Pioneers in Marketing: Biographical Essays (2012)

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Pioneers in Marketing

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51 Pioneers in MarketingA Collection of Biographical EssaysD.G. Brian Jones

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Pioneers in MarketingA Collection of Biographical Essays

D. G. Brian Jones

NEW YORK LONDON

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First published 2012by Routledge711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Simultaneously published in the UKby Routledge2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2012 Taylor & Francis

The right of D.G. Brian Jones to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Typeset in Sabon by IBT Global. Printed and bound in the United States of America on acid-free paper by IBT Global.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataA catalog record has been requested for this book.

ISBN13: 978-0-415-89193-6 (hbk)ISBN13: (ebk)

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To my elders . . .

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Contents

List of Figures xiForeword xiiiAcknowledgments xv

1 Biography and the History of Marketing Thought 1

2 Edward David Jones (1870–1944): The First Professor of Marketing 19

3 Simon Litman (1873–1965): Pioneer in International Marketing 34

4 Henry Charles Taylor (1873–1969): The Father of Agricultural Marketing 54

5 Percival White (1887–1970): Marketing Engineer 70

6 George Burton Hotchkiss (1884–1953): A Pioneer in Advertising 94

7 Theodore N. Beckman (1895–1973): Mr. Wholesaling 109

8 David D. Monieson (1927–2008): Philosopher and Pragmatist 124

9 William R. Davidson (1919–): Mr. Retailing 143

10 Lessons from Pioneers in Marketing 160 Notes 171Bibliography 173Index 189

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Figures and Tables

FIGURES

1.1 Intellectual genealogy of marketing thought. 42.1 Edward David Jones. 203.1 Simon Litman. 354.1 Henry Charles Taylor. 555.1 Percival White. 715.2 Percival White’s Projecta prototype. 745.3 Percival White’s Projecta prototype. 745.4 Offi ce work station designed by Percival White. 758.1 David D. Monieson. 1259.1 William R. Davidson. 144

TABLES

1.1 Primary Source Materials–Archives and Personal Interviews 10

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Foreword

By nature we are interested in other people, their lives, their successes, and their peculiarities. Certainly, as young scholars and students we look to those who have achieved great success. This can be success in academia, out in the world of business or, as in the case of a number of fi gures in this excellently written collection of biographical studies of the pioneers of marketing, oscillating between these domains. Professor Jones introduces us to a group of individuals that will be familiar in part, some much less so, letting us glimpse into their lives. We witness people who demonstrate considerable prowess in their varied endeavors, as well as their, on occa-sion, ego-driven failings.

But, and this is an important point underscored by Jones, these were not simply lone fi gures pushing the boundaries of theoretical, conceptual, and usable knowledge. They were supported by family, friends, and business and scholarly acquaintances who enabled them to reach the rarefi ed levels they managed in their careers. Often the encounters that would prove so fruitful were serendipitous in nature. This said, throughout this remarkable study, which spans the length of the discipline from its origins as a univer-sity based subject in the early twentieth century all the way through to the near present, we do get a sense of individual tenacity as well.

These people worked hard and frequently went out into the market-place to study what was happening between the production and delivery of goods. They often literally followed the products themselves, watched service encounters, and spoke to those working in locations of interest, cajoling them to provide access to their premises for students, so that they could see the mechanics of the distribution process fi rst hand. One gets a real sense of the labor that went into the early founding of the discipline and the expenditure of energy underpinning the description of the marketing process for peda-gogic purposes during the time-frame Jones covers so adroitly.

These early, middle, and more recent scholars and practitioners all had the ‘open-minded’ curiosity that led Professor Jones to spend a considerable period of time over his own very successful career working his way through countless university and other archives. We truly owe him a debt of thanks for his archival tenacity. He has been at the forefront of the domain of

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xiv Foreword


marketing history and the history of marketing thought for nearly thirty years. His own persistence being displayed from the outset when he refused to let Robert Bartels’s opinion that there wasn’t much of a connection between the German Historical School and early marketing thought stop him from pursuing doctoral studies that demonstrated exactly the opposite (this tenacity was supported by his supervisor, Professor David Monieson, whose biography is included in this volume).

Those with an interest in biography, but who are unsure about where to start will fi nd much methodological sustenance in this book, as Jones pro-vides the interested scholar with an overview of what it means to be con-ducting biographical research. He lists the key sources likely to help launch a piece of research in this area and gestures to the university collections that he has mined and which others might fruitfully explore. As this account reveals, he draws upon numerous sources that many have failed to fi nd or have passed over without revealing the ontologically ground-shaking issues and topics that were contained within the pages of the biographies, articles, notes for courses, and so forth that are carefully related in the pages of this book. To be sure, this is a text that will interest those already fascinated by the history of marketing thought. Even those without a prior commitment to studying the history of the discipline would, however, do very well to read this book and read it carefully.

Throughout the pages that follow, many of the lessons that we repeat to our students uncritically are questioned using source material that has not been published before. Thus, Jones highlights the early ethical orienta-tion of marketing scholars; he documents their interest in distributive jus-tice. This should interest all of us, but especially the macromarketing and critical marketing communities. For those with other orientations, we gain insight into the nature of marketer-customer relations in the early portion of the twentieth century. Far from the ‘production’ or ‘sales’ orientations we often hear about as characteristic of this time, Jones reveals the argu-ments made by multiple scholars and practitioners that bear what Wit-tgenstein would term a “family resemblance” with the later articulations of the marketing concept by General Electric and Pillsbury or relationship marketing by countless others. Those with an interest in retailing will fi nd much insight into the development and refi nement of their topic. In his treatment of William Davidson, for example, Jones highlights the way in which theory and practice were greatly infl uenced by this pioneer thinker’s exceptionally successful consultancy activities.

Put very simply, I cannot recommend this book highly enough. Read it and encourage your students to read it.

Mark TadajewskiUniversity of Strathclyde, UK

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Acknowledgments

I started writing short biographies while working on my doctoral disserta-tion at Queen’s University during the late 1980s. My supervisor, Dan Mon-ieson, fueled my passion for marketing history and biographical research was a collateral product of my dissertation on the history of marketing thought. Dan was one of three mentors who encouraged those interests at that time. As a member of my dissertation committee, Stan Shapiro was another. More recently he has been a collaborator, reviewer, and cheer-leader for my biographical projects. Among his many professional favors for me, Stan Hollander created opportunities to publish historical research in marketing when there were few gatekeepers listening. I’m especially grat-ifi ed that an earlier version of the Simon Litman biography was awarded the Stanley C. Hollander Award at the 2003 Conference on Historical Analysis and Research in Marketing—and that Stan was able to be there to make the presentation. Without those three mentors, I would not be doing the work I enjoy today.

The biographical essays in this collection were written over a period of some twenty-fi ve years. Edward David Jones and Henry Charles Taylor were characters in my dissertation which I completed in 1987. Ever since, I have been fascinated with biography and that fascination gradually led to the other essays included in this collection. Earlier versions of all of these essays were presented at conferences and/or published as articles in aca-demic periodicals. All were revised and expanded for this collection. As a result of those earlier ‘test runs’, these essays have benefi ted from the com-ments of numerous anonymous readers and reviewers. Gerald Vaughn also read my original draft of the Edward David Jones biography and, through his own study of Jones’s contributions to the fi eld of business administra-tion, he provided me with additional insights into Jones’s work on market-ing. Alan Richardson has been reading and critiquing my writing for about twenty-fi ve years and his support has always inspired me.

Three of these essays were much improved with the assistance of col-leagues who collaborated with me on earlier versions. Mark Tadajewski piqued my interest in Percival White when he invited me to join him in a study of White’s work on Scientifi c Management. White’s biography was

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xvi Acknowledgments


an extension of that project and Mark co-authored the original version for publication in Marketing Theory. Stan Shapiro and Peggy Cunning-ham were both students of Monieson and later were his colleagues. They both contributed to an earlier version of the Monieson essay published in the Journal of Historical Research in Marketing. Stan was also Mon-ieson’s friend for a half century and from that perspective provided me with insights that were invaluable in writing that biography. Peggy audited Mon-ieson’s doctoral seminar the last time he taught it and was his colleague late in his career. My wife, Paula McLean, also contributed to the Monieson biography as a research assistant, editor, and girl Friday! Those skills and others she gave generously and cheerfully throughout this entire project. And fi nally, the original idea for writing a biography of William R. David-son was entirely Robert Tamilia’s. We collaborated on the research for that biography but then for various reasons wrote separate papers about diff er-ent aspects of Davidson’s life and career for presentation at the Conference on Historical Analysis and Research in Marketing. The essay included in this collection is entirely my own, but I might never have selected Davidson as a subject without Robert’s initiative. My sincere appreciation goes to Mark, Stan, Peggy, Robert, and to Paula.

Earlier published versions of some chapters were used with permission as follows. Parts of Chapter 1 appeared in “Biography as a Methodology for Studying the History of Marketing Thought” in Psychology & Market-ing, March 1998, pp. 161–173, John Wiley and Sons. Sections of Chap-ters 2 and 4 were published in “Biography and the History of Marketing Thought: Henry Charles Taylor and Edward David Jones” in Ronald Ful-lerton (ed.) Explorations in the History of Marketing, 1994, pp. 67–85, JAI Press, copyright by Elsevier. An earlier version of Chapter 3 appeared as “Simon Litman (1873–1965): Pioneer Marketing Scholar” in Market-ing Theory, 2004, pp. 343–361, Sage Publications. Chapter 5 is based on “Percival White (1887–1970): Marketing Engineer”, also published in Mar-keting Theory, December 2011, Sage Publications. Much of Chapter 7 was published in “Theodore N. Beckman (1895–1973): External Manifestations of the Man”, March 2007, pp. 129–141, in the European Business Review, Emerald Publications. And fi nally, Chapter 8 is based on “The Intellectual Odyssey of David D. Monieson (1927–2008): A Quest for Usable Knowl-edge”, published in the Journal of Historical Research in Marketing, May 2010, pp. 198–217, Emerald Publications.

Historians rely heavily on librarians and archivists. They are a special breed and the best of them enthusiastically become part of one’s research team. As a novice historian in the late 1980s, I was grateful for the assis-tance of Harry Miller at the Wisconsin Historical Society and Raimund Goerler at the Ohio State University Archives. Harry Miller came to my rescue again some twenty-fi ve years later when I was revising the Taylor biography for this collection. Robert Chapel was helpful during my visit to the University of Illinois Archives in 1994. Emily Haddaway, curator

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Acknowledgments xvii


at the Ohio Wesleyan University Historical Collection, and Karen Jania, reference librarian at the Bentley Historical Library of the University of Michigan also provided timely assistance for my recent revision of Edward David Jones’s biography.

There are no institutionally-housed archival collections for Percival White or for the Market Research Corporation of America. At one point I almost gave up researching White’s biography for lack of source material. Persistence led me to discover that White’s grand-daughter, Lucy Sallick, lived just half an hour away from my home. Eureka! It turned out that Lucy is the White-Riley-Sallick family historian and unoffi cial archivist. The Sal-licks shared their considerable family fi les with me and gave generously of their time for interviews about Percival White. Their involvement and participation was invaluable to me.

Funding and institutional support for various parts of this research were provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Can-ada and by the Quinnipiac University School of Business summer research grants program.

My proposal for this collection was initially turned down by more than one publisher and I was about to give up when Mark Tadajewski encouraged me to persevere and introduced me to the editorial staff at Routledge Publish-ing who were enthusiastic about this project throughout its development.

My favorite editor has always been my wife, Paula. More than that, she pro-vides me with moral support and a sense of humor that keeps me grounded.

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1 Biography and the History of Marketing Thought

This book includes a collection of eight biographical essays about market-ing scholars whose lives and careers span the development of marketing as a university discipline from the early twentieth century through today. Some of their names should be well known to students of marketing. Oth-ers may be total strangers. Each, however, made important contributions to the study of marketing. For the most part, these individuals were teachers and scholars, not practitioners, although for some their consulting work informed their thinking about marketing in important ways. Beyond what we can learn from their biographies about their thoughts on marketing, my goal has been to pay tribute to important marketing scholars.

You need only turn on the television or browse the shelves of any book-store today to see that biography has become one of the most popular literary genres of our time. Most of us are interested in sports heroes, pol-iticians, and movie stars because of their notoriety or accomplishments. However, biography does more than just satisfy our curiosity about the lives of the rich and famous. It also teaches us about life and human behav-ior. Biography can tell us about a subject’s motivation, the personality they brought to their life and work, and the people and conditions that infl u-enced them along the way. In that way, biography adds fl esh to the bones of achievement. With respect to the history of an academic discipline such as marketing, biography can explain the origins of a scholar’s work, how that work came to include certain ideas, and the ideological underpinnings of a subject’s thinking. Truly important and original ideas are the product of complex combinations of conditions and infl uences for those individuals who fi rst thought of them. Studying their lives can help us to better under-stand their contributions to marketing thought and the development of the marketing discipline. Getting to know them can inspire us in our own lives and careers. Like me, you may be able to trace your own intellectual geneal-ogy to one of the subjects in this collection.

I come by my interest in biography naturally. I’ve always had a deep respect for my elders and frankly I’m a bit of a hero-worshipper (Mario Andretti and Paul Newman are high on my list). As a biographer, that is a trait that can be dangerous if not kept in check. My doctoral dissertation (Jones 1987) exam-ined the infl uence of the German Historical School of Economics on the early

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2 Pioneers in Marketing


twentieth-century development of marketing as a university discipline. It was about a particular group of economists in Germany and how their thinking infl uenced another particular group of economists in America—those who pioneered the study and teaching of marketing as an applied branch of eco-nomics (Jones and Monieson 1990b). How could I not develop an interest in the lives and careers of those individuals? Not surprisingly, a few of them are included as subjects in this collection.

For my purposes here, biography is a form of historical research. Histori-cal research in marketing tends to be divided between marketing history on the one hand and the history of marketing thought on the other. Marketing history focuses on marketing activities such as branding, advertising, retail-ing, consumption behavior, and the lives and contributions of marketing practitioners. The history of marketing thought examines marketing ideas, theory, and schools of thought, including the lives and contributions of mar-keting thinkers. A fi ne recent example of biographical work dealing with marketing history is Nancy Koehn’s (2001) collection of biographies of six pioneers in the branding and marketing of consumer goods. We are concerned here, however, with the history of marketing thought—the history of ideas about marketing and the development of marketing as a university discipline. There is a tradition of biographical study in that connection including many short biographical sketches and several longer biographical essays. Begin-ning in 1956, the Journal of Marketing published a series of biographical sketches which continued for many years, originally under the title “Pioneers in Marketing” (twenty-three subjects) and later as “Leaders in Marketing” (forty-nine subjects). Another series of twenty-six sketches formed the basis of Paul Converse’s important book on the history of marketing thought, The Beginning of Marketing Thought in the United States with Reminiscences of Some Pioneer Marketing Scholars (1959). Bartels’s well-known book on The Development of Marketing Thought (1962) included seventeen short bio-graphical notes and later editions (1976, 1988) added to that list. That book was actually based on his doctoral dissertation (1941) that also included as an appendix some forty biographical sketches, all of which were more detailed than the ones eventually published in his book. Bartels, himself, was later the subject of a biographical essay by Shaw and Tamilia (2001). Other more recently published essays include those about Wroe Alderson (Wooliscroft 2006) and Sidney Levy (Harris 2007). The Journal of Historical Research in Marketing in its fi rst issue published an autobiographical essay by the eminent marketing historian, Stanley C. Hollander (2009), and continues to publish biographical material (Tadajewski 2009; Tamilia 2011) as part of its mission. Mark Tadajewski and I (2008) also included some thirty-three biographical readings about marketing pioneers in our edited collection on the history of marketing thought, most of which were reprints from the collections cited above. And fi nally, the Sheth Foundation has recently produced a series of videotaped biographical interviews with ten living scholars who were judged to be “legends” in marketing.1 Those interviews are supplemented by a multi-volume set of each legend’s seminal works, the series being titled, Legends in


Biography and the History of Marketing Thought 3


Marketing. For a relatively complete list of previously published biographical sketches and essays about marketers, see Appendix 1.1.

In this opening chapter, I’ll briefl y explain my approach to doing biograph-ical research including some discussion about the selection of my subjects and of the source materials used. In subsequent chapters, the biographical essays are presented in the approximate chronological order of the subjects’ careers beginning with Edward David Jones (1870–1944) and Simon Litman (1873–1965) who were among the very fi rst university teachers of marketing in North America, followed by Henry Charles Taylor (1873–1969), Percival White (1887–1970), George Burton Hotchkiss (1884–1953), Theodore N. Beckman (1895–1973), David D. Monieson (1927–2008), and William R. Davidson (1919–). Bartels’s (1962) book on the development of marketing thought includes a chart showing lines of infl uence among pioneers in the marketing discipline. Four of the subjects herein were included in that origi-nal chart which is adapted here in Figure 1.1 to illustrate all eight subjects and their connections in the intellectual genealogy of marketing thought. From Jones, who taught the fi rst marketing course at the University of Michi-gan in 1901, to Davidson, whose career began in the late 1940s and until recently was still active as a retailing management consultant, their careers span over a century. Percival White is the only subject in this collection who was not a university professor although he wrote several college textbooks about marketing. In one way or another, all were pioneers in marketing.

