This article explores some of the purposes, advantages, problems, and limitations of periodizing marketing history and the history of marketing thought. A sample of twenty-eight well-known periodizations taken from marketing history, the history of marketing thought, and business history is used to illustrate these themes. The article concludes with recommendations about how to periodize historical research in marketing.
An explosion of interest in consumption has occurred among American and European historians. While social historians have paid the most attention to consumption a broad array including economic, communications and intellectual historians have taken up this issue. These authors have varying views of the nature of changes in consumption and of the dimensions and causes of these changes. This article attempts to summarize the historians' views.
Surrogate shoppers are involved in a significant portion of consumer decisions. This article broadens the application of the surrogate shopper concept by including all those who shop on behalf of clients and have a fiduciary responsibility to them and examining their implications for marketing and consumer theory. Surrogate shoppers have the potential to bring about efficiencies in marketing systems. However, with their information advantage and decision-making power, both positive and negative consequences can accrue to consumers, suppliers, and society. E very day, millions of consumers delegate all or part of many purchasing decisions to surrogate shoppers. Shopping agents always have existed, but the proliferation of choices in market after market has led to new types and increased use of surrogates. More and more marketers find that, instead of facing a sea of individual consumers, they are dealing with consumers' shopping representatives. As the figures on the dollar volume of sales attest, surrogate shoppers wield significant purchasing power (see Table I).Why would consumers delegate so many important decisions to others? The lack of involvement that Olshavsky and Granbois (1979) find in their classic article may be one reason. The literature on surrogacy also has identified a lack of time and expertise and a distaste for shopping, among other reasons (Forsythe, Butler, and Schaefer 1990; Hollander 1971;Solomon 1986). Still other reasons for delegation of decision making can be found in theory. According to Alderson (1957), consumers seek to increase the potency of IA memorial essay for Kathleen M.
The authors examine issues related to farm-to-table direct marketing. We consider motivations and drawbacks associated with participating in farm-to-table from both the consumer and farmer perspectives. While we find a significant amount of advocacy for the restoration of nostalgic methods of food distribution that remove all intermediaries from direct farmer-consumer interaction, we conclude that farm-to-table direct marketing plays, and is likely to continue to play, a very minor role in US food distribution.
Small rental libraries that circulated popular fiction and nonfiction for a small fee flourished as sideline businesses in many U.S. and British nonbook retail and service outlets from the late 1920s through the 1940s. Publisher’s Weekly estimated that there were 50,000 of these so-called drugstore libraries in the United States alone in 1935. This article explores the antecedents, history, operation, and influence of those libraries. It then considers this one subindustry’s implications for such marketing concepts as theories of retail firm growth and decline, the vagueness of the distinction between products and services, loss-leader and scrambled merchandising, and relationship marketing. The overall picture is one of very considerable flexibility in both private- and ultimately public-sector response to changing consumer needs and desires.
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