Editorial

Citation

Jones, D.G.B. and Tadajewski, M. (2013), "Editorial", Journal of Historical Research in Marketing, Vol. 5 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/JHRM-07-2013-0038

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Journal of Historical Research in Marketing, Volume 5, Issue 4

Each year Emerald Publishing runs the Literati Network Awards for Excellence to highlight and reward the achievement of our authors and editors and celebrate the outstanding contributions many have made. The web pages for the Emerald Literati Network Awards for Excellence 2013 are now live at: http://www.emeraldinsight.com/literati. The JHRM 2012 Outstanding Paper Award winning article is now available as a sample article on the JHRM homepage and therefore is free to all to read for the duration of one year.

The JHRM Outstanding Paper Award winner for 2012 was “The evolution of conspicuous consumption” by Georgios Patsiaouras and James A. Fitchett published in JHRM Vol. 4 No. 1. This article deals with a subject rarely considered in much depth. The authors blend the history and sociology of consumption to trace a vast swathe of the history of marketing thought in an interesting and insightful manner. They reach back to the Roman Republic to find early examples that show conspicuous consumption is not just a twentieth century phenomenon. The authors also make a very strong case for extending the canon of literature as regards conspicuous and symbolic consumption beyond Thorstein Veblen’s work.

Our three highly commended award winners for Vol. 4 were: “A history of the concept of branding: practice and theory” by Wilson Bastos and Sidney J. Levy in No. 3; “Early schools of marketing thought and marketplace evolution” by Thomas L. Powers in No. 1; and “Marketing education and acculturation in the early twentieth century: evidence from Polish language texts on selling and salesmanship” by Terrence H. Witkowski in No. 1. Congratulations to all these authors and thank you for contributing your work to the Journal of Historical Research in Marketing.

In this issue

Articles in this issue cover a range of countries and interesting topics in marketing history including nineteenth century American firearms branding, early twentieth century department store marketing in Australia, market research on American black consumers during the early to mid-twentieth century, early twentieth century consumption by young women in Korea, and the growing worldwide phenomenon of retromarketing.

Robert Henning and Terrence H. Witkowski document the advertising of E. Remington & Sons used from 1854 to 1888 to create a valuable firearms brand. Their source material includes period newspapers, journals, and catalogs – and their article includes some wonderful illustrations. Remington’s advertising included a range of appeals including expert testimonials, fear of robbery and home invasion, claims of high quality, ownership of military contracts, and honors from shooting competitions. The Henning and Witkowski article sheds light on the evolution of the American firearms industry and on the prevailing gun culture – a hot topic in America today.

In “The role of department stores in the evolution of marketing”, Ellen McArthur examines the late nineteenth and early twentieth century retailing practices of Australian department stores to describe the antecedents of a range of so-called more “modern” marketing practices including sales promotion, trade promotion, direct mail, destination retailing, and consumer segmentation and targeting. McArthur uses a wide range of primary source material including period trade journals and newspapers, but notably the archives of the Master Retailers’ Association, the dominant industry employers’ association in Australia and possibly the first retail association of its kind in the world. McArthur’s article contributes to our understanding of Australian marketing history by connecting the practices of pioneer retailers to the broader field of marketing.

Judy Foster Davis is well known for her studies of the history of marketing to American black consumers. She adds an important chapter here in “How research on the black consumer market influenced mainstream marketers, 1920-1970”. Drawing on archival source material from the Hartman Center for Marketing History at Duke University, from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York, and from the Museum of Public Relations, Davis uses market opportunity analysis as a theoretical foundation to examine how mainstream American market research companies were motivated through the first half of the twentieth century to pursue black consumers on the basis of attractive consumption behaviors as well as demographic and psychographic characteristics that were revealed by research as early as the 1920s. During and after Second World War, market research on black consumers became widely available through the trade press, trade associations, the academic literature, and through internal corporate efforts. White and black scholars, entrepreneurs, and marketing professionals were instrumental in gathering, disseminating, and interpreting information about African-American consumers. These efforts changed the way that black consumers were portrayed in marketing materials. Davis concludes that economic self-interest, more so than social pressures, driven by civil rights advancements, transformed the African-American market into an attractive consumer segment widely recognized by mainstream marketers.

During the 1920s and 1930s in the colonial city of Seoul, a group of women known as the “New Women” and the “Modern Girls” expressed their modern identities by wearing different clothing, hairstyles, and makeup, by visiting cafes, viewing Western movies, and by consuming other foreign products. Admired by many as pioneers of modernity, they were also severely criticized by others for indulging their vanity, for breaking the boundaries of the “wise mother and good wife” ideology – and those criticisms continue today. Hyun Jeong Min provides a fascinating analysis of neo-Confucian nationalism and the Korean nationalist ideology that was deeply rooted in Korean society through her study of the consumption behaviors of New Women and Modern Girls. Min’s research draws material from period Korean newspapers, magazines, and other print advertisements from the 1920s and 1930s. This article provides an historical context for understanding women’s experiences in the consumer culture of twenty-first century Korea.

Stephen Brown’s article is a colorful history of new old stuff. Brown began writing about retromarketing about 15 years ago. At that time he believed that the use of nostalgia in marketing was a passing fad. In this reflective essay, he chronicles the ongoing popularity of retromarketing, a phenomenon he calls “yester-mania”. Brown concludes that retromarketing remains a distinctive feature of today’s past-facing, future-fearing society – and of marketing – one that is worth of further investigation by marketing historians. We agree.