THE BIOGRAPHER’S CRAFT

There are two basic approaches to biographical research. The biography-as-social-science approach uses life history as a method of doing sociological or psychological research in the development and testing of theory (Merrill and West 2009; Miller 2000, 2005). The more common approach used for this collection is a form of non-fi ction literature about the lives of signifi cant individuals. Here, biography is a branch of history using historical research methods to follow, document, and verify the results of genuine, open-minded curiosity, exploring with honesty the realities of a human life (Hamilton 2008). The essence of this historical perspective is a thorough, systematic, critical, and sophisticated awareness of the changes or continuity in events over time and of the context in which change or continuity occurs (Fullerton 1987). Historical research requires a coherent recreation of what happened and the signifi cance of what happened, a narration of those events through time including the analysis and explanation of the causes and consequences of those events. However, using the metaphor of landscape, history is more concerned with the background–the social, political, and economic context of important historical events or developments, whereas biography focuses on the human foreground. Very little has been written about doing biograph-ical research in marketing (Jones 1998; Nevett 1983; Savitt 2011) and not a lot has been published about doing biographical research in general. Three




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books of instruction I fi nd invaluable are those by Hamilton (2008), Lomask (1986), and Barzun and Graff (2004).

Barzun and Graff ’s (2004) classic work describes simply the process of doing historical research as follows.

1. Select a subject. 2. Consult secondary sources. For biography, a good place to start is with

the Gale Biography Resource Center, an online database of biographi-cal information on over 380,000 people from throughout history and around the world, and H. W. Wilson’s Biography Index (the largest ongoing index to biographical books, pamphlets, and journal articles). Various dictionaries of biography include Current Biography, Ameri-can National Biography (twenty-four volumes plus supplements), the National Cyclopedia of American Biography (sixty-three volumes since 1897), and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (for British subjects). Also useful are the various Who’s Who directories, genealogical websites, and the American Genealogical Index. Obvi-ously, any published biographies of the subject must also be read.

3. Take notes from secondary sources; analysis is part of this process. 4. Find the facts; collect source material or primary data. This will usu-

ally include two major categories of data: archival source material, and interviews or oral evidence. The National Union Catalogue of Manuscript Collections (free online through the Library of Congress) can be useful in tracking down relevant archival collections.

5. Verify facts; this is an ongoing process and relies on honesty and intel-lectual humility as well as awareness of one’s biases and an attempt to compensate for them. Sources must be constantly questioned for validity and reliability. Triangulation of data sources can be useful in that connection.

6. Turn facts into ideas; this involves commonsense reasoning, the search for probabilistic truth and for the types of causation that occur in a long chain of events, and for patterns which are usually demonstrated over time. The biographer arranges snapshots into a movie, turns sin-gle moments into a whole life (Gaddis 2002).

7. Organize and write the story. Research and writing are two sides of the same coin. You iterate between them. The subject’s life line gives the biography its inherent structure. There is a chronology to every subject’s life, but the writing doesn’t have to be chronologically linear.

SELECTING A SUBJECT

The biographer’s fi rst task is to select a subject and the biographer’s relation-ship with that subject is crucial to success in writing a biography. Why these lives? Why are they interesting to me (and hopefully to others) and relevant




to students of marketing? Milton Lomask (1986) writes that the best subject is a person whose interests, attitudes, and background are roughly consonant with the biographer’s. So, who better to write biographies about marketing academics than another marketing academic? Lomask also writes about the need for subjects to have suffi cient “residue”, a combination of impact or biographical worthiness if you will and suffi cient distance in time from the present to be able to put the subject’s impact into perspective.

My doctoral dissertation (1987) was about the “Origins of Marketing Thought” and documented of some of the earliest university courses in marketing including those taught by Edward David Jones (University of Michigan), Simon Litman (University of California), and Henry Charles Taylor (University of Wisconsin). It focused on the historical developments at two centers of early infl uence on the development of marketing thought: the University of Wisconsin where Jones and Taylor had trained as econo-mists and where Taylor became a faculty member, and the Harvard Busi-ness School. The fi rst biography I tackled was Edward David Jones (no relation). His work was featured prominently in an article published by my dissertation supervisor, David D. Monieson (1981a), another one of my subjects in this collection. In connection with my dissertation research, I studied Jones’s early writings on marketing and one thing (the dissertation) led to another (the biographical essay). One of the things that interested me about Jones was his keen sense of ethical marketing. That appealed to the macromarketer in me.

Simon Litman was part of the supporting cast in my dissertation work, so I did not begin work on his biography until much later. Little was known about Litman except that he had taught one of the fi rst university courses in marketing at the University of California-Berkeley. He later moved to the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign where I found myself in 1994 during an archival trip. The University of Illinois Archives turned out to be a gold mine for my study of Litman’s life and career. Among the mate-rials there was an unpublished autobiography by Litman. Sometimes the selection of a subject is driven by the availability of great source material. Among other claims to fame, it turns out that Litman was the fi rst market-ing professor to teach and write about international marketing.

Much of what is written above about Jones also applies to Henry Charles Taylor. They were classmates at the University of Wisconsin which accounts for many of their similarities. In fact, the careers of Jones and Taylor had so many parallels that I published an article examining those connections (Jones 1994). What distinguished Taylor from Jones was the former’s spe-cialization in agricultural marketing. He was the fi rst to teach that subject at the University of Wisconsin and one of the fi rst to do so in America. During my visits to the University of Wisconsin Archives and to the State Historical Society of Wisconsin for dissertation research, I discovered that the Henry Charles Taylor Papers contained a great deal of material includ-ing his unpublished autobiography, all of which yielded another gold mine for a biographical essay.




Mark Tadajewski piqued my interest in Percival White when he invited me to collaborate on a study of White’s pioneering work on Scientifi c Man-agement. White was an engineer and consultant, not an academic, but had published a seminal book on Scientifi c Marketing Management (1927b) as well as some of the earliest books dealing with market research (1921, 1927a, 1931). One of my mentors, Stan Hollander, often criticized mar-keting historians for ignoring the contributions to marketing thought by non-academics, so Percival White’s biography became, for me, a tribute to Hollander. Besides his lack of academic pedigree, White’s biography was diff erent from the others in this collection in that it was my fi rst opportunity to work with a private archival collection, an extensive resource owned by one of White’s grand-daughters, Lucy Sallick, who also provided additional insights into White’s life and career. It was a unique and truly rewarding experience working with the Sallicks on Percival White’s biography.

As a marketing historian, I had long admired the seminal work on that subject by George Burton Hotchkiss. His Milestones of Marketing: A Brief History of the Evolution of Market Distribution (1938) was the fi rst rea-sonably comprehensive history of marketing as we understand it today. Milestones and Hotchkiss’s Wheeler’s Treatise of Commerce (1931), prob-ably qualify him as one of the fi rst true marketing historians. As an aside, a favorite in my personal book collection is number 299 of the 400 signed and numbered copies of the “deluxe edition” of Wheeler’s Treatise of Com-merce. Hotchkiss’s biographical essay herein benefi ted from my discovery of his unpublished autobiography in the New York University Archives.

Theodore N. Beckman spent his entire academic career at Ohio State Uni-versity and was my dissertation supervisor’s dissertation supervisor, which makes Beckman a sort of intellectual grandfather to me. That gave me a natural enough interest in his life and career. Beckman was also the most prolifi c and recognized scholar in this collection. He published over two hundred articles and seven books (one of them co-authored with William Davidson, another of the subjects in this collection), including seminal work in the areas of wholesaling, credit, and marketing productivity, as well as a Principles text that evolved through eight editions. Most American market-ing professors during the mid-twentieth century knew of Beckman and his work. Indeed, many likely taught from Beckman’s textbooks. He supervised over fi fty doctoral students at Ohio State University (including Davidson and Monieson), many of whom became well-known scholars in their own right. Beckman also consulted extensively to government and business. All of this created substantial residue for his biography. As a graduate student, I some-times listened to stories about Beckman told in reverence by Monieson. Beck-man’s impact on his students was also evident to me when in 1993, while presenting an earlier version of his biography at a conference, one of Beck-man’s former students who was in the audience came up to me afterwards with tears in his eyes and thanked me for telling Beckman’s life story.

The Ohio State University connection continues with David D. Mon-ieson, who was a student of Beckman’s and my mentor at Queen’s




University. Monieson was already a legend at Queen’s when I studied there as a graduate student in the early 1980s. While Monieson made impor-tant contributions to marketing scholarship, especially in the philosophy of marketing (Tadajewski 2010), his impact or residue is fi rmly established as a marketing teacher (Shapiro 2010; Trebuss 2010). Writing his biographi-cal essay was a struggle for me in some ways. It wasn’t until ten years after I had interviewed Monieson at length for this work and not until he had tragically developed Alzheimer’s disease that I began to write his biography. Even then I did so with considerable assistance from colleagues who were also students of Monieson’s. All of this provided me with some distance and helped me to keep an important balance and perspective on Monieson’s contributions to marketing.

The fi nal subject in this collection is William R. Davidson. The idea of writing a biography about Davidson should be credited to Robert Tamilia who shares my interest in biography and is a student of retailing, Davidson’s area of expertise. Tamilia and I began collaborating on the Davidson story, and interviewed Davidson together at his home in 1998, but then for various reasons we each wrote separate chapters on Davidson’s life for presentation at a conference in 1999. The end product included in this collection is entirely my own. Davidson’s career, more than any other in this collection, was split between the academic and business worlds. He was a distinguished mem-ber of the faculty at Ohio State University for twenty-fi ve years including a stint as chairman of the marketing department, was an accomplished scholar with numerous publications on retailing, served as President of the American Marketing Association, then founded what became one of the largest and most successful retail management consulting fi rms in the world, Manage-ment Horizons, which he guided for over twenty years.

GATHERING SOURCE MATERIAL

It is important to distinguish between primary and secondary biographical data. At a deeper level, however, it is also useful to identify four diff erent categories of biography or biographical data: personal, professional, intel-lectual, and environmental.

Primary and Secondary Biographical Data

The distinction between primary and secondary data is not as clear for historical writing as for some other forms of research. Generally speak-ing, primary historical data is that which came into existence during the time period being studied (during the subject’s life) and which has not been interpreted in some way for the purpose of writing a history or a biography. Secondary historical sources include the literature published about the time period being studied. This can include published biographies of the subject, the published literature about the history of marketing thought, histories of




institutions at which the subject worked, and of course general histories of the time period during which a subject lived. If the subject was a university faculty member, there may be a history of their affi liated institution and perhaps of the relevant department within that institution which can be a valuable secondary source in researching a biography. For example, since Beckman and Davidson both served on the faculty at Ohio State University for a long time, the starting points for research into their biographies were provided in Guy-Harold Smith’s (1966) The First Fifty Years of the College of Commerce and Administration (of Ohio State University).

Broadly speaking, primary source materials usually include written documents (diaries, notes, correspondence, and even published articles and books by the subject), images (photographs, advertising), artifacts, and memories elicited through oral history methods or interviewing. For biographies of marketing scholars such as the individuals in this collection, the most important sources of primary data were archival documents and memories recorded during interviews. Their scholarship, both published and unpublished, was also obviously an important source since it includes each subject’s ideas about marketing. Beckman’s Principles text (1927), for instance, is an important source of information about his thinking on the philosophy of marketing science. In the introduction to that text, he clearly describes his belief in a positivistic science of marketing and confi rms his ultimate goal in scholarship–the development of marketing theory. When used to speculate about his philosophy of science, Beckman’s Principles text is a source of primary data. On the other hand, Wright’s (1965) bio-graphical sketch of Beckman published in the Journal of Marketing is an interpretation of Beckman’s life and contributions, and thus is secondary data. As you can see, the usually clear distinction between unpublished and published data (as primary and secondary, respectively) does not hold here. Primary biographical data can be, and usually is, unpublished (for example the personal papers found in an archival collection). Clearly, however, a book published by a marketing scholar can also be primary data for a bio-graphical examination of that individual’s contributions to theory.

As with all forms of research, it is desirable to use as much primary data as possible in order to get close to the subject, to get inside his or her mind. Although there are important marketing thinkers who were not university professors (Percival White, for instance), faculty members are in an unusual professional situation that often lends itself to creating a rich collection of unpublished, primary biographical data. Most university archives collect, or used to collect, as a matter of policy the papers of important faculty members and in the past many university professors seem to have been pack rats. As a consequence, there are often considerable collections of personal papers which have been donated to universities providing important sources for bio-graphical research. Those sources range from curriculum vitae (simple, but nonetheless an important primary source of biographical data) to large col-lections of personal papers including unpublished autobiographies, diaries, lecture notes, unpublished papers, photos, and correspondence. Table 1.1




lists the major archival collections used for the biographies presented herein, and briefl y describes the nature of each collection.

The Theodore N. Beckman Papers at the Ohio State University Archives, for instance, include personal correspondence covering the period from

Table 1.1 Primary Source Materials--Archives and Personal Interviews

Subject Sources/Description of Materials

E. D. Jones(1870–1944)

Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan—Edward David Jones Necrology File; State Historical Society of Wiscon-sin—Richard T. Ely Papers: correspondence; State Historical Society of Wisconsin—Henry C. Taylor Papers: correspondence.

S. Litman(1873–1965)

University of Illinois Archives—Simon Litman Papers: unpub-lished autobiography, correspondence, unpublished manuscripts, fi nancial records, lecture notes, speeches.

H. C. Taylor(1873–1969)

State Historical Society of Wisconsin—Henry C. Taylor Papers: unpublished autobiography, correspondence, diaries, speeches, course notes, unpublished manuscripts, biographical material including photos; University of Wisconsin Library Archives—Benjamin H. Hibbard Papers: unpublished manuscript; State His-torical Society of Wisconsin—Richard T. Ely Papers: unpublished manuscript; Yale University Library Archives—Farnam Family Papers: correspondence.

P. White(1887–1970)

Private family collection—Lucy Sallick Papers: oral history transcript, correspondence, biographical material including photos, unpublished manuscripts; Library of Congress—Edward Bernays Papers: correspondence, unpublished manuscripts, various documents for a market research survey, New York Public Library—Market Research (1934–1938); Interviews with Lucy Sallick conducted in 2010.

G. B. Hotchkiss(1884–1953)

New York University Archives—George Burton Hotchkiss: unpublished autobiography

T. N. Beckman(1895–1973)

Ohio State University Archives—Theodore N. Beckman Papers: curriculum vita, biographical notes, correspondence, lecture notes and exams, consulting reports, unpublished manuscripts and speeches, Master’s Degree Thesis; Notre Dame University Archives—James Hagerty Papers: course notes, Interview of Beckman conducted by Robert Buzzell in 1965; Interview with David D. Monieson conducted in 1992; Interview with William R. Davidson conducted in 1992.

D. D. Monieson(1927–2008)

Interviews (seven hours) with David D. Monieson conducted in 1998; Private family collection—correspondence, unpublished manuscripts, lecture notes and exams; Interview conducted with Mel Goodes in 2007.

W. R. Davidson(1919–)

Interviews (ten hours) with William R. Davidson conducted in 1998.




1941 to 1970, biographical notes prepared for university records, course outlines, tests and lecture notes, extensive consulting reports and corre-spondence, and unpublished manuscripts and speeches. Similarly, the Simon Litman Papers held at the University of Illinois Archives numbers eighteen boxes and covers the period from 1865 to 1965 including correspondence, speeches, newspaper clippings, unpublished manuscripts and notes, photo-graphs, and an unpublished autobiography. Those substantial collections of primary data have provided considerable grist for my biographical mill.

Of course, if your subject is living, then personal interviews can be used to gather primary data. Davidson’s and Monieson’s biographies relied exten-sively on personal interviews conducted over multiple sessions in 1998. The Monieson interviews ran seven hours and the Davidson interviews totaled ten hours, all of which was transcribed to facilitate interpretation and to preserve the fi ndings. Shorter, more structured interviews were also con-ducted with former students and family members for the biographies of Theodore Beckman and Percival White. A fi lmed interview of Beckman (1965c) was conducted by one of his former students for the American Marketing Association and that provided useful information but it is a secondary source of information for my research. Wherever possible, mul-tiple sources were interviewed to obtain multiple perspectives. One of the advantages of these interviews was that they elicited feelings and states of mind that are often absent from or disguised by written documents.

Some primary data may be diffi cult to fi nd depending on the subject (busi-ness practitioners, even successful ones, don’t tend to create or leave behind collections of personal papers). Percival White is a case in point. White was a newspaper reporter, engineer, and marketing consultant who founded what became one of the largest market research fi rms in America during the 1930s and 1940s. Yet there is no institutionally-housed (e.g. university, historical society, or public library) archive for either White or the company he founded in 1934, Market Research Corporation of America. He is listed in various Who’s Who directories (Who’s Who in New England, Who’s Who in Amer-ica, and Who’s Who in Commerce and Industry), and in the Gale Biogra-phy Resource Center which adds little to the Who’s Who directories besides White’s list of publications. The New York Times published his obituary in 1970 and an issue of the Bulletin of the Taylor Society (of Scientifi c Manage-ment fame) in 1927 gave a very brief biographical note about White that had obviously been provided by him to the Bulletin in connection with a review of his book, Scientifi c Marketing Management. Taken together, those mate-rials were not suffi cient to write the biographical essay that is included in this collection. However, a co-author of one of White’s books turned out to be one of his daughters, Matilda White-Riley (1911–2004), who later became a well-known sociologist. At the time I was researching Percival White’s biog-raphy, Matilda’s curriculum vita was still posted online with the American Sociological Association and it included the names of her children. Coin-cidentally, Matilda’s daughter (White’s grand-daughter), Lucy Sallick, lives not far from my home. Indeed, Lucy Sallick owns a fairly large collection of




family papers and graciously granted me access for the purpose of research-ing Percival White’s biographical essay.

