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Introducing The History Of Marketing Theory Essay

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Introducing the History of Marketing Theory and Practice
1.1 Introduction
The global popularity of marketing as a subject for study might suggest that those studying and teaching the subject know what it is that they are studying and how this study should be undertaken. But as we shall see in this chapter and others in this book, this has often not been the case. Marketing as a subject has proved almost impossible to pin down, and there is little consensus about what it means to study marketing. Most organisations now employ marketers. Marketing roles were traditionally found in commercial firms, but increasingly all kinds of organisations feel the need to employ marketers or to commission services from marketing consultants. The …show more content…

1.2 The Early Development of Marketing Thought
In his important history of marketing, Bartels (1988) proposes that the term ‘marketing’ was first used ‘as a noun’, that is, as a label for a particular practice, sometime ‘between 1906 and 1911’ (Bartels, 1988: 3). Nonetheless, Bartels’ historical account has been challenged by scholars who assert that there were people writing about the subject before 1906 (Brussière, 2000). In appraising the Publications of the American Economic Association, Brussière found that the term marketing was actually used in 1897. Tamilia (2009), on the other hand, suggests that it was used even earlier than this in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. These examples are clearly taken from the academic literature. But it was not just academics writing about the subject. For example, Shaw (1995) notes that in Miss Parloa’s New Cookbook and Marketing Guide which was published around 1880, ‘marketing’ related to buying and selling activities. This was not the only book using the term at this time or previously. Shaw says that if we look at dictionaries prior to the Bartels statement the intellectual history of the term ‘marketing’ can be extended much further, all the way back to 1561 (Shaw, 1995: 16). On a related point, Dixon argues that ‘The Oxford English Dictionary traces the use of this term [marketing] to the sixteenth century; it certainly did not originate in the United States between 1906 and 1911’ (Dixon, 2002: 738). Nor should

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