D.G. Brian Jones

Explorations and Insights

Recently marketing has lost a pioneering figure in Professor William R. Davidson who passed away just before Christmas 2012. A long-time member of faculty at Ohio State University, a hugely influential scholar in retailing and distribution, the co-author of bestselling textbooks, and for many the personification of professionalism in academic practice, Davidson had a major impact on our field. In recognition of this, in this “Explorations and Insights” section, we have commissioned three papers from scholars who have studied Davidson extensively.

As Brian Jones reveals in his biographical examination of Davidson’s life and career, this was an extremely motivated person, who possessed the unusual ability of being able to straddle both academia and practice successfully. And by saying he did this simply “successfully”, perhaps we are guilty of – if anything – underplaying Davidson’s abilities. When we start to explore his personal and social development, it becomes clear that the opportunities presented at a formative age, whilst working in various jobs, sparked his initial interest in retailing. He, in turn, had the privilege of inspiring many thousands of students during his long career at Ohio and indirectly through his writing and scholarship.

Like many of his generation, Davidson’s career was influenced by the Second World War. He served his country with distinction, earning commendation. This career break provided him with time to think about how he wanted to live his life. Rather than leading him back to home and hearth, to the retailing job he was already excelling at, Davidson made use of the GI Bill’s provisions for education, coming into contact with key figures whose scholarly lifestyle moved between the worlds of research and practice: reflecting a behavioural pattern that could only have shaped Davidson’s own career strategy.

Upon arrival at Ohio State, Davidson was fortunate to work within the orbit of a number of major contributors to marketing – Maynard and Beckman – who became key figures in his doctoral supervision, eventually writing with him. These two influences underscored to Davidson the need for the close connection between academia and practice. Davidson’s career took this to a point beyond both Beckman and Maynard’s, inasmuch as he – to the surprise of colleagues and students as Sweeney and Tamilia reveal in their contributions to this section – left Ohio State to devote his time to his burgeoning role at Management Horizons, a consultancy he started with Alton Doody in the late 1960s.

Our second contribution to this section picks up some of the threads that Jones unpicks, focusing on them at a more microscopic level. We are extremely fortunate to have this contribution from an individual who not only knew Davidson very well, he was a co-author on one of Davidson’s seminal retailing textbooks, and a former Chairman of Management Horizons, Davidson’s company. Daniel Sweeney explores the development of Retailing: Principles and Practices through its multiple editions, tracking the key concepts, theories and topics covered in this important, widely used book over its publishing history. What Sweeney underscores for the reader is how Davidson’s academic work was fully inflected by the changing environmental circumstances in which he was writing. As the environment changed, his textbooks were modified to encompass cutting-edge academic thought that would speak to his key stakeholders: students and practitioners. These books were scholarly, defining and distinguishing concepts as clearly as possible, whilst also advancing research frontiers in many cases. Davidson and his co-authors managed this by using the extensive knowledge derived from consultancy activities at Management Horizons to rethink key ideas involved in, for example, calculating return on investment, repurposing and repackaging this for wider use with clients on questions of performance management.

Strategic management, efficiency in operations, determining financial returns on investment, and elements of what we now term relationship marketing and stakeholder management, weave throughout many of Davidson’s writings. Sweeney’s summary of the changes led by Davidson and his colleagues in moving marketing and retailing textbook writing from its early descriptive, “observation-based knowledge” phase to a more rigorous engagement of theory and practice should itself figure prominently in all reviews of the development of scholarship in retailing.

The third paper is by written an author who was also personally connected to Davidson, in that Tamilia’s doctoral research was undertaken at Ohio State, where Davidson was still serving as a Professor. As a highly skilled marketing historian, Tamilia takes the reader on a journey into the work of Management Horizons via a close reading of a short, but valuable book, that records the contributions of the company to retailing and distribution practice from the mid-1960s until 1996. Tamilia’s paper is wide-ranging and detailed, so only the barest bones will be explored briefly here. Tamilia’s close rendering of the Management Horizons text, highlighting the major models and concepts produced by Davidson and colleagues, offers us a unique insight into this organization. It enables us to see the importance ascribed to scholarship and the use of “real world” empirical case analysis to refine and rework extant knowledge; insights that were shared with practitioners, then ultimately placed into the hands of students exposed to Davidson’s textbooks across America, indeed the world.

Tamilia introduces and explains the function of, for example, the “Geometry of Environmental Opportunity Model”, the “Model of the Institutional Life Cycle in Retailing”, following this by reviewing Davidson’s research and consultancy work on issues of government regulation, work which took him into the court room as an expert witness. He then turns his attention to an issue flagged up in various ways by all three contributions, Davidson’s prescience with respect to computer technology and its likely impact on retailing. The interest in computer technology is connected to Davidson’s attention to efficiency, productivity and the effective management of resources. And the use and application of computer technology for information management was something that would occupy both Davidson personally and Management Horizons as a corporate entity, making the latter a desirable acquisition by Price Waterhouse LLP in the mid-1980s. This is not the end of the story for the company, but we will leave the reader to explore the remainder of the account at their own pace.

Reading the three papers in the order suggested here will provide marketing and retailing scholars with rich insights into an individual, a community of scholars, their company, and the interconnections between each of these levels ranging from micro level biographical detail through to macro, environmental factors that shaped how we understand retailing today.

Mark Tadajewski