Categories of Biographical Data

Beyond the primary and secondary data issue, there are diff erent catego-ries of data that refl ect diff erent aspects of a subject’s life. All biographical research draws basically on four such categories: personal, professional, intellectual, and environmental biography.

Personal biographical data, or personal biography, includes the demo-graphic, family, and personality characteristics of a subject. Sources of such data include curriculum vitae, autobiographies, diaries, and even interviews with the subject as well as with friends and relatives. For example, Beck-man’s personal biography relied to some extent on his curriculum vita as well as interviews with former students. An interview with Beckman by his former student, Robert Buzzell, under the auspices of the American Market-ing Association had been fi lmed in 1965, approximately ten years before Beckman’s death. Watching that fi lm allowed me to see and hear Beckman speak about his own contributions to a particular area of marketing thought. Taken together, those sources inspired a vision of a man with an intense work ethic, one who, like many early twentieth-century Americans, was a poor immigrant who worked hard to acquire wealth and material possessions. They also suggested that Beckman was somewhat intellectually arrogant and therefore slow to recognize the work of others. The biographies of George Burton Hotchkiss, Simon Litman, and Henry Charles Taylor all benefi ted from my access to their unpublished autobiographies. However, Hotchkiss’s manuscript was more useful than was Litman’s or Taylor’s in writing about contributions to marketing, because Hotchkiss was much more involved in scholarly marketing organizations and more clearly aware of his importance to the marketing discipline than were the other two subjects. A signifi cant portion of Litman’s autobiography deals with his contributions to Jewish reli-gious organizations which are only indirectly related to his career, which is the primary focus of the biography presented in this collection. And Taylor’s autobiography focuses greatly on his later work for non-academic organiza-tions involved in agricultural economics.

Professional biography examines the jobs, positions, and careers held during a subject’s life. Of course, the subject’s curriculum vita is again an excellent source of this type of data. Beckman’s vita confi rmed that all of his university education and his entire working life were spent at Ohio State University. This may help to explain why he placed such a high value on outside consulting jobs. They gave him non-academic contacts and a fresh way of looking at marketing problems. For Beckman’s professional biog-raphy, specifi cally relating to his consulting work, university records were also an important source of information. During that time period, faculty members at Ohio State University doing outside consulting were required to provide a detailed request to the university. That included a description




of the type of work to be carried out as well as a rationale for how the con-sulting would contribute to the faculty member’s academic career. In the Theodore N. Beckman Papers there are numerous such requests that pro-vide much insight into the consulting jobs done throughout his career. His motivation for such work was undoubtedly fi nancial, in part, but his offi -cial requests to the university also suggested that Beckman saw consulting as an essential part of the training for any university teacher of marketing.

Intellectual biography describes the education and training of a subject. For this, the biographer of a marketing scholar might fi rst turn to the uni-versity calendars or catalogs of the educational institutions attended by the subject. Such calendars published in the early twentieth century often included a good deal of information that is no longer provided today. For example, course descriptions in calendars sometimes specifi ed which read-ings were assigned and gave detailed descriptions of course content. Essen-tially, a brief syllabus was included as part of the university calendar. Often, calendars included a list of the names of outside speakers invited to lecture in business schools, and they almost always indicated faculty members’ teaching assignments. This can be used to develop an intellectual genealogy for the subject and, in turn, can lead to archival collections of the subject’s teachers for information about the intellectual biography of the subject. For Beckman’s biography, this included a study of the James Hagerty Papers, since Hagerty was Beckman’s undergraduate and graduate teacher, his doc-toral thesis supervisor, and indeed, for a period of time was Dean of the College of Commerce at Ohio State. In turn, the Theodore N. Beckman Papers were useful in providing background for Davidson’s biography as well as Monieson’s since both were students of Beckman.

In addition, archival collections for a subject sometimes include lecture notes and theses written when the subject was a student. These materials can off er valuable insights, not only into what was studied and under whom, but also into the early development of ideas which later became important con-cepts or theories for the marketing discipline. Such was the case for Beckman’s Master’s thesis on wholesaling, which grew out of a course on “Wholesaling and Retailing” taught by Walter Weidler at Ohio State University. Weidler went on to supervise Beckman’s thesis and provided him with many of the industry contacts who were infl uential in that particular piece of work and in some of the consulting work later pursued by Beckman.

Environmental biography includes the social, political, and economic con-ditions during a subject’s life. Generally these are available from published his-tories of the period during which a subject lived. Even a general knowledge of the unusual economic and social conditions during the depression of the 1930s and world wars will provide some context for the biography of individuals who lived during those times. For example, it is important to understand how diffi cult and risky it must have been to start a new company during the depres-sion such as Percival White did in 1934 with Market Research Corporation of America. Records of such conditions as they aff ected subjects at a personal level can sometimes be found in diaries or in unpublished autobiographies.




The persecution of Jews, especially during World War I, played a signifi cant role in making Simon Litman more active in Jewish religious organizations and less active in scholarly pursuits after 1920.

As secondary and primary data are being collected, in all of its various biographical forms, the process of analysis is already beginning. The very activity of fi ling the data forces the biographer to begin imposing some order on the collections of facts being assembled.

TURNING FACTS INTO IDEAS–ANALYSIS AND INTERPRETATION

One popular description of the analysis and interpretation of historical data draws an analogy with detective work (Barzun and Graff 2004; Lomask 1986; Winks 1968). This is because the analysis and verifi cation of histori-cal evidence must be guided by accuracy, love of order, logic, honesty, self-awareness, and imagination (Barzun and Graff 2004). The underlying logic is analogous to regression analysis; one examines the correlation of diff er-ent sets of events and attempts to explain the relationships among them. Fortunately, biography cannot be expressed in the same neat, quantitative form as are regression results. The chronological ordering of events can imply, but cannot prove, causality. Fullerton (2011) writes that the most important aspect of historical methodology is interpretation, going beyond a chronicling of facts, explaining why events occurred and why people did what they did. Analysis and interpretation of historical evidence requires a little imagination and creativity.

ORGANIZING AND WRITING THE STORY

Analysis and writing are interrelated. Indeed, it is one iterative process moving back and forth between the two activities. Narrative, telling the story of the past, is the only structure appropriate for writing a biography. Character, setting, action, and happening, all interact to produce narrative (Witkowski and Jones 2006). An essential quality of biographical writing is clarity. Some historians favor a dramatic and literary style and others prefer heavy documentation from source materials, but all must write with clar-ity. Good narrative also depends on achieving the correct historical tempo expanding and contracting the scale of time to establish the signifi cance of events (Hexter 1971). The narrative can be organized chronologically, topically, or a combination thereof. Usually, the biographer starts by orga-nizing the events of a subject’s life chronologically, allowing the topical patterns to emerge as the research progresses. For the most part, all of the biographies in this collection are presented in a chronological theme, but with topical sections based mostly on intellectual background, professional career, education, teaching, research, and (where relevant) consulting.




Periodization is the division of chronology into separately labeled, sequential time periods with reasonably distinct beginning and end points (Hollander et al. 2005). Time periods are to the historian or biographer what acts and scenes are to the playwright. They summarize and structure the narrative to make it more understandable. Two methods appropriate for biographical writing are context-driven periodization, where the structure is punctuated by some external event or events that precipitated a change in direction of the subject’s life or career, and periodization by turning points in the subject’s life itself. A good example of the former was the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 which led to Percival White’s inheritance of suffi cient wealth to allow him to quit his job as a newspaper reporter, start his own automobile manufacturing company, and develop his talents as an engineer which profoundly aff ected the way he thought of marketing. The progres-sion in a subject’s life line, for example childhood, education, jobs held, and important achievements, provides examples of turning points used to structure all of the biographical essays in this collection.

***

There is a tradition of biographical writing about pioneers in marketing, but most of that work consists of very short biographical sketches. This collection of longer essays includes subjects who were important marketing scholars of the twentieth century. Some of these eight subjects have a personal connec-tion with me. Some were selected for serendipitous reasons. All of them had interesting careers from which we can learn lessons about the development of the marketing discipline through the twentieth century.

An exhaustive search of published historical and biographical literatures turned up little prior work about the subjects in this collection. My work here was informed by a wealth of archival source material and depth interviews. Stated simply, biography is story-telling, but it is story-telling that is truthful, analytical, and informative. It is story-telling that can add to our understand-ing of the history of marketing ideas–in a poetic way. The eight biographies which follow are stories about great marketing scholars whose accomplish-ments should be recognized and celebrated. Whether for the seminal nature of their ideas, the enduring infl uence of those ideas on marketing thinking, or the impact they had as teachers, they were all pioneers in marketing.

APPENDIX 1.1. BIOGRAPHICAL PUBLICATIONS ABOUT MARKETERS

The following is a relatively complete list of publications that include bio-graphical material about marketing practitioners and scholars although mostly the latter. The material is categorized by increasing depth of cover-age into “Brief Notes”, “Short Sketches”, and “Essays”.




Brief Notes

Bartels, R. 1941. Marketing Literature–Development and Appraisal. PhD diss., OSU. Appendix D: “Biographical and Autobiographical Material Concerning Marketing Writers” contains the following subjects:

Agnew, Hugh Elmer; Alderson, Wroe; Alexander, R. S.; Anshen, Mel-vin Leon; Barker, Clare Wright; Beckman, Theodore N.; Borden, Neil H.; Breyer, Ralph Frederick; Brisco, Norris A.; Butler, Ralph Starr; Canoyer, Helen G.; Cherington, Paul T.; Clark, Fred E.; Comish, New-ell Howland; Converse, Paul D.; Copeland, Melvin Thomas; Drury, James C.; Duncan, Carson S.; Elder, Robert Fairchild; Engle, Natha-neal Howard; Grether, Ewald Theophilus; Hibbard, Benjamin Hor-ace; Holtzolaw, Henry F.; Huegy, Harvey W.; Ivey, Paul W.; Learned, Edmund Philip; Macklin, Theodore; Maynard, Harold Howard; Nystrom, Paul H.; Phillips, Charles F.; Pyle, John Freeman; Shaw, Arch Wilkenson; Slagsvold, P. L.; Surface, Frank Macy; Tosdal, Harry R.; Vaile, Roland S.; Vaughan, Floyd Lamar; Weidler, Walter Crothers; Weld, Louis D. H.; White, Percival.

Short Sketches

I. Bartels, R. 1988. The History of Marketing Thought. Columbus, OH: Publishing Horizons. Appendix A: “Pioneers in Marketing Thought” con-tains the following subjects:

Agnew, Hugh E.; Beckman, Theodore N.; Borden, Neil H.; Breyer, Ralph F.; Butler, Ralph Starr; Clark, Fred E.; Comish, N. H.; Converse, P. D.; Copeland, Melvin T.; Duncan, C. S.; Hibbard, B. H.; Macklin, Theodore; Maynard, H. H.; Nystrom, Paul H.; Shaw, Arch W.; Vaile, Roland S.; Weidler, W. C.; Weld, L. D. H.

II. Bartels’s (1988) Appendix B: “Contributors to Marketing Thought” contains the following subjects:

Bagozzi, Richard P.; Bartels, Robert; Bass, Frank M.; Bettman, James R.; Bowersox, Donald J.; Bucklin, Louis P.; Buzzell, Robert D.; Churchill, Gilbert A.; Cohen, Joel B.; Engel, James F.; Hollander, Stanley C.; Hol-loway, Robert J.; Howard, John A.; Hunt, Shelby D.; Kassarjian, Har-old H.; Kotler, Philip; Lazer, William; Levitt, Theodore; Levy, Sidney J.; McCarthy, E. Jerome; Stanton, William J.; Stern, Louis W.

III. Converse, P. D. 1959. The Beginning of Marketing Thought in the United States. Austin, TX: Bureau of Business Research, University of Texas. Chapter III: “The Pioneer Scholars” contains the following subjects:




Butler, Ralph Starr; Calkins, Earnest Elmo; Cherington, Paul T.; Clark, Fred E.; Copeland, Melvin T.; Douglas, Archer Wall; Duncan, C. S.; Frederick, J. George; Hall, S. Roland; Nystrom, Paul; Parlin, Charles Coolidge; Russell, Frederick A.; Moriarty, W. D.; Sammons, Wheeler; Scott, Walter Dill; Secrist, Horace; Shaw, Arch W.; Starch, Daniel; Ste-vens, W. H. S.; Weld, L. D. H.

IV. The Journal of Marketing’s “Pioneers in Marketing” series includes the following subjects (publication year, volume, issue number):

Agnew, Hugh Elmer (1960, volume 24, issue 3); Brisco, Norris Arthur (1960, 25, 1); Cherington, Paul Terry (1956, 21, 2); Clark, Fred Emerson (1957, 22, 1); Converse, Paul Dulaney (1958, 23, 2); Copeland, Melvin T. (1957, 22, 2); Erdman, Henry E. (1960, 24, 4); Filene, Edward A., and Filene, Lincoln (1959, 23, 3); Hibbard, Benjamin Horace (1959, 24, 2); Hotchkiss, George Burton (1961, 25, 3); Lyon, Leverett Samuel (1959, 23, 4); Maynard, Harold H. (1959, 23, 4); Nourse, Edwin Gris-wold (1958, 22, 4); Nystrom, Paul Henry (1957, 21, 4); Parlin, Charles Coolidge (1956, 21, 1); Scott, Walter Dill (1961, 25, 5); Shaw, Arch W. (1958, 22, 3); Starch, Daniel (1957, 21, 3); Tosdal, Harry R. (1958, 23, 1); Vaile, Roland Snow (1956, 20, 4); Weld, Louis D. H. (1960, 25, 2).

V. The Journal of Marketing’s “Leaders in Marketing” series includes the following subjects (publication year, volume, issue number):

Alderson, Wroe (1966, volume 30, issue 1); Alexander, R. S. (1967, 31, 4); Beckman, Theodore N. (1965, 29, 3); Bernstein, S. R. (1965, 29, 2); Borden, Neil H. (1963, 27, 1); Branch, Judson B. (1973, 37, 3); Britt, Steuart-Henderson (1974, 38, 1); Brown, Lyndon O. (1965, 29, 4); Bursk, Edward C. (1970, 34, 3); Caples, John (1973, 37, 4); Carroll, Thomas S. (1965, 29, 1); Cooke, Blaine (1969, 33, 3); Cox, Reavis (1969, 33, 1); Duncan, Delbert J. (1968, 32, 2); Frey, Albert Wesley (1963, 27, 4); Gallup, George H. (1962, 26, 4); Grether, E. T. (1967, 31, 2); Harper, Marion, Jr. (1967, 31, 1); Hilton, Conrad N. (1969, 33, 4); Heineman, Ben W. (1967, 31, 3); Hobart, Donald M. (1962, 26, 1); Howard, John A. (1970, 34, 1); Iacocca, Lee (1968, 32, 4); Jelliff e, C. Gordon (1973, 37, 1); Kaiser, Henry J. (1963, 27, 2); Keith, Robert J. (1968, 32, 3); Kellstadt, Charles H. (1973, 37, 2); Kotler, Philip (1972, 36, 4); Kroc, Ray A. (1970, 34, 2); Lane, Mills B., Jr. (1971, 35, 3); Lawrence, Mary Wells (1972, 36, 1); Lucas, Darrell Blaine (1971, 35, 2); Mahoney, David J. (1964, 28, 4); McNair, Malcolm P. (1969, 33, 2); Nielson, Arthur C. (1962, 26, 3); O’Dell, William F. (1970, 34, 4); Parks, Henry G., Jr. (1972, 36, 3); Peterson, Peter G. (1966, 30, 3); Politz, Alfred (1964, 28, 1); Polk, Sol (1966, 30, 2); Romney, George (1963, 27, 3); Rubicam, Ray-mond (1962, 26, 2); Smith, Everett R. (1964, 28, 2); Smith, Wendell R.




(1966, 30, 4); Stanton, Frank (1964, 28, 3); Staudt, Thomas A. (1972, 36, 2); Suzuki, Yasura (1971, 35, 4); Walker, E. Cardon (1968, 32, 1); Weinberg, Robert Stanley (1971, 35, 1).

VI. Wright, J. S., and P. B. Dimsdale, eds. 1974. Pioneers in Marketing. Atlanta, GA: Georgia State University. This source includes the following subjects (in addition to those originally contained in the Journal of Market-ing’s “Pioneers in Marketing” series):

Breyer, Ralph F.; Converse, Paul Dulaney; Copeland, Melvin T.; Nystrom, Paul Henry; Resor, Stanley B.; Saunders, Clarence.

EssaysHarris, G. E. 2007. Sidney Levy: Challenging the Philosophical Assumptions of

Marketing. Journal of Macromarketing 27 (1): 7–14.Hollander, S. C. 2009. My Life on Mt Olympus. Journal of Historical Research in

Marketing 1 (1): 10–33.Shaw, E., and R. Tamilia. 2001. Robert Bartels and the History of Marketing

Thought. Journal of Macromarketing 21 (2): 156–63.Tadajewski, M. 2009. Competition, Cooperation and Open Price Associations:

Relationship Marketing and Arthur Jerome Eddy (1859–1920). Journal of His-torical Research in Marketing 1 (1): 122–43.

Tamilia, R. D. 2011. The Timeless Intellectual Contributions of Donald F. Dixon. Journal of Historical Research in Marketing 3 (1): 33–52.

