of marketing. This research allows the reader to see the man behind the work and the influences on his thinking.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the evolution of marketing’s philosophical conversation over the past 120 years, focusing on the emergent meaning of the notion that marketing should become more “scientific”.

This paper focuses on the US academic marketing literature, primarily journal articles and books published in the first half of the 20th century.

The Aristotelian distinction between techné, epistemé and phronesis provides a rich basis for framing philosophical discussion in marketing, and should supplant the art-science debate and Anderson’s distinction between science₁ and science₂. Prior to 1959, the marketing journals provided a forum for phronesis, though this diminished as the academic marketing community largely abandoned the inductive, contextual approach in favour of a deductive, “scientific” methodology. The Ford Foundation played an important role in effecting this change.

The paper highlights the importance of forums where practitioners can reflect on the ethical and social implications of their practices and then work to enhance these practices for the greater social good.

Questions the value of distinctions between marketing theorists and practitioners and the consequential focus of marketing journals.

Advances the concept of phronesis in the marketing literature and distinguishes it from epistemé, which has dominated academic marketing discourse over the past 60 years.

Some ideas are expounded about how to get published in management or marketing publications. First, almost anyone with ideas can get published. Second, only a few people have all the necessary skills (creative ideas, writing skills, organisational capabilities, packaging prowess and artful matching of product and markets) to publish alone on a regular basis. What publishing can do for you is examined, the ways that we stop ourselves from publishing and hints for getting into print are given.

The case is presented by a senior marketing major (Tim), who did a business internship in the new products area of a fictitious consumer package goods firm. The case is presented as a journal Tim kept while interning. It is based on the author’s own journal, kept while working as a business professor intern in a firm similar to that in the case. Although names have been disguised, most of the activities, practices and problems described in the case are based on the author’s internship experience. Tim is simultaneously involved in two major new product projects. First is the early exploratory research done for new vegetable‐based food products. Second is a snack product which is ready to be moved from a controlled store test to test markets. Tim is also involved in other activities: a new business committee meeting, an industry forum, and a strategic plans presentation meeting. Tim works fairly closely with the new products manager, people in other areas of the firm such as marketing research and research and development, as well as with the firm’s ad agency. The case also describes informational interviews Tim conducted with various functional managers in the company involved with new products, and it gives students a feel for all of the nitty gritty implementation details involved in new product work.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the use of rhetorical and narrative strategies in the foundational text of Service-Dominant (S-D) Logic. The author argues that the success of Vargo and Lusch's (2004a) paper in establishing the foundational premises of the new S-D Logic is greatly aided by their persuasive use of classical rhetorical techniques of word choice, metaphor, and framing as well as the careful construction of a narrative that is guaranteed to be attractive to their audience.

The author uses techniques of rhetorical and narrative analysis to closely examine some of the principle argument in the foundational text of S-D Logic.

The author finds that Vargo and Lusch (2004a) make use of a powerful narrative of redemption in which marketing is seen to be saved from a potentially destructive internal struggle by a revelatory shift in perspective. The choice of key framing terms such as “logic”, “evolution”, and “paradigm” is found to have an important rhetorical effect in supporting this persuasive narrative and helping to cast it in a scientifically “inevitable” light.

The findings speak to the vital role played in academic marketing, and in the successful promulgation of a new movement within the academic marketing community, of persuasive language and narrative.

The chapter briefly reviews the eight volumes in my Legend series – organizational buying behavior, consumer behavior, product and new product management, marketing strategy, market segmentation, global marketing, marketing research and modeling, and the future of marketing. In addition, the chapter highlights the three driving forces of much of my research: (a) the real world challenges facing corporations and organizations, (b) the search for new methodological developments, and (c) the continuous challenge of the prevailing marketing concepts and approaches. The chapter concludes with some reflections on the evolution of marketing in the past five decades and my wish list for the discipline and my future activities.