‘Chemists to the Nation’: House magazines, locality and health at Boots The Chemists 1919–1939

Abstract

This article focuses on the role of company magazines at Boots The Chemists between 1919—1939. Informed by Marchand's model of the creation of a `corporate soul' and Weick's typology of organizational `sensemaking', the article examines how The Bee, the house journal disseminated to retail employees, alluded to the contribution made by Boots as `Chemists to the Nation' to the health and welfare of its customers and to the towns in which branches were situated. Arguing that company magazines could be used to demonstrate corporate soul to employees as much as to the consumer, the article shows how The Bee was used to `enact' scenarios that highlighted the valuable role that the company perceived that they performed in the local community.

Gaining customer centric understanding of retail displays for future innovations

“…Four documents were disregarded for being out of scope: one concerned B2B customers and managers' sensemaking thereof (Holmlund et al , 2017); another, management sensemaking across cultures (Petersburg, 2013); a third, company magazines' contributions to sensemaking within an organisation (Phillips, 2008) and the last concerned customer incivility and had no relation to retail displays (Hur et al , 2015).…”

The British house magazine 1945 to 2015: The creation of family, organisation and markets

“…Simon Phillips' similarly examined the role of the house magazine at the British pharmacist Boots in building a corporate culture in the interwar period. 15 Phillips' noted that the role of this culture was not simply to integrate workers into the company, but also acted as a means of internal propaganda by promoting the benefits that Boots offered to the nation and local communities. Magazines attempted to engineer internal consent amongst employees and counter outside criticisms concerning the size and monopolistic aspects of Boots' national chain of pharmacies.…”