Wooliscroft, B. 2006. Wroe Alderson a Life. In A Twenty-First Century Guide to Aldersonian Marketing Thought, ed. B. Wooliscroft, R. Tamilia, and S. Sha-piro, 3–32. Boston, MA: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Zuckerman, M. E., and M. L. Carsky. 1990. Contributions of Women to US Mar-keting Thought. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science 18 (4): 313–18.



2 Edward David Jones (1870–1944)The First Professor of Marketing

Edward David Jones is widely credited for teaching the fi rst university course in marketing (Bartels 1951, 3; Maynard 1941a, 382; Monieson 1981a, 4). However, marketing historian Robert Bartels suggested that Jones made no further contributions to the marketing discipline after teaching that “fi rst” course (1951, 3). That is not true. Although later in his career Jones became more interested in the general fi eld of business administration, he continued to teach marketing courses at the University of Michigan for many years and, perhaps more signifi cantly, published a body of work about marketing and its eff ects on society—a seminal contribution to the early marketing literature that has gone unnoticed by marketing historians. A constant theme in his writing was the application of social ethics to marketing. Indeed, Jones was a macromarketer long before there was a school of macromarketing thought.

Jones was born on May 15, 1870, in Orfordville, Wisconsin, the son of Methodist clergyman David Oliver Jones and Frances Jones. After complet-ing public school, he attended Lawrence University for two years followed by two more at Ohio Wesleyan University in Delaware, Ohio, where he completed a Bachelor of Science degree in 1892. He then enrolled as one of the fi rst graduate students in the newly-formed School of Economics at the University of Wisconsin. Upon completion of his PhD in 1895, he mar-ried Annabelle White of Columbus, Ohio. Annabelle was the daughter of Zenus Leonard White, a well known and successful Columbus business-man whose Z. L. White & Company department store was a major retail outlet in Columbus for over thirty-fi ve years (Taylor 1909). After an aca-demic career which lasted some twenty-fi ve years, Jones ‘retired’ in 1922 at the age of fi fty-two for a life of travel, art collecting, and philanthropy—likely funded by an inheritance from his father-in-law who died in 1921. Jones lived the rest of his life in Columbus.

AN EDUCATION IN HISTORICAL ECONOMICS

At the University of Wisconsin Jones studied economics under Richard T. Ely, who had a strong infl uence on most of his graduate students, especially




Jones (Jones and Monieson 1990b). Ely was the reform-minded founder of the American Institutional School of Economics which was derived from the German Historical School of Economics. During the nineteenth century, many American students of higher education travelled to Germany. Various estimates place the number of American students there between 1820 and 1920 at approximately ten thousand (Herbst 1965). This was an impressive number, even when compared to those Americans studying in other Euro-pean institutions. For example, in 1895 there were two hundred Americans registered at the University of Berlin while there were only thirty at the Sor-bonne in Paris (Herbst 1965). The German universities were professional schools, a place to prepare to earn one’s bread and butter. In American

Figure 2.1 Edward David Jones.Source: History of the University of Michigan (Hinsdale and Demmon 1906).


Edward David Jones (1870–1944) 21


universities at that time, the emphasis was on uniformity, discipline, and instruction following the lecture-and-recitation method. By contrast, Ger-man universities provided an atmosphere of academic freedom and equality between students and professors. Graduate students were treated as junior colleagues and classes often took the form of seminars modeled after the laboratory method of the natural sciences. When the fi rst business school associated with the University of Berlin began classes in 1906, seminars were thought to be a partial answer to the unique educational needs of business students (Redlich 1957). During the 1890s, students of econom-ics in Germany often went on what were called ‘excursions’ (fi eld trips) to various fi rms to study fi rsthand the industrial forces in the economy. All this created in American students a commitment to scholarship as a pro-fession, a “craftsman’s regard for technical expertise, an unfailing respect for accuracy, and a concern for the application of knowledge and skills to social ends” (Herbst 1965, 19).

During the mid-nineteenth century, a scientifi c model of historicism began to dominate the social sciences in Germany. A historical school of economics emerged, in part as a reaction to classical economic think-ing (Myles 1956). Founders of the German Historical School of Econom-ics were dissatisfi ed with the inability of Classical economics to solve the problems associated with the rapid growth of the German economy at that time, such as poverty, industrial development, and the development of a banking system (Hildebrand 1848). That focus on solving real economic problems reinforced a distinctive set of assumptions about teaching and studying economics. The German Historical School of Economics became known for its inductive, historical, statistical methodology, its pragmatism, and its ethical ideals.

A steady stream of German-trained economists returned to America during the late nineteenth century including Richard T. Ely and Henry C. Adams, both initially appointed to positions at Johns Hopkins University and later at the Universities of Wisconsin and Michigan respectively. Ely and Adams were among the most infl uential American economists to train under the Historical School and both played an important role in developing Edward David Jones’s academic career. In 1906, Henry Farnam conducted a survey of 115 American economists to study the infl uence of the German Historical School. Fifty-three of those surveyed had trained in Germany; twenty had earned degrees. Many of those who did not earn degrees took what was known as ‘the grand tour’, studying at multiple institutions. Myles (1956) compiled a list of seventy-nine German-trained American economists based on pre-1905 membership in the American Economic Association, of which thirty-three had earned degrees in Germany and forty-six others had received some training there, including Edward David Jones.

Ely was a vocal and enduring disciple of the Historical School. As one of the founders of the Institutional School of Economics in America, he led an attack on orthodox economic doctrine, ideology, and methodology.




He criticized the rigidity and determinism of Classical economics and enthusiastically claimed that “the younger men in America are clearly abandoning the dry bones of orthodox English political economy for the methods of the German school” (1884, 64). In 1885, Ely led a group of German-trained economists to form the American Economic Associa-tion (AEA). In its founding statement of principles and in its early pub-lications, the AEA revealed the infl uence of the Historical School (Ely 1936). According to Ely, the formation of the AEA represented a protest against the orthodox system of laissez-faire economics, an emphasis on historical-statistical study, and a focus on social ethics. Ely’s response to Farnam’s survey was typical.

When I went to Germany, studying fi rst under Conrad, then under Knies, under whom I took my degree, a whole new world was opened to me. . . . I may also mention that the ethical view of economics impressed me strongly. I think the Germans under whom I studied had a suffi ciently clear perception of the diff erence between ethics and eco-nomics. They had a feeling, however, that ethical infl uences should be brought to bear upon our economic life, and they believed also that those ethical infl uences which were actually at work shaping economic life to a greater or less extent should be examined carefully as existing forces. (Ely 1906)

Ely believed that economics and ethics were inseparable (Ely 1886)—that economics should be concerned with the social growth of mankind. This ethical conception of economics seemed to single out marketing.

With the inventions and discoveries of modern times, we seem almost to have solved the problem of production; but the problem of an ideal distribution of products still awaits a solution. . . . Such a distribution of economic goods must in the highest degree subserve the end and purpose of human existence for all members of society. (Ely 1886, 50)

In 1892 Ely was hired as the fi rst director of the new School of Economics at the University of Wisconsin. It was Ely’s habit to encourage his students to spend some time studying in Germany. Jones followed this advice, and went to the universities of Halle and Berlin in 1894 and 1895. Of (Ely’s mentor) Johannes Conrad, Jones wrote to Ely the following:

Conrad seems to me to be, above all, a practical man, energetic and determined in his ways yet most approachable. In fact, as has been said of him a number of times, he is very American in spirit. . . . The semi-nar students have been taking weekly excursions to various manufac-turing institutions in the vicinity and this feature is of great interest and benefi t to the foreigners, at least, who are in the class. (Jones 1894)




After two years of study in Germany, Jones returned to the University of Wisconsin in 1895 to fi nish a thesis on “Economic Crises” under Ely’s super-vision. During his subsequent career, Jones carried forward Ely’s beliefs in an inductive, historical science of economics based on social ethics, and soon became one of the pioneers in American marketing education. Later, as he neared retirement from his academic career in 1918, Jones refl ected on Ely’s infl uence.

I want to tell you how your advanced thinking in so many lines (which American social evolution has since confi rmed) and your matchless productivity have been an inspiration to me. My own program can be briefl y told. When I went into business administration I did not real-ize what an unsurveyed wilderness I was going into. Having had little business experience I took the usual precaution to ground myself in technique. But the main object has long been to formulate the under-lying principles of administration, especially with reference to what, in the phrase of the moment, is spoken of as “the handling of the human factor”. To get the data for this has required the observation of non-economic joint action, especially military administration and diplomacy. The ethical purport is the same as if I were studying dis-tribution or the labor movement. I hope to see industry made more just and generous not only through a democratic process, but by the formation of a code of ideals of professional competence for admin-istrators. . . . I hope to see the general welfare promoted, not only by the use of the national dividend outside of industry but by the trans-formation of the life in industry itself, by fi tting men to their tasks, interpreting the tasks in term of service and elegance of method, by control of fatigue, by the sociability and aesthetics of welfare work. (Jones 1918)

A PIONEER IN MARKETING EDUCATION

For six years after his graduation in 1895, Jones taught economic geogra-phy and statistics at the University of Wisconsin and for a while it seemed he might stay at Wisconsin. However, in 1901 he was off ered a full time faculty position in the Department of Economics at the University of Mich-igan by Henry C. Adams, head of the department, a friend of Ely’s, and as mentioned above a student of the German Historical School. Adams was a strong supporter of developing university instruction in business. At Johns Hopkins University in 1880, he had proposed to the curriculum committee something “novel to academic ears . . . a course on ‘American Technics’, which would comprise contributions from agriculture, manufacturing and transportation supplemented by abundant illustrations from statistics” (Dorfman 1969, 14).




Adams was particularly interested in having Jones teach a course origi-nally to have been titled, “The Physical Basis of Industrial Organization”, but which subsequently came to be called “Industrial Resources of the United States”. Ultimately those plans led to what is today recognized as the fi rst American university course in marketing (Bartels 1962). The course was titled “The Distributive and Regulative Industries of the United States” and was described in the University of Michigan Catalogue (1901) as

a description of the various ways of marketing goods, of the classifi ca-tion, grades, brands employed, and of wholesale and retail trade. Atten-tion will also be given to those private organizations not connected with money and banking, which guide and control the industrial process, such as trade associations, boards of trade and chambers of commerce.

At that early point in time, the term “marketing” was not commonly used in the sense it is today. Instead, terms like “distribution”, “trade”, and “commerce” were often used in reference to what we think of today as marketing.

In 1903/04 this course was expanded into three others, all taught by Jones and apparently quite popular with students as they were off ered by the University in both semesters. “The Distribution of Agricultural Prod-ucts” focused on the various systems of marketing agricultural products and included a discussion of commission selling, cooperation, public and private market contracts and speculation. “The Wholesale Trade” looked at “the requirements of marketing as they aff ect the technique of manufac-turing . . . the principles governing the determination of price and quality . . . the outlets employed in direct and indirect selling and the methods of stimulating trade” (University of Michigan Catalogue 1903/04). Finally, “The Retail Trade” covered

the general position of the retailer followed by an analysis of loca-tion, stock-keeping, selling and advertising. Special attention is paid to the principle of departmentizing [sic]. Department stores, mail-order stores and special stores are studied. (University of Michigan Cata-logue 1903/04)

According to Jones, retail practice at that time was characterized by confu-sion and a lack of ingenuity. Drawing from the history of American trade, he noted that in the period since the Civil War there had been a scarcity of goods that shielded retailers from competition, making it relatively easy to earn a profi t in retailing, resulting in many retailers treating customers with indiff erence (Jones 1905). “The result has been to cramp the growth of the retail industries as a whole, and render them unsatisfactory to the manu-facturers as the distributors of their products.” (Jones 1905, 10) According to Jones, that was a major cause of the rise of nationally branded goods




sold directly to consumers by manufacturers. Jones also recognized that the industrial revolution had dramatically improved the means of trans-portation and communication leading to the creation of larger markets and “keen and relentless competition” that demanded higher education in com-merce and marketing (Jones 1904). However, at the turn of the twentieth century there were very few suitable textbooks on commercial subjects, so the best single source of published information for use in teaching, in his opinion, was trade magazines (Jones 1903a). In that connection, he cited as examples, The American Agriculturalist, Northwestern Miller, Iron Age, Engineering and Mining Journal, The Manufacturer’s Record, The Textile Record, The World’s Work, and The Commercial and Financial Chronicle. Indeed, most of Jones’s own published scholarship later appeared in trade magazines such as Mill Supplies and The Engineering Magazine.

Jones felt that marketing courses, in addition to administration, fi nance, and accounting, were an essential part of business education (1913a). In order to teach these subjects, however, he believed that scientifi c investiga-tion was fi rst necessary in order to discover general principles. Jones wrote that the “chief function of this generation of college men associated with business administration will be recognized to be, not teaching, but scien-tifi c investigation” (1913a, 190). And his German training in economics provided a model for how to carry out that research.

Those who have been originally trained as economists need to observe the procedure in the physical sciences [as did the German Historical School] with reference to the use of the inductive form of the scientifi c method. (1913a, 191)

In fact, Jones employed that method in his own research, gathering his-torical, statistical data and writing descriptive case studies of marketing practices.

In 1903 the Carnegie Institution of Washington undertook the publica-tion of a multi-volume history of the American economy. The project was structured into eleven divisions, one of which was the history of foreign and domestic commerce. Jones felt that it should include a related topic that had been ignored, the “evolution of methods of marketing products—whole-saling, retailing, etc.” and was eager to contribute materials on this topic (Jones 1903b). In 1907 he assumed responsibility for writing a chapter on the “American Domestic Market Since 1840” (Carnegie Institution of Wash-ington 1907, 78). The plan included having some students at the University of Wisconsin work on various aspects of the history of marketing agricul-tural products (Jones 1907). Although the volume as originally planned was never completed, Jones wrote and published a series of twenty-three articles from 1911 through 1914 which was to have served as a trial of the material designated for the Carnegie project. Taken together, they constitute a major contribution to early twentieth-century marketing thought.




THE MARKETING SERIES IN MILL SUPPLIES

All of the aforementioned articles were published in the trade journal, Mill Supplies, which introduced Jones to its readers as an associate editor.

No person who wishes to keep abreast of the times, improve the con-duct of his business and aid in reducing to a minimum the abuses and complexities apparent in the trade should fail to observe the conclu-sions reached by Professor Jones, who has made the solutions of these problems his life’s work. (Crawford 1911, 2)

This collection of Jones’s work had common threads running throughout and was quite remarkable for the tone in which it was presented as well as for the principles and concepts of marketing it identifi ed. Many of the articles took a historical perspective and were based on an inductive line of reason-ing consistent with his training under Ely and economists of the Historical School. A continuous theme was social ethics and distributive justice.

In the opening piece, titled “The Larger Aspects of Private Business” (1911a), Jones stated that his purpose was to “examine some marketing problems” and the apparent ineffi ciency of the marketing process. He iden-tifi ed three separate movements for greater industrial effi ciency. The Con-servation movement sought to reorganize industries concerned with the production of raw materials. The Scientifi c Management movement had improved the organization of manufacturing and transportation. Jones then labeled a third movement, the “cost of living movement”, which would “reform the distributive system to secure effi ciency in the merchandising of products from producer to consumer” (1912d, 284). He believed that greater effi ciency in the marketing process could be achieved through the application of Scientifi c Management principles to industrial purchasing and consumer buying, through the organization of industrial and consumer cooperatives, and through the standardization of products.

Jones had determined that retailing activities added fi fty percent or more to the cost of goods, and that much of that was waste due to advertising and an overabundance of retail stores (1912f). The ratio of population to number of stores was decreasing and this seemed, in Jones’s opinion, to be an unnecessary trend. Advertising was almost entirely a waste.

A distributive expense of great importance is the modern advertising campaign. Although I am willing to grant what the modern busi-ness man says about the necessity of advertising for his individual business it is true in my opinion that advertising is one of the great blood-suckers of modern industry. Very largely it is a waste of money so far as the customer is concerned, as it is merely a usurpation by the manufacturer of the function of recommending and guarantee-ing products which previously the local retailer performed. And in the change there is waste, for the retailer is still necessary and the




manufacturer must spend immense sums to gain the attention of the customers. (1910, 139)

The overriding concern in Jones’s analysis of the effi ciency of marketing was with distributive justice. This was clearly infl uenced by his critical view of marketing systems. For example, he felt that the emergence of large department store retailers had set diff erent classes of merchants, the local jobber-small retailer system and the general jobber-department store sys-tem, against each other as representatives of rival systems of mercantile distribution (1911f, 245). That position was ironic since his father-in-law, Z. L. White, owned a large department store in Columbus, Ohio.

That critical tone also characterized Jones’s assessment of the perfor-mance of markets. He described the function of a market as providing an opportunity for purchasing a good assortment of reliable merchandise in the required quantity at a fair price, but concluded that wasn’t happening—that markets were unstable, unsafe for traders, and, that the system of dis-tribution was excessively expensive (1912c, 121).

Greater effi ciency was only part of the solution to the distributive injus-tices Jones perceived in the marketing system. He also advocated the educa-tion of consumers as well as producers in the techniques of marketing. For example, he suggested that consumers should study and learn the diff erences in quality between brands and determine the “appropriate service level” at which goods should be purchased (1912e, 408). Farmers, he felt, were par-ticularly in need of marketing education and the “development of a theory of the choice of crops and products from the market side” (1912d, 285).

Jones’s concern for distributive justice can be explained by his adoption of Ely’s model of economic science holding that ethics was an essential part of economics. Thus, Jones advocated the organization of consumer and farm cooperatives (1912c, 1912d, 1912e) and placed a priority on general welfare over individual self-interest (1911k). He suggested the need for a code of ethics for business (1911g, 1913a), and wrote of a “moral ideal” in marketing which he hoped would replace caveat emptor as the standard of merchant behavior.

Caveat emptor will not excuse moral defi ciency in [a merchant] because he sells goods, any more than it will in a physician because he leaves medicines with his patients. Furthermore, we have no more reason to be satisfi ed with caveat emptor as a moral ideal than we have to rest contented with the remainder of the ancient Roman code of morals. . . . The moral conception of the merchant as one who selects his stock of goods in the spirit of a friend selecting a present for a friend; who preserves the merchandise as one who feels that it already belongs to another, and is held in trust; who awaits trade with the spirit of accom-modation in his heart; who charges for his service with that justice tem-pered with humanity which characterizes the best class of physicians; and who advises with that fi delity which makes the best attorneys, is




the only conception which will attract the highest talent into this pro-fession and will leave the pathway open for growth in functions and in effi ciency. (1912g, 577)

Perhaps the most signifi cant single concept or idea to emerge from Jones’s series in Mill Supplies was that of the marketing functions. A functional approach was evident in at least three of Jones’s articles (1911k, 1912g, 1913b), however the principal marketing functions were most clearly out-lined in “Functions of the Merchant” (1912g). These included transporta-tion, bulk-breaking, assorting, storage, buying, selling, and risk taking, and were carried out in order to provide time, place, and quantity utility (1912g, 575). Although Arch W. Shaw is generally given credit for originating the functional approach (Shaw and Jones 2005), Jones should, at least, share in that distinction. True, Jones’s article was published (November 1912) three months after Shaw’s (August 1912), however Jones had written on the func-tional theme as early as December of 1911 and appears to have developed the idea quite independently of Shaw’s work. Both of these pioneers in marketing recognized that certain essential functions were performed in the marketing process and that these functions added value for consumers. Jones went even further in his 1912 article by articulating a primitive version of the marketing concept—a focus on serving customers’ needs and not simply on sales.

Many merchants narrow their fi eld of enterprise by placing undue emphasis on the sale itself as the object of study and the fi eld of retail activity. The fi eld of the retail expert is self-training, the establishment of the principles and policies of action, proper equipment, selection of stock etc.; and the establishment of a reputation for reliability and effi ciency. Sales are the natural consummation of these things; and sales only come steadily, and in satisfactory amount, as consummations. In short, then, the proper thing for the merchant to emphasize, as an expert, is prepara-tion for service, rather than the act of sale itself. (1912g, 577)

A complete list of Jones’s articles from Mill Supplies is provided in Appen-dix 2.1. Taken together, they provide a truly seminal collection of ideas about marketing, one which is modern in content and at the same time unusual for its high ethical values.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE BROADER FIELD OF BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION

In 1913, Jones was promoted to the rank of Full Professor. After focusing his teaching and writing on marketing for over a decade, Jones shifted his attention to the broader fi eld of business administration. This was marked by the diversifi cation of his teaching assignments to include courses such as




“Principles of Administration”, “Problems of Production”, and “Business Organization and Management”, as well as his publication of a series of articles in The Engineering Magazine that were collected and republished in Business Administration—The Scientifi c Principles of a New Profession (1913f), The Business Administrator, His Models in War, Statecraft and Science (1914b), The Administration of Industrial Enterprises (1916), and Industrial Leadership and Executive Ability (1920). Jones believed that the underlying principles of business could be discovered by studying the work of successful administrators. Successful business administrators were secretive about their methods and practices and, in any case, Jones did little if any consulting and therefore had limited access to business leaders’ thoughts about practice. However, the careers of leaders in war, statecraft, and science had been studied and written about for centuries. Their lives were sometimes the subject of published biographies; their campaigns were often a matter of public record. In The Business Administrator, His Models in War, Statecraft and Science, Jones drew an analogy between the need of American businesses for knowledge and the need of the German army prior to World War I. The Germans had studied military history to understand the principles of military administration. Jones believed the same approach could be used for business. Besides, as Jones pointed out, the language of business was already littered with military metaphors such as “captain of industry”, “strategy”, “tactics”, “campaigns”, and so on. Thus, from the Romans, Frederick the Great, Napoleon, and more modern military his-tory, Jones inferred administrative principles such as the ability to make decisions, take initiative, undertake preliminary planning, the subordina-tion of detail, discipline, and concentration of eff ort for effi ciency.

In his third book on business administration, The Administration of Industrial Enterprises (1916), Jones included considerable discussion of “the process of mercantile distribution”, or marketing. He described his treatment of marketing in this book as an “outline” only and promised another more specialized volume in the near future.

The methods of mercantile distribution are presented in outline, with-out entering upon a criticism of the vast wastes entailed by the modern evolution, for the reason that it is becoming customary to separate the discussion of industrial organization from that of commercial orga-nization, and for the further reason that the Author hopes at a later time, Deo favente [God willing], to present a work upon the American domestic market. (1916, vi)

It included chapters on purchasing, selling, advertising, physical distribu-tion, and credit. Pricing was discussed extensively in the chapter on selling. Throughout his writing, it is clear that Jones was very much infl uenced by then emerging ideas about Scientifi c Management, particularly its emphasis on achieving effi ciency and eliminating waste. Each of the marketing chapters




on purchasing, selling, and advertising, also uses the functional approach by pointing out the functions performed by each of those elements of marketing. God must not have been willing, because the promised volume on the Ameri-can domestic market was never written, although Jones did teach a course by that title at the University of Michigan from 1914 through 1917.

Marketing scholars who believe today that the marketing concept and relationship marketing is of more recent origin (unfortunately that includes most marketing scholars today) might be surprised to read Jones’s descrip-tion of successful selling.

The basic rule of effi ciency in selling is to know thoroughly the proper-ties of goods and the needs of people. The reason why this rule is not universally accepted is that it is possible to make a brief record which appears like success by cutting prices, or by applying the arts of sales-manship and advertising to goods without distinctive merit of design or the attraction of low price. Misfi t sales do not maintain themselves, however, for each of such sales installs in the possession of the buyer an article which begins at once to educate him as to the error he made in acquiring it, and which re-emphasizes the point steadily and concretely as long as it exists. Intelligently directed sales campaigns aim, there-fore, at selling service or satisfaction, by which along permanent trade connections can be formed. (1916, 365)

Contrary to popular belief today, the notion that fi rms should maintain a focus on customers and the development of long-term relationships is not a new idea (Tadajewski 2008, 2009) and it was clearly a central part of Jones’s view of marketing early in the twentieth century.

In The Administration of Industrial Enterprises, the chapter on advertis-ing draws heavily from several classic works by authors recognizable to any student of marketing history, such as W. D. Scott, Hollingworth, Tipper and Hotchkiss, E. E. Calkins, and Paul T. Cherington. However, Jones’s chapter is distinctive for his characteristic focus on the waste in advertising.

Besides the waste of labor and material agencies, advertising involves a waste of the nervous energy of the public. It demands perception and an act of judgment from the majority of street-car patrons, to discover the few who want Spearmint gum. It fl ashes a dazzling array of electric lights before the eyes of the thousands who pass on a great city highway, to sift out a couple of hundred patrons for a rathskeller. In spite of a wastefulness like that of insensate nature . . . advertising has established itself as part of the machinery of competition which is indispensable for the time being in many branches of industry. (1916, 383)

To the fi rst American university teacher of marketing, the practice of mar-keting was a necessary evil. There is some irony in that, and it may have




contributed to Jones’s decision to shift his focus away from marketing to business administration and ultimately to quit full time teaching altogether.

ART COLLECTING AND PHILANTHROPY IN RETIREMENT

Towards the end of World War I, Jones served as a civilian expert for the Committee on Education and Special Training of the War Industries Board and as Acting Director of the Employment Management section of the same organization (Jones 1919). In early 1919, at the age of forty-nine, he resigned from the University of Michigan. He had been hired in 1901 as a Lecturer, and had attained the ranks of Junior Professor in 1904 and Pro-fessor of Commerce and Industry in 1913. After his resignation, he worked for the federal government for a year as an agent for the Federal Board for Vocational Education, then for another year as Supervisor of Foreman Training Courses in the Division of Education at Harvard University. He seemed to be at loose ends, but circumstances soon allowed him to retire to a life of art collecting and philanthropy.

With his father-in-law’s death in 1921, Jones served for a year as Vice President of the Z. L. White Company in Columbus, Ohio. His duties dur-ing that year were likely connected with the sale of the store to the J. C. Penney Company (Davidson 2002). The Z. L. White department store had opened in 1884, succeeding White’s earlier retail establishments dating back to 1860. White had also served as President of two Columbus fertil-izer companies and Vice President of the City National Bank.

I speculate that Jones and his wife inherited considerable wealth when White died, because they surely couldn’t have aff orded to live the way they subsequently did if relying solely on the savings of a university professor’s salary. Perhaps surprisingly, Jones did little if any consulting as was often common for business professors of that era. Nevertheless, the Joneses became generous benefactors of their alma mater, Ohio Wesleyan Univer-sity, giving many gifts to the Fine Arts Department, among them “valuable books of art and other illustrative material, and a number of fi ne paintings. . . . His love of rare and beautiful books has enriched Slocum Library” (Burgstahler 1944). The Phi Delta Theta society at Wesleyan, of which Jones was a member, described him in 1935 as “quite busy in art aff airs” (Phi Delta Theta Society 1935) and he served for many years as a member of the board of the Columbus Gallery of Fine Arts. When Jones passed away in January, 1944, the President of Ohio Wesleyan described him as “a man of high ideals, of noble purposes, of lofty ambition, of unselfi sh character, and of gracious manner” (Burgstahler 1944, 56).

***

Edward David Jones was clearly infl uenced by Richard T. Ely’s views of eco-nomics which, in turn, were strongly infl uenced by the German Historical




School of Economics. Jones carried forward that training and the values it imparted to become a true pioneer in the marketing discipline. How-ever, Jones might have travelled a diff erent road if not for the invitation from Henry Carter Adams to join the University of Michigan specifi cally to teach what turned out to be marketing. Besides the distinction of teaching the fi rst university course in marketing, Jones was one of the fi rst to write about the basic functions of marketing. He applied the philosophy of Sci-entifi c Management to marketing, and argued constantly for higher ethical standards for marketing behavior. As his thinking matured, he broadened his interests to the general fi eld of business administration but continued to view marketing as an essential part of university instruction in business.

Jones retired from academic life at a relatively young age, the reason for which is unknown, and with promised contributions to marketing that went unfi lled. I would speculate that his retirement was either out of frustration with the lack of progress in industry towards his ideals for business behavior, or because early retirement simply became fi nancially possible when his father-in-law passed away. Nevertheless, he was a true pioneer in marketing.

APPENDIX 2.1. THE MARKETING SERIES IN MILL SUPPLIES: 1911–1914.

1911a. The Larger Aspects of Private Business. Mill Supplies 1 (January): 3.1911b. What Goods are Worthy of Manufacture. Mill Supplies 1 (Febru-

ary): 57–58.1911c. Standardization: Its Eff ect on Quality. Mill Supplies 1 (March):

99–100.1911d. Cost Accounting and Effi ciency. Mill Supplies 1 (April): 149–52.1911e. Buyers’ Specifi cations: Scientifi c Purchasing. Mill Supplies 1 (May):

209–10.1911f. Quantity Prices Versus Classifi ed Lists. Mill Supplies 1 (June):

245–46.1911g. The Cancellation of Orders. Mill Supplies 1 (July): 291–92.1911h. The Restriction of Prices. Mills Supplies 1 (August): 339–40.1911i. Advertising and Trade Brands. Mill Supplies 1 (August): 391–92.1911j. Our System of Weights and Measures Indefensible. Mill Supplies 1

(October): 430–32.1911k. Function of a System of Grades. Mill Supplies 1 (December):

529–30.1912a Some Problems of Price. Mill Supplies 2 (January): 9–10.1912b. List Prices and Discounts. Mill Supplies 2 (February): 59–62.1912c. The Perfect Market Outlined. Mill Supplies 2 (March): 115–21.1912d. Cost of Living and Marketing of Farm Products. Mill Supplies 2

(May): 283–85.




1912e. Cost of Living and the Retail Trade. Mill Supplies 2 (August): 406–8.

1912f. Principles of Modern Retail Merchandising. Mill Supplies 2 (Sep-tember): 461–62.

1912g. Functions of the Merchant. Mill Supplies 2 (November): 575–77.1913b. Function of Trade Marks. Mill Supplies 3 (February): 69–70.1913c. The Purchasing Department. Mill Supplies 3 (March): 130–32.1913d. History of American Machine-Tool Manufacture. Mill Supplies 3

(November): 623–28.1913e. History of American Machine-Tool Manufacture, Part II. Mill Sup-

plies 3 (December): 684–86.1914a. Evolution of Accuracy in Manufacture. Mill Supplies 4 (January):

23–24.



3 Simon Litman (1873–1965)Pioneer in International Marketing

For those of us whose graduate education included reading Robert Bartels’s (1962) The Development of Marketing Thought, one of the most endur-ing recollections must be his genealogical chart showing lines of personal infl uence in the development of marketing thought. It includes the names of American universities where marketing is thought to have been fi rst studied as well as the individuals responsible for that work. Those listed in that chart are important because they pioneered the academic study of market-ing in some way. Some were among the fi rst American professors to study and teach marketing at the universities listed there. Others came later and were well known for their contributions to the marketing literature. One of the names near the very top of Bartels’s (1962, 37) genealogical chart—Simon Litman—is associated with the University of Illinois where he spent most of his academic career (see Figure 1.1). However, as Bartels also noted, Litman’s claim to fame is for teaching the fi rst course in marketing at the University of California in 1902 before moving to Illinois in 1908. In that distinction, Litman followed Edward David Jones at the University of Michigan by only one year. Unlike Jones, who never seemed all that aware of his pioneer status, Litman did later realize that he was one of the fi rst to teach the subject and wrote about the experience in the Journal of Market-ing (1950) providing details about why the course was off ered and how it was taught. Nevertheless, while recognized by marketing historians for his pioneering status as a university teacher, Litman’s seminal writings about marketing in general and, more signifi cantly, about international market-ing, have gone unrecognized until now.

EARLY INTERNATIONAL INFLUENCES

Simon Litman was born on October 13, 1873, and raised in Odessa, Rus-sia (in what is now the Ukraine), the son of Jacob and Pauline Litman. His father was a successful textile industrialist who owned a wool process-ing plant near Cherson, Russia. The Litman patriarch purchased raw wool which was then washed and baled at his plant for shipment to international


Simon Litman (1873–1965) 35


markets, requiring him to travel extensively. Jacob Litman prospered in international trade at a time when international economic integration rivalled that of recent times (Lindsey 2002; Micklethwaite and Woolridge 2000). This was an important early infl uence on Simon who later pursued a lifelong interest in international marketing.

The success of the family business provided the Litmans with a rela-tively privileged life. As a child, Simon learned to play the piano and his parents often took him to the opera. The family’s library numbered a few thousand volumes and as part of his education Simon became fl uent in

Figure 3.1 Simon Litman.Source: Ray Frank Litman: A Memoir (Litman 1957).




English, French, and German, in addition to his native Russian. Despite his cultured upbringing and signs of high intellectual capacity, Simon attended and graduated in 1892 from the Odessa Commercial College rather than from a gymnasium. Throughout Europe, a gymnasium provided second-ary education that prepared students to enter a university. The commercial college, on the other hand, was more vocationally oriented. Perhaps this choice was related to an expectation of working in his father’s business.

Shortly thereafter however, the Litman family moved to the United States. According to Simon, this move was in order to avoid persecution from the Bolsheviks (1963). As a Jew and successful businessman in late nineteenth-century Russia, Jacob Litman would have had more than his share of dis-crimination with which to deal. At every level of Russian society, there was a traditional and deep-seated contempt towards big business.

There is no doubt that throughout most of the nineteenth century a grave opprobrium attached to entrepreneurial activities in Russia. Divorced from the peasantry, the entrepreneur remained despised by the nobility and intelligentsia. . . . In innumerable adages, fairy tales, and songs, the wisdom of folklore insisted upon the unrighteous origin of wealth. (Gerschenkron 1965, 343)

More importantly, the anti-Semitic policies of the Russian government at that time added pressure for the Litmans to leave. In 1891 “the Moscow Jewish colony had been much reduced when most Jews were forced to leave the city by order of the imperial government” (Ruckman 1984, 23). In 1893 when the Litmans moved to the United States, Russia accounted for more of those Jew-ish immigrants than did any other country in the world (Godley 2001).

The Litmans’ move was fairly typical of the late nineteenth-century migration of eastern European Jews to the United States (Godley 2001). They settled in New York City and, not surprisingly given Jacob’s back-ground in the textile business, soon started their own retail clothing store (Litman 1963). Simon’s fi rst job was as cashier and bookkeeper in his father’s store. Unfortunately, the business failed after only three years resulting in his parents returning to Russia. Simon and his older brother, Sasha, stayed behind in New York. There followed short stints of employment for Simon, fi rst as a correspondent in the offi ces of the Botany Worsted Mills making abstracts of Dunn and Bradstreet reports, then as an inspector for the New York State Tenement Committee.

In 1897, Sasha went to Paris to work as a correspondent for the New York Herald and Simon decided to go along. His brother and father both encouraged him to further his education, so Simon decided to study political economy at the Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques. Courses there included political economy taught from the standpoint of “individuals’ participation in the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services” (Litman 1963, 16), which would have reinforced his secondary education




in commerce and anticipated his later work as a marketing pioneer. As Lit-man later described,

It was a wonderful experience and I was grateful for the opportunity not only to learn but also to observe how the subjects were handled so as to keep interested a heterogeneous group of students, many of whom, like myself, came from foreign lands. (Litman 1963, 17)

Two points in the above quote are noteworthy. Simon was beginning to show an interest in teaching, something he had apparently not considered until then. As well, he seemed quite conscious of the multicultural back-grounds of his classmates. We also know that during his stay in Paris he travelled quite extensively throughout Europe. These experiences may have combined to infl uence his later interest in international marketing.

During Litman’s time in Paris, the famed novelist Emile Zola came to the city and published articles in a French magazine about the Dreyfus aff air, attacking the passions aroused by anti-Semitism. Litman described Zola’s writings as “eloquent and impassioned appeals to France’s young men . . . to redress a social wrong, to remember the suff erings their fathers had undergone to gain liberties they now enjoyed, and to be generous and humane” (Litman 1963, 20). Zola was brought to trial and mobs paraded the streets shouting “down with Zola, down with the Jews”. As a Jew in that atmosphere, Litman found it stressful and diffi cult to focus on his studies, but he did so and earned his diploma in 1899.

One of his professors at the Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques sug-gested graduate studies in economics at the University of Munich under the well-known German Historical School economist, Lujo Brentano, as preparation for a teaching career. It seems that this was the fi rst time Litman seriously considered an academic career and it appealed to him. Following that advice, he went to Munich and studied under Bren-tano whom he later considered his mentor and a tremendous intellectual infl uence (Litman 1963). This training placed Litman in good company with many other German-Historical-School-educated economists who at that time were pioneering the study of marketing in North America (see Jones and Monieson 1990b, and chapters herein on E. D. Jones and H. C. Taylor).

In addition to their characteristic emphasis on historical-statistical methods of study and pragmatism mentioned in the earlier chapter on E. D. Jones, the German Historical School economists are credited for leading the move towards protectionism and state socialism in Germany, thereby becoming a major force in what Lindsey (2002) describes as the “Industrial Counterrevolution”. In the early twentieth century, that signalled the end of half a century of international economic integration not rivalled until after World War II. “Protectionism, nationalism, imperialism, militarism—these were the dark forces unleashed by the Industrial Counterrevolution




in the international area . . . [and] ultimately exploded in the cataclysm of World War I” (Lindsey 2002, 65). Despite Litman’s acknowledgement of Brentano’s infl uence, however, there is no evidence that Litman followed the protectionist ideals associated with the Historical School in general. Quite the opposite, as we will learn below. Litman was clearly a free-trader. Under Brentano’s supervision, Litman began his dissertation on “The Pos-sibility of a Rise in Wages and the Wage Fund Theories” which criticized Classical economic theory. However, since he had graduated from a school of commerce instead of a gymnasium, as was required in the German edu-cation system, he could not actually complete his PhD in Germany. So, at Brentano’s suggestion, he transferred to the University of Zurich where he completed his dissertation and earned his doctorate in early 1902.

In 1899, while in Munich studying for his PhD, Simon met Rachel (Ray) Frank and the two were married on August 14, 1901. Ray was a native Cali-fornian, an accomplished journalist, preacher of the Jewish religion, and a co-founder of the National Council of Jewish Women. When Simon fi nished his doctorate in 1902, the couple moved back to Paris where Simon attempted in vain to “break through the wall of extreme French nationalism in order to fi nd a place on the faculty of some institution of higher learning in France” (Litman 1957, 151). So, in 1902, they decided to return to the United States where they believed it would be easier for Simon to begin his career. Since Ray had family and a history in California, that became their new home.

Through Ray’s connections, Simon was off ered a position at Stanford University in the Department of Philosophy, but felt unqualifi ed to teach outside of economics. His only other option, as he later realized, was to become a pioneer teacher of marketing.

My next step was to see Professor Adolph C. Miller at the Univer-sity of California, Berkeley. He was organizing a new department, separate from that of history and kindred disciplines where economics was taught heretofore. Professor Miller was interested in establishing courses in commerce and industry. Could I undertake the work? Here my knowledge was also somewhat defi cient, but I realized it was this or nothing. Nothing was out of the question, and so I decided to accept the off er. And so my academic career started in the second semester of 1902–03, when, as I learned later, I became one of the pioneers in teaching marketing and merchandising in the colleges of the United States. (Litman 1957, 152)

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA (1902–1908)

Litman taught three diff erent courses during that second semester of the 1902–1903 academic year: “Modern Industries”, “Recent European Com-mercial Policies”, and “Technique of Trade and Commerce”. It was the




latter that Bartels credited as one of the fi rst university courses in market-ing in America (1962, 29). At the turn of the twentieth century, the term “marketing” was not commonly used as a noun and many of the earliest university courses and texts used “distribution”, “trade”, and “commerce” in a manner more or less synonymous with what we know today as mar-keting (Jones and Shaw 2002). It seems that the idea for such a course may have come from the economist Adolph Miller, but in any case it was not Litman’s. Nevertheless, he soon put his own stamp on it.

When Simon Litman was asked to teach a course called “The Tech-nique of Trade and Commerce”, he had never heard of such a subject. Moreover, he was unfamiliar with American business, for he had lived and been educated in Russia, France, and Germany. . . . Thus Litman brought to the study of marketing a viewpoint probably unlike that of anyone else at that time. (Bartels 1962, 30)

In fact, a European education, particularly a German one, was not that unusual for American economists at that time (Jones and Monieson 1990b; Thwing 1928). Bartels’s observation was more accurate, however, when it came to Litman’s multinational upbringing and personal experiences. Those did give him a rather unique international perspective on trade and commerce, when compared with the backgrounds of other pioneer market-ing scholars.

That fi rst University of California marketing course titled “Technique of Trade and Commerce” was described very briefl y in the University Bulletin as “a study of the organization and institutions of commerce; commercial forms and practice” (1902–1903). The following year, no doubt benefi ting from Litman’s fi rst experience teaching the course, its Bulletin description was expanded to read as follows:

The system of weights, measures and moneys in diff erent countries; the signifi cance of price quotations and of the terms used in connec-tion with sales in the diff erent markets of the world; the meaning and determination of standards and grades as to quality; the forms and signifi cance of invoices, bills of ladings, warehouse receipts, consular certifi cates and other business documents relating to trade. The orga-nization of trade and the devices used by governments and individuals to promote trade. (University of California 1903–1904, 17)

The references to diff erent countries, diff erent markets of the world, and consular certifi cates, made it clear that this wasn’t just a course in general marketing, but rather one which had a distinctive international focus.

The fi rst couple of times he taught the course, Litman used German books on trade to help him outline his lectures. As he later described in the Journal of Marketing,




There were no books, and trade and technical journals as well as gov-ernmental publications contained very little information which could be used either in the preparation of lectures or in the giving of read-ing assignments to the students. The works known to me covering the subject were mostly German treatises by Cohn, Grunzel, and van der Borght. (1950, 220–21)

However, he soon developed his own American examples from which to teach his students.

I abandoned it [the use of German texts] after two semesters and pro-ceeded to deal directly with the status and characteristics of market distribution as it was organized by sellers of industrial raw materials, of agricultural commodities, and of semifi nished and fi nished goods. In order to gain information as to how the mercantile activities were specifi cally carried on in the United States, I interviewed wholesalers, retailers, managers of industrial concerns, brokers, advertising agents, exporters and importers. It took some time to make them admit the feasibility and desirability of having marketing courses in universi-ties; their resistance was fi nally broken down and their rather hostile attitude changed to that of cooperation. The businessmen whom I approached thought that problems of merchandising could not be dis-cussed eff ectively in the classroom, that this had to be done in the fi eld under the supervision of men of aff airs. I pointed out that what they were favoring was a system of apprenticeship prevalent in many lines of endeavor in the past but discarded for more effi cient methods with benefi cial results to all. (1963, 28)

Like Jones at the University of Michigan and later Taylor at the University of Wisconsin, Litman also recognized the value of hands-on learning and, as was common in the German economics courses he took as a student, he supplemented his own lectures with visits by students to local indus-trial and commercial concerns (1950). He continued that practice later at the University of Illinois by occasionally taking students on fi eld trips into Chicago where they visited the Board of Trade, Marshall Field department store, Montgomery Ward, the Credit Clearing House, and other industrial establishments (1963, 41).

Litman included exporting and importing as an integral part of domes-tic marketing activities and had a candid attitude about that relationship.

I acted on the assumption that marketing problems and methods do not diff er in essentials from country to country, that fundamentals are the same irrespective of boundaries within which they are being applied. . . . The proximity of the port of San Francisco may have had something to do with the inclusion in my discussions of what has




been termed foreign trade. I felt that this trade was not foreign to our national economy; the handling of outgoing and incoming products on docks and in piers, in warehouses and customs houses, in stores where importations were competing with domestic merchandise, seemed to me to present problems of salesmanship, advertising, and fi nancing closely interwoven with national distributive activities. If this be her-esy, I plead guilty to it. (1950, 221–22)

The latter comment expressed his surprise that anyone would not consider international marketing an essential part of the study of general marketing, especially for a country like the United States which was so deeply involved in international trade. This would have been particularly evident in San Francisco (a port city) across the bay from Berkley.

In addition to Litman’s refl ections on teaching that fi rst marketing course at the University of California that were published in the Journal of Marketing (1950) and recorded in his unpublished autobiography (1963), a remarkable record of the content of that course “Technique of Trade and Commerce” survives in the University of Illinois Archives (Litman ca. 1902–1908). Some time during his tenure at the University of California, between 1902 and 1908, Litman wrote a synopsis for a book he planned to write based on that course. A twenty-three-page, handwritten manuscript survives, titled “Mechanism and Technique of Commerce” (a condensed outline of which is provided in Appendix 3.1). Litman referred to it as a “synopsis of a textbook which could be placed in the hands of students in our Colleges of Commerce”, and as such it almost certainly represents the topics he covered in his course at the University of California.

Litman recognized at that time that marketing had received little or no attention from American scholars despite its “prime importance to students and business men” and described his proposed book as “an analysis of the diff erent institutions and organizations that have been established for the maintenance, protection and promotion of trade” (ca. 1902–1908, 1). In fact, seven of the twenty-two chapters were to have dealt directly with marketing institutions including retailers and wholesalers. His arguments against department stores anticipated similar concerns voiced by Edward David Jones (see Chapter 2 herein) just a few years later.

[The department store] . . . reduces the number of independent small dealers, tends towards monopolizing trade, decreases the price of city real estate, off ers sweat shop goods, reaches out where it should not, lowering standards (pictures, music), uses unfair methods in special sales, etc. (Litman ca. 1902–1908, 20–21)

An institutional school of marketing later emerged as one of the three tra-ditional schools of thought (Shaw, Jones, and McLean 2010) demonstrat-ing in another way how Litman anticipated developments in the marketing




discipline. Both of the other traditional schools of marketing (functional and commodity) were also represented in Litman’s book proposal, includ-ing chapters dealing with the functions and methods of pricing and credit, advertising, and warehousing; and chapters focusing on commodities such as grain and cotton were included along with one on produce exchanges.

Within a few years, “Mechanism and Technique of Commerce” was pub-lished under the shortened title Trade and Commerce (1911) by the LaSalle Extension University, in part as a “course designed to meet the demand for effi cient training in Commerce” (Litman 1911, inside cover). This mono-graph may be the most comprehensive record in existence today of the con-tent of what was one of the earliest university courses in marketing.

Litman defi ned trade and commerce as a “universal type of exchange” carried on by the modern merchant who

is a necessary auxiliary to the agriculturer and the manufacturer of a country. It is he who . . . drives the wheels of industry, he who is responsible for the ceaseless activity in mines and in forests, in blast furnaces and in rolling mills; it is he who leads a nation to its position of industrial and commercial supremacy. (1911, 2)

It is evident throughout the book (and course) that Litman’s use of the phrase “universal exchange” was in reference to what today is more broadly considered marketing. The content of the book is very consistent with Lit-man’s original 1902–1908 outline, cited above, except for the addition of a section dealing with commercial geography and separate discussions of international trade organized fi rst by diff erent commodities and then by countries as markets. The latter covers a wide selection of countries and includes discussion of market size, consumption patterns, major industries, GNP, exports, and imports. It is clearly an early example of what later became known as the commodity school of thought, but with strong ele-ments of the institutional school as well.

Oddly enough, the most interesting and focused discussion of market-ing topics is presented in a separate chapter titled “Competition in Trade”. There Litman described in detail what he called the “fi nal struggle for the market”. Every marketing activity is viewed through a lens of competi-tion. Competition, he wrote, begins with the choice of location and the acquisition of goods. The means of retail competition are found in the personal characteristics of the merchant, such as innovativeness, friendli-ness, aggressiveness, and a precise knowledge of costs. Wholesale competi-tion was described as more specialized than retail in its product range, but with wider geographic coverage and therefore more likely to face interna-tional market opportunities. Litman further distinguished between retail and wholesale by describing the former as competition by ‘business unit’ and the latter as competition by ‘commodity’. Techniques of promotion and pricing were described as “methods of competition”. He lamented the




popularity of “underselling” (cost and price cutting) as a method of com-petition and blamed it for declining quality in many classes of goods and for the increasing use of bait-and-switch tactics. Although he didn’t call it odd-even pricing, Litman described the practice and suggested (remember, this was in 1911) that it had “lost a great deal of its value as a competi-tive scheme” (1911, 425). The use of rebates, trading stamps, and credit, were all discussed as pricing “methods”. And both the promotional as well as protective functions of packaging were mentioned, the latter taking on greater importance, of course, when goods were to be shipped to inter-national markets. Litman noted the greater importance of advertising for consumer marketing than for industrial, and remarked on the pros and cons of the newspaper as an advertising medium versus magazines for vari-ous product categories. In addition to brief discussions of personal selling and outdoor advertising, there is a surprisingly detailed discussion of direct mail including the use of sampling and the construction of mailing lists. Indeed, it is remarkable how many of the practices he discussed then are still relevant today.

Although published in 1911, Trade and Commerce closely refl ects the content of his earlier synopsis titled “Mechanism and Technique of Com-merce” (ca. 1902–1908) which was written while teaching the fi rst market-ing course at the University of California. And as we will see below, that material served as the basis of a course he taught for almost twenty years.

Litman’s research during his tenure at the University of California also clearly refl ected his interest in foreign trade. In 1906 he published “The Trading Place of Nations” and followed this in 1908 with “San Francisco as a Foreign Shipping Port” in the University of California Chronicle and “Tariff Revision and Foreign Markets” in the American Economic Asso-ciation Quarterly. Despite his productivity, however, he felt that advance-ment at the University of California would be slow and wanted to be nearer to the industrial and political centers of the country. So, in 1908 when an off er came from the University of Illinois, he accepted.

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS (1908–1948)

The University of Illinois was an enthusiastic pioneer in collegiate busi-ness education. A program of studies in Commerce was founded in 1902 with David Kinley as its Director. Kinley had studied at Johns Hopkins University with Richard T. Ely, then followed the latter to the University of Wisconsin where, under Ely’s mentorship, he received the fi rst PhD in Eco-nomics from that institution in 1893. Ely’s record for spawning students of business and marketing was impressive (Jones and Monieson 1990b). Kinley was hired in 1893 as Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois, promoted one year later to Professor, and founded the Department of Eco-nomics in 1895.




Leading up to the founding of Commerce at Illinois, Kinley spent a sabbatical during 1900–1901 studying commercial education in Europe. Although he thought that European study in general was overestimated and that the prestige of study in Germany in particular was declining,

he was impressed with the extent of her [Germany’s] commercial and industrial development and concomitant expansion of commercial edu-cation both on the high school and collegiate levels. “The movement is in the air wherever I go”, he wrote Draper [University of Illinois President], and strongly urged the President to expand in the direction of training for business and for public service. The US consuls and dip-lomatic agents with whom Kinley talked agreed that such a program would be timely and useful. (Grisso 1980, 85)

President Draper quickly approved of Kinley’s plan and a program of “Courses of Training for Business” was off ered the following year within the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, but like many collegiate experi-ments with commercial education at that time, it suff ered from a lack of fi nancial support from the university’s administration. That changed in 1904 with the appointment of a new President, Edmund J. James, for-mer Director of the Wharton School of Commerce at the University of Pennsylvania. James had spent thirteen years at Wharton and had been commissioned by the American Bankers’ Association in 1891 to make a study of European institutions of commercial education and report on the feasibility of establishing similar schools in connection with universities and colleges in the United States. His report (1893) focussed on the ris-ing challenge of German commerce to the British Empire and attributed its success to superior preparation available to German students. James’s vision for commercial education was based on teaching a science of busi-ness and preparing students for management positions. That vision was very consistent with Kinley’s.

One of the fi rst professors Kinley hired to teach in the new Commerce program was George M. Fisk, who was also a protege of Richard T. Ely’s and who had completed his PhD in Economics at the University of Halle, in Germany. Fisk is another pioneer teacher included in Bartels’s genealogy of marketing (1962; and see Figure 1.1 herein), and was credited by May-nard (1941b) for his 1903–1904 course titled, “Domestic Commerce and Commercial Politics”. However, in 1907 Fisk resigned from the University of Illinois to enter private industry and that led directly to Simon Litman’s hiring. Kinley heard of Litman’s work at the University of California and persuaded him to join the faculty at Illinois (Kinley 1908).

Litman was hired to replace Fisk in the fall semester of 1908, literally to take over Fisk’s courses. In some ways, the succession likely took place with-out the school missing a beat. Both men were pioneer teachers of marketing. Each published one major book during his career—dealing primarily with




international trade but including considerable marketing content. However in contrast to Litman’s beliefs cited above, about the essential interweaving of domestic with foreign marketing issues, Fisk taught domestic and for-eign marketing as two separate, but related courses of instruction. “Foreign Commerce and Commercial Politics” was described in the Illinois Bulletin as follows:

Problems arising in connection with international trade relations, and various attempts to solve them; changes in theories and policies; economic systems (mercantile, free trade, and protective); classes of customs tariff s; commercial treaties; institutions for furthering export trade; commercial museums and bureaus of information, sample houses, consular reports, etc. (University of Illinois 1908–1909, 236)

The similarly titled, “Domestic Commerce and Commercial Politics”, dealt much more directly and clearly with marketing issues.

The course deals with the principles and methods of buying and selling in internal trade, discussing the various forms of wholesale and retail trade organizations; department, mail-order and co-operative stores; markets, fairs, auctions; stock and produce exchanges, etc. (University of Illinois 1908–1909, 236)

Curiously, and in contrast to his own stated beliefs, Litman followed Fisk’s example and continued to off er separate courses in domestic and foreign commerce. Perhaps as a new member of the faculty, he didn’t want to push his views. Nevertheless, in 1911 Litman changed the title of the domes-tic course to “Mechanism and Technique of Domestic Commerce” which was very similar to his University of California course and based it on his Trade and Commerce (1911) book. “Mechanism” served as the introduc-tory course (indeed the only course) in marketing at Illinois until 1915. At that time the business curriculum was reorganized under a “college” status separate from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences with several new marketing courses including “Salesmanship”, “Advertising”, and “Organi-zation and Control of Mercantile Distribution”, none of which was taught by Litman. However, he continued to teach “Mechanism and Technique of Domestic Commerce” until 1920.

Between 1912 and 1920, Litman was also a frequent speaker outside the School on marketing subjects. In 1912 he delivered lectures through the University YMCA on “Face to Face Salesmanship” and “Principles of Salesmanship”. The School also off ered non-credit, short business courses in which Litman gave lectures on “Credits and Collections”, “General Aspects of Marketing”, “Retail Distribution”, and “Mercantile Credit”, all during 1916. As well, in 1917 he gave several invited lectures on various aspects of “Retailing”.




However, by 1920 Litman had decided to redirect his attention towards graduate teaching and away from general marketing subjects to specialize in foreign trade.

1920 marks the end of my participation in business banquets as well as in short courses dealing with domestic commerce [marketing]. I started to devote full time to problems connected with international economic relations, with foreign trade in its various manifestations, with ocean shipping, and later with counselling graduate students and with the conduct of the seminar for doctoral candidates. (Litman 1963, 44)

It isn’t too surprising that Litman shifted his teaching interests from under-graduate and extension courses to graduate instruction. Then, as now, that was probably a fairly typical career progression. However, it is somewhat curious that he moved so completely out of teaching marketing. There is no hint in his unpublished autobiography as to why this happened, but we can speculate about several reasons.

Following the war, in 1918–1919, the School’s student enrolment and fac-ulty complement both doubled in size. This was the largest annual increase in bodies since 1902. At the same time, new majors were added to the under-graduate program and the number of graduate courses was expanded. A new department, “Business Organization and Operation”, was formed under which all marketing courses were listed. Litman, however, was offi cially part of the “Economics” department within the School of Commerce. As part of the re-shuffl ing and change in the curriculum, 1920–1921 was the last year Litman off ered his seminal course, “Mechanism and Technique of Commerce”. By then a new introductory course, “Organization and Control of Mercantile Distribution”, had taken its place and several new marketing electives were being off ered including “Salesmanship”, “Advertising”, and “Marketing Farm Products”. The infl ux of new faculty included marketing specialists such as Fred Russell in 1920 and Paul Converse in 1924. Indeed, it was Converse who, in an article in the Journal of Marketing in 1952, observed that Russell joined the faculty “to take over the marketing courses, allowing Litman to specialize in Foreign Trade” (1952, 65). At the time of his hiring, Russell was already a past President of the National Associa-tion of Teachers of Marketing and Advertising (NATMA, forerunner of the American Marketing Association) and author of two well-known textbooks on salesmanship. Converse later became President of the NATMA and his distinguished career and contributions to the marketing discipline are well known to students of marketing history (Dix 2003; Huegy 1958). With such high-profi le marketing specialists as these now on faculty, Litman was no longer needed to teach marketing courses.

In 1919 Litman was also promoted to Full Professor at an annual sal-ary, by the way, of $3,000. Perhaps he viewed this as a sign that his career had reached a stage of maturity requiring a diff erent sort of contribution.




Thus, by 1920 he had begun to do more scholarly research and writing than he had previously (see Appendix 3.2). Between 1917 and 1920 he was involved, under the auspices of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, in a series of studies on the economic eff ects of the World War. The opportunity for this work had come at the invitation of David Kinley who had been hired to edit the series and whom Litman obviously admired and respected. That work led directly to Litman’s publication of a monograph, “Eff ects of War on Foreign Trade” (1919), and several articles including “Prices and Price Control in Great Britain and the United States During the World War” (1920), “Foreign Trade of the United States Since Armistice” (1921), and “Eff ects of World War on Trade” (1926). Of course, the eff ects of World War I on international trade were devastating. The War brought to a dramatic halt the international economic integration triggered by the technological advances of the industrial revolution (Lindsey 2002). It was ironic, then, that Litman would soon publish his most important contribu-tion to the marketing literature—a book about international marketing.

Essentials of International Trade (1923/1927) was Litman’s most sig-nifi cant publication. The book begins as follows:

There is fundamentally no diff erence between international, or what is termed foreign trade, and domestic trade. Both represent a private merchandising activity which is carried on for profi t and consists of the purchase and sale of commodities. (1927, 3)

That statement was consistent with his early (ca. 1902–1908) synopsis of “Mechanism and Technique of Commerce” and with his later (1950) state-ments about the essential interweaving of domestic and foreign marketing. However, it seems inconsistent with his practice during twelve intervening years of teaching separate domestic and foreign marketing courses.

Essentials of International Trade is presented in two parts, the second of which deals extensively with marketing topics including market research, merchandising policies, channels of distribution and intermediaries, personal selling, advertising, credits and collections, and transportation. Marketing scholars who follow the popular belief that the marketing concept was invented by Robert Keith in 1960, would be surprised to read Litman’s discussion in Essentials of the desirability and diffi culties of adapting products to market requirements and the profi tability of such actions (Chapter 16); or his discus-sion of organizing for export marketing, wherein he recommends a separate department for export marketing but advises that it be closely connected and coordinated with the other marketing activities in the fi rm (Chapter 19). Those two issues–satisfaction of customers’ needs at a profi t and the requisite synergy between various marketing activities–are the essential pillars of the marketing concept. However, as with most marketing scholarship of the early twentieth century (Jones and Monieson 1990b; Jones and Shaw 2002), Litman’s writing eschewed theory and focused instead on the description of practice.




One of the failings of Essentials of International Trade, given its author’s belief that international marketing was a subset of general marketing, was the lack of reference to the large and growing literature on marketing which existed by that time. Throughout the fi fteen chapters that deal with the “private aspects of international trade” (marketing), there are only a few references to works by recognizable marketing scholars–Harry Tosdal, Ralph Breyer, and C. S. Duncan. A cursory examination of Bartels’s well-known bibliographical appendix (1962) quickly assures us that by 1923 there was an extensive textbook literature on advertising, credit, selling and salesmanship and sales management, retailing, and even general mar-keting. Yet this literature was largely ignored by Litman in his discussions of those topics. Certainly, citing one’s sources was not as common then as today, but even so Litman off ered relatively few bibliographic sources.

Essentials of International Trade was relatively successful as measured by college adoptions of the text. Between 1923 and 1932, approximately sixty-six diff erent post-secondary institutions in North America adopted the book including two Canadian universities (Eldridge 1924; Litman 1924–1932). The latter point is interesting because of the obvious Ameri-can orientation of the text. It was also translated into Japanese in 1929. The success of Essentials as a text on international marketing is anomalous in the early twentieth-century marketing literature and curious given the dramatic decline in international trade after World War I.

RETIREMENT AND RELIGION

With a successful textbook in publication and a commitment to graduate teaching, one might have expected Litman’s scholarly output to grow at this point in his career. However, that was not the case. Instead, he became progressively more involved with religious commitments. From the begin-ning of his marriage, Simon was infl uenced by his wife, Ray’s, strong reli-gious beliefs and involvement with Jewish causes (Litman 1957).

“Jewish faculty members were almost as rare as albinos in American higher education in the early twentieth century” (Solberg 1992, 218). An Ivram was organized at the University of Illinois in 1907 with the objective of promoting the social welfare of Jewish students and a broader knowledge of Jewish matters. Litman was the only Jewish faculty member to be active in the Ivram at the University of Illinois. He and Ray often entertained Jewish students in their home and were both active in the activities of the Ivram, which reorganized as a Menorah Society in 1912. In 1922 and 1923 Simon was elected President of a local chapter of B’nai B’rith, soon became a frequent speaker at the Michigan Menorah Society, and was instrumental in the founding of the fi rst Hillel Foundation in Illinois. He was also very active in fundraising for a Jewish synagogue in Urbana-Champaign, which was eventually built in 1948. That same year, he retired from the University




as Emeritus Professor and his wife passed away. Although not especially prolifi c during his career, he continued to write during his retirement with a memoir of Ray Litman published in 1957 and his own (unpublished) biography completed two years before he died in 1965.

In his autobiography he wrote about his chosen vocation by stating, “I have been asked on a number of occasions whether I was ever regretful of having chosen teaching and research as my life’s work and I always replied with a defi nite ‘no’. I really cannot imagine what else I could have done that could have given me more satisfaction.” (Litman 1963, 100)

***

Simon Litman was a pioneer of university instruction in marketing. He published an important early (1911) marketing textbook that has hereto-fore gone undiscovered by marketing historians. That text is also likely the most complete surviving description we have of the content of an early twentieth-century collegiate marketing course. As well, he published what was undoubtedly one of the earliest (1923) textbooks to deal in any com-prehensive way with the subject of international marketing. For those accomplishments, he deserves our recognition.

Litman was not a theorist. Few, if any, of the early marketing scholars were. Like other economists trained in the methods and values of the Ger-man Historical School, they found that existing economic theory did not adequately explain the phenomena and problems associated with mass distri-bution. Instead, they used a more historical, statistical, descriptive approach to economics which they hoped would ultimately and inductively yield the-ory. During the early twentieth century, Litman and other pioneer market-ing scholars focused on describing the “how to” practices which became loosely identifi ed under the emerging umbrella termed “marketing”. Litman felt strongly, and at that time he was distinctive in this belief, that the study of marketing should include a study of international marketing practices. In this he was one of very few marketing surfers on the wave of international economic integration that followed the industrial revolution but which came to a halt in 1914, not really returning until after World War II. Perhaps that is why Litman’s seminal work on international marketing has gone unnoticed. His contributions came during that relatively short window in time when the academic study of marketing was emerging and at the same time the fi rst great era of international economic integration was ending.

How and why did Litman become a pioneer in marketing education? It seems likely that his role as inventor was a reluctant one at best. At the Uni-versity of California, by his own admission, that seminal course in “tech-nique of trade and commerce” was not his idea and initially he struggled with what the subject meant. In order to develop his thinking about marketing, he drew from German books on trade, personal experience and observations of business, and interviews of practising business people. That pragmatism was




probably derived from his German graduate education, driven by necessity, and reinforced by the philosophy of business education developed early on at the University of Illinois by David Kinley and Edmund James.

If Litman’s 1911 Trade and Commerce is indeed a detailed description of the content of one of the fi rst collegiate marketing courses, then mar-keting historians have an important new source for studying the origins of collegiate marketing education. The discovery of Litman’s writings and teaching about international marketing also opens a new chapter in the history of that sub-discipline which deserves further study. The prevailing wisdom until now was that nothing had been published about international marketing until 1935 (Bartels 1988, 213) and that the fi eld never really developed until after World War II. This line of thinking completely ignores the period of international economic integration that preceded World War I during which Litman lived and worked. His seminal book on international marketing should provide the starting point for a more in-depth study of the history of international marketing education which examines more closely the changing conditions between the late nineteenth century and mid-twentieth century and the resulting thirty-year lull in development of international marketing thought. In that history, Simon Litman is certainly one of the pioneer marketing scholars.

APPENDIX 3.1 OUTLINE OF SYNOPSIS FOR PROPOSED BOOK (CA. 1902–1908)

Mechanism and Technique of Commerceby Simon Litman, University of California*

PrefaceScope & Purpose; an account of the complicated machinery of modern business; analysis of the diff erent institutions and organizations that have been established for the maintenance, protection and promotion of trade.Reasons for attitude taken: mechanism & technique of commerce has received little or no attention from English and American writ-ers, although it off ers a very broad fi eld for investigation and is prime importance to students and business men.

Part I. Institutions of Commerce

Chapter 1 Caravans, Convoys and Factories Historical and multinational (examples for Venice, Hamburg, Ital-

ian city republics, German Hausa, and English merchant adventurers, China, Japan, Africa).




Chapter 2 Consular Service The judge for convoys and factories (examples—Turkey, Persia, Siam);

organization of the consular service for the United States.

Chapter 3 Markets, Fairs and Auctions Gathering places for buyers and sellers; examples of fairs–Leipzig,

Novgorod; modern markets–Les Halls Centrales of Paris; auctions—London, Liverpool, Havres, Antwerp.

Chapter 4 Produce Exchanges Origin, nature and signifi cance; Classifi cation; functions; methods of

dealing.

Chapter 5 Stock Exchanges

Chapter 6 Chambers of Commerce French type adopted by most European countries; chambers in Eng-

land and the United States; New York Chamber of Commerce.

Chapter 7 Commercial Museums Advantages in promoting foreign commerce; exhibiting producing

and consuming capacities; testing new products; intelligence bureaus; examples–Philadelphia Commercial Museum, Imperial Institute of London, Museums of Brussels and Vienna.

Chapter 8 Ministries of Commerce The state in its relation to trade; examples–Board of Trade in Eng-

land, Department of Commerce and Labor.

Part II. Elements of Commerce

Chapter 9 Labor in Commerce Numbers and classifi cations of employees; salaries and working con-

ditions for salespeople.

Chapter 10 Capital in Commerce

Chapter 11 Mercantile Credit Extent and signifi cance; various kinds of credit.

Chapter 12 The Credit Man Duties and functions.

Chapter 13 Mercantile Agencies Origin and growth of mercantile agencies; organization and

management.

Chapter 14 Commercial Competition Wholesale and retail; advertising mediums and methods, purpose and

signifi cance.




Part III. Organization of Trade

Chapter 15 Single Trader and Partnerships Suitability of single trader for commerce.

Chapter 16 Corporations Advantages; economics of corporations.

Chapter 17 Agencies Great value in the commercial life of today; universal, general and

special agents; commission merchants, brokers, and commercial travellers.

Chapter 18 Wholesale Trade Diff erences from retail; organization of wholesale trade in staple com-

modities; grain trade in the Unites States; cotton trade in England.

Chapter 19 Storage and Warehousing Industry Signifi cance; methods.

Chapter 20 Retail Trade Growth and reasons for growth; eff ects of prices; peddlers and

hucksters.

Chapter 21 Department Stores Theories as to origins; business methods of the department store;

advantages and disadvantages.

Chapter 22 Cooperative Distribution Success in Europe, especially in England; growth in the United States;

principles and methods of a cooperative store.

*This is an outline of Litman’s twenty-three-page, handwritten synopsis of a proposed book on Mechanism and Technique of Commerce. The manu-script is undated, but was written between 1902 and 1908 while Litman was at the University of California.

APPENDIX 3.2 LIST OF PUBLICATIONS BY SIMON LITMAN

1906. The Trading Place of Nations. Southern Pacifi c Company Bulletin.

1908a. San Francisco as a Foreign Shipping Port. University of California Chronicle 10 (July): 3.

1908b. Tariff Revision and Foreign Markets. American Economic Asso-ciation Quarterly.

1909a. Review of Legislation on Commerce and Industry for 1907–1908. New York State Library Bulletin.




1909b. Accounting. American Economic Association Quarterly 10 (April): 102–104.

1911a. Trade and Commerce. Chicago: LaSalle Extension University.1911b. Business Economics. The Volume Library. Chicago: W. E. Richard-

son Co.1919. Eff ects of War on Foreign Trade. Historical Outlook (February).1920a. Prices and Price Control in Great Britain and the United States

during the World War. Monograph No. 19, Preliminary Economic Studies of the War. London: Oxford University Press.

1920b. The Past Decade of the Foreign Commerce of the United States. American Economic Review (June): 313–31.

1921. The Foreign Trade of the United States since the Signing of the Armistice. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (March): 1–7.

1923/1927. Essentials of International Trade. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Translated into Japanese by S. Ogata, Osaka University, 1929.

1926. The Eff ects of the World War on Trade. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (September): 23–29.

1927. The Purpose of a Graduate Course in International Trade. In Grad-uate Work in Commerce, 22–27. Urbana: University of Illinois.

1950. The Beginnings of Teaching Marketing in American Universities. Journal of Marketing 15 (October): 210–23.

1957. Ray Frank Litman: A Memoir. New York: American Jewish His-torical Society.



4 Henry Charles Taylor (1873–1969)The Father of Agricultural Marketing

Henry Charles Taylor is considered by some to be the father of agricultural economics in America (Jones 1958; Parsons 1970). Taylor started the fi rst university department of agricultural economics in the United States at the University of Wisconsin in 1909 (Pulver 1984) and his contributions to that fi eld on the academic side as well as in civil service, frankly, overshadow his work in marketing. Nevertheless, his work in agricultural marketing was also seminal. He was a faculty member at the University of Wisconsin from 1901 until 1919, the fi rst eight years as an instructor under Richard T. Ely’s leader-ship in the Department of Economics, followed by ten years as the founding Chair of the Department of Agricultural Economics. He was then appointed Chief of the Federal Offi ce of Farm Management (1919–1921), Director of the Bureau of Markets and Crop Estimates (1921–1922), and of the Bureau of Agricultural Economics (1922–1925), before rejoining the academic world as Professor of Economics at Northwestern University from 1925 until 1928. He later returned to civil service as Managing Director of the Farm Foundation from 1935 through 1945 and continued with that organization as an agricul-tural economist until 1952. A signifi cant part of Taylor’s work in agricultural economics, both academically and as a civil servant, included marketing. Paul Converse may have been the fi rst marketing historian to cite Taylor as an early contributor to marketing ideas (1945, 19). He suspected that Taylor might have preceded Arch W. Shaw in originating a functional approach to the study of marketing. Bartels also recognized Taylor as a contributor to the development of marketing thought, though only in passing. In his often-cited intellectual genealogy of marketing (see Figure 1.1), Bartels included Taylor as one in a group of four infl uential economists at the University of Wisconsin, an early center of infl uence on marketing thought (1951, 4). Taylor’s distinc-tive contribution to the marketing discipline was to be one of the fi rst econo-mists to study and teach agricultural marketing in America.

GROWING UP IN THE MID-WEST

Henry Charles Taylor was born on April 16, 1873, on a farm in southeast Iowa. His recollections of childhood focused on lessons in the “art of farm


Henry Charles Taylor (1873–1969) 55


management” taught by his father, Tarpley Taylor, the values of a good Christian life instilled by his mother, and on grade school teachers who rec-ognized in young Henry a sharp mind and who encouraged him to pursue an education (1960, Chapter 1). Taylor described those lessons learned in the home and on the farm as “fundamental to all of the [subsequent] educa-tion received from universities and from life’s activities” (1960, 17).

Taylor’s father was a successful farmer. When the Homestead Act was passed in 1862, farmers could move further west and receive from the fed-eral government 160-acre farms just by occupying the land. Many small-farm owners in Taylor’s native Iowa were glad to accept the government’s off er but, instead of moving west, Taylor’s father bought out his neighbors eventually acquiring six hundred acres. However, Taylor recalled that his father held a stewardship theory of property rather than one of absolute ownership, and believed that he should manage his land to best advance

Figure 4.1 Henry Charles Taylor.Photo Courtesy Wisconsin Historical Society, Image Number WHi-26621.




“the cause” (Taylor 1960, 15). “The social point of view was strong in our family” (Taylor 1992).

By the time he was ready to attend college his father was out of debt and despite the depression of the 1890s could aff ord to send all his chil-dren to college. Others could not. During that depression, farmers seemed to be hit particularly hard and Taylor’s father became a member of the Grange1 which was pressing for legislation to improve the prices on farm products. From these infl uences, Henry Charles Taylor derived inspiration and an ambition which guided his education and career. He decided that he wanted to “get an education, become a successful farmer and then go to Congress to promote legislation which would help farmers” (Taylor 1960, 18). Eventually, Taylor did all three.

GETTING AN EDUCATION IN AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS

The fi rst step in that direction was taken in 1891 when Taylor entered Drake University to study agriculture. In 1893, he transferred to Iowa State College where he earned a Bachelor of Agriculture in 1896 and that same year a Master of Science in Agriculture for a thesis on “Tenancy and Farm Ownership”. At Iowa State College, however, his studies “had to do with the material side of agriculture” (Taylor 1960, 21) rather than the eco-nomic side since the subject of agricultural economics was not yet taught in America. Despite now having earned undergraduate and graduate degrees, Taylor’s second ambition to become a successful farmer and lobbyist was put on hold.

Having studied the production side of farming, Taylor felt a need to learn about the social sciences in relation in agriculture. In 1896, he was drawn to the University of Wisconsin where Richard T. Ely was Chair of the Department of Economics. In Taylor’s words:

Professor Ely was a social economist . . . [believing that] human insti-tutions were the determining factor in the distribution of wealth. Ely taught that the distribution of wealth could be improved by modifying economic institutions. He stressed that in modifying social economic institutions the general welfare is always to be kept in mind as the goal. He taught that private property is not absolute; it is a ‘social trust’ and may be modifi ed in the interest of the general welfare . . . the general welfare became the center of interest about which all other problems revolved and in terms of which the problems were to be ultimately solved. (Taylor 1960, 26–28)

It isn’t surprising that Ely’s approach to economics would appeal to Tay-lor, whose father was a member of the Grange and believed he was only a custodian of the land, that it should be managed for “the cause”, and who




wanted to promote legislation helping farmers gain a fair share of the dis-tribution of wealth in America.

Ely had been looking for a graduate student to specialize in agricultural economics. However the subject was not well developed in America, so he advised Taylor to spend some time studying in Europe “where agricultural problems were in a more advanced stage because agriculture had been car-ried on there longer than in the United States” (Taylor 1960, 31). More generally, it was Ely’s habit to encourage his graduate students to spend time studying in Germany (Jones and Monieson 1990b) where he himself had studied under Karl Knies, Ernst Engel, and Johannes Conrad of the German Historical School of Economics.

Following Ely’s advice, in 1899 Taylor went to England, then to Germany where he studied agricultural economics under Johannes Conrad at the Uni-versity of Halle and under Max Sering at the University of Berlin. At the lat-ter institution, Taylor also took courses from German Historical economists, Wagner and Schmoller. At the University of Halle, Conrad’s courses in agri-cultural economics were described by Taylor as “historical and descriptive in character”, concentrating on the political economy of agriculture rather than on the technical aspects of farming (Taylor 1940, 95).

By the close of the nineteenth century every important German uni-versity had its professors who taught subjects having to do with the fi eld we now designate as agricultural economics. . . . For example, in 1900 at the University of Halle, Professor Johannes Conrad gave a course entitled, ‘Agrarpolitik’, historical and descriptive in character. . . . American students who went to Germany for training in agricul-tural economics at the turn of the century . . . found many of the basic principles which have been followed in the development of agricultural economics in the United States. (Taylor 1940, 95–96)

Taylor returned to the University of Wisconsin from Germany in 1901 to complete his doctoral thesis on “The Decline of Landowning Farmers in Eng-land”. It was a historical, comparative study of land tenure which drew from archival materials at the British Museum, from personal observations made while visiting farmers and estate agents in England, and from the works of Roscher, Conrad, Sering, and Brentano, all German Historical School econo-mists. Taylor later cited his own doctoral thesis, along with B. H. Hibbard’s (1902) “The History of Agriculture in Dane County”, M. B. Hammond’s (1897) “The Cotton Industry: An Essay in American Economic History”, and J. G. Thompson’s (1907) “The Rise and Decline of the Wheat Growing Indus-try in Wisconsin”, as major contributors to the University of Wisconsin’s repu-tation as the leading center in the use of the historical approach (Taylor and Taylor 1952, 287). He credited Ely as the primary stimulus for that use of the historical method but acknowledged that “the roots of that Wisconsin back-ground may lead back to the German Historical School” (Taylor 1939, 2).




UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN (1901–1919)

On his return to Wisconsin in 1901, Ely off ered Taylor an instructor’s posi-tion in the Department of Economics. Actually, a “Course in Commerce” (a major in commerce) had been started within the Economics department under the direction of William A. Scott and it was from Scott that the off er came, specifi cally to teach economic history and economic geography (Taylor 1992). There were still no agricultural economics courses off ered at the University of Wisconsin or anywhere else in the United States for that matter, so Taylor began his academic career teaching economic history and economic geogra-phy in the “course [program] in commerce”, taking over those classes from Edward David Jones who was departing for the University of Michigan.

Teaching the commercial courses was no drawback. Agricultural history and the economics of agricultural marketing were made to loom large in the two commercial courses which I was giving, much of which I moved over to agricultural economics [later, in 1909]. (Taylor 1960, 50)

Taylor’s 1901 course in economic geography was a signifi cant beginning for his contributions to marketing education. The material used in that course, and other courses he may have modeled his after, add considerable insight into his teaching of marketing. For example, one of his fi rst moves was to give that course more emphasis on agriculture and marketing, an example of what later would come to be known as the commodity approach to mar-keting (Shaw and Jones 2005).

From two-thirds to three-quarters of the time in the course in eco-nomic geography was spent in describing where each of the impor-tant agricultural products was grown, where it was consumed, and the transportation, merchandising, and processing which it underwent as it passed from producer to consumer. (Taylor 1941, 23)

The text he used in that course was Volume VI of the Report of the US Industrial Commission of 1900, entitled “Distribution and Marketing of Farm Products”. That report has been cited by marketing historians as the fi rst ‘textbook’ used in American university marketing courses (Bartels 1962; Hagerty 1936) and its relevance as an early marketing text has been discussed at length by Johnson and Hollander (1987). It provided descrip-tions of the distribution of cereals, cotton, and dairy products, and of the marketing of livestock, as well as a discussion of the signifi cance of cold storage and refrigeration in the marketing of perishable products. In Tay-lor’s words, Volume VI was

by all odds the best book on agricultural economics at the beginning of the twentieth century. . . . The facts assembled and the methods of




presentation made it possible for the reader to develop in his mind a fairly clear picture of marketing processes and price-making forces. (Taylor and Taylor 1952, 517)

Taylor went so far as to state that this report marked the very beginning of “scientifi c study of marketing” (1922, 13) and “had much infl uence upon my course in economic geography and in turn suggested the method used in studies from 1912–1917 in the marketing of Wisconsin farm products” (1941, 24). Other government publications that described marketing were also assigned in Taylor’s 1901 course. They included “The Grain Trade of the U.S.”, “The Cotton Trade of the U.S.”, both published in Monthly Sum-mary of Commerce and Finance (1900), and several bulletins of the US Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Statistics (Taylor 1908).

The materials developed by Taylor in that early course in economic geography dealing with agricultural economics later formed the basis of his seminal book, An Introduction to the Study of Agricultural Economics, published in 1905. This was probably the fi rst book dealing with agricul-tural economics to be published in the English language and would likely have been one of the fi rst to deal with agricultural marketing, had it not been for the time pressures of Taylor’s tenure clock. Taylor described the omission of marketing content in this way.

It will be noted that the fi rst edition of Agricultural Economics, pub-lished in 1905, did not include the subject of marketing, although there was a chapter on prices. My interest in the fi elds of farm management and land tenure was greater at that time than my interest in market-ing. I had not written up my ideas on marketing so carefully as I had those on these other subjects, and since, for practical reasons, it was necessary to publish the book in the spring of 1905 in order to get the promotion to an assistant professorship [and a raise in salary to $1,400 a year], I published the material on the economics of farm management and land tenure which was ready, omitted the discussion of marketing, and called the book An Introduction to the Study of Agricultural Eco-nomics. (Taylor 1941, 2)

The next edition (1919) incorporated considerable discussion of marketing, with specifi c emphasis on the relation between the farmer and middlemen.

Tracing the sources of content in Taylor’s 1905 book yields an interest-ing, if not surprising, path to earlier German courses in agricultural mar-keting. In responding to Henry Farnam’s 1906 survey on the infl uence of the German Historical School on American economists, Taylor wrote that many of the subjects discussed in his own book were covered in lectures by Max Sering at the University of Berlin and by Johannes Conrad at the University of Halle while he was studying in Germany (Farnam 1906). In addition, a report sent to Benjamin Hibbard at the University of Wisconsin




from the American Consulate-General in Berlin indicates that courses in agricultural marketing were off ered as early as 1912, and probably ear-lier, at the Universities of Berlin, Halle, and other institutions in Germany (Thakara 1913). For example, the catalogue of the University of Berlin for 1912/13 listed the following:

General course in business management. Includes credit, competition, speculation, the methods and psychology of advertising, selling meth-ods and organization tariff technique, etc. Organization of commercial establishments in particular branches. The grain trade and the market-ing of grain. (Thakara 1913, 5)

The report by the Consulate-General concluded, “in most, if not all, of the [German] universities there are, of course, opportunities for the study of various phases of economics bearing in a broad way on the subject of mar-keting” (Thakara 1913, 2). One is left wondering how much of the lecture material dealing with marketing at the University of Wisconsin might have been borrowed from courses off ered earlier in Germany.

Whatever its sources of infl uence, Taylor’s early course in economic geography marked the beginning of instruction in agricultural marketing at Wisconsin and quite likely in America.

Marketing in the Department of Agricultural Economics

Gradually, Taylor was able to expand the number of courses on agricultural economics off ered by the Department of Economics. In 1904–1905, he taught “The Elements of Agricultural Economics”, “Historical and Com-parative Agriculture”, and “Agricultural Industries” (University of Wiscon-sin 1904/05, 117), in addition to the course on “Economic Geography”. In 1907, he added a course on “Commercial Geography” which was

a description of the production and marketing of the principle agri-cultural products, and a study of the conditions which determine the geographical distribution of the centers of production of each of these products; a discussion of the production and consumption of the lead-ing products of mines and of forests. (Extension Division 1907)

That same year, Taylor was promoted to the rank of Associate Profes-sor. In 1908, Taylor’s expanding eff orts in agricultural economics were rewarded with a promotion to Full Professor and an appointment as head of a new department.

A Department of Agricultural Economics–the fi rst such department to be established in an American university–was formed within the College of Agriculture in 1908, and Taylor was appointed the fi rst Chair. As a result, teaching and research in agricultural economics in general and in marketing




in particular received additional emphasis. Taylor had already encouraged several of his students in economics to work on marketing topics (Jones 1907). When the Department of Agricultural Economics was formed, how-ever, a new emphasis was evident in thesis work and in research published through the Agricultural Experiment Station’s Bulletin Series.

A phrase that became popular in agricultural circles after the turn of the century was “the marketing problem”. It had to do with the suspected manipulation of prices for farm products by middlemen. One signifi cant result of this widespread concern was the formation, in 1903, of the Ameri-can Society of Equity, for the purpose of securing for farmers a fair share of the national income (Taylor 1941, 4). The Society was very critical of a “price-making system” which was “tyrannical”, and reduced farming to “commercial slavery” (Everitt, quoted in Taylor 1941, 5). Taylor’s attitude was much more moderate.

I was tolerant towards but not enthusiastic about the Equity move-ment in Wisconsin. I had read [Everitt’s] The Third Power when it fi rst came out with the feeling that Everitt was an agitator and that many of his statements were wild exaggerations. While I was fully aware of the opportunity for dishonesty in the middleman service, I believed that hired men of cooperative associations working in central mar-kets, remote from the farmers, might also succeed in being dishonest. I believed that, so far as the central market was concerned, the best con-trol the farmers could exert was by understanding clearly what took place. (Taylor 1941, 6)

The last part of that sentence–that the best control farmers could exert was by understanding clearly what took place–is essential to understand-ing what ultimately drove Taylor forward through his career in teaching and civil service. He believed that farmers did not receive a fair share of the nation’s economic wealth and that information and education for farmers, especially about the marketing of agricultural products, was the key to helping them get what they were due.

In 1906, as the interest of Wisconsin farmers in the activities of middle-men and the price-making system grew, Taylor began studying the coopera-tive creameries and cheese factories in southern Wisconsin (Taylor 1941, 7). In 1910, he published a bulletin through the University’s Agricultural Experiment Station on “The Prices of Farm Products”. Taylor’s conclusions about the prices of eggs, butter, and cheese were consistent with the notion that middlemen served an essential function for which a price had to be paid (Taylor 1941, 8).

The following year, in 1911, two of Taylor’s senior students in agricul-tural economics, W. A. Schoenfeld and G. S. Wehrwein, were given the task of studying the marketing of Wisconsin cheese. Together with Taylor in 1913, they published the results of their investigations as “The Marketing




of Wisconsin Cheese”. That article described where cheese was produced, where it was consumed, and the activities of middlemen in the marketing process; the advantages and disadvantages of a cheese-maker versus a sales agent carrying out the selling function, the various types of retailers and wholesalers, the operation of dairy boards, retail prices, and the services rendered by various middlemen. Taylor commented that, “while our fi nd-ings tended to sober those persons who had been speaking excitedly about the marketing problem, they made it perfectly clear that, in certain stages in the marketing of Wisconsin cheese the agencies were not functioning satisfactorily” (Taylor 1941, 16).

This early research dealing with the marketing of Wisconsin cheese was signifi cant in a number of ways. “This fi rst piece of research and extension work on the marketing of cheese did much to give the Depart-ment of Agricultural Economics at the University of Wisconsin prestige in the minds of the members of the State Board of Public Aff airs” (Taylor 1941, 18). It signifi ed the beginning of a specialization by the Depart-ment in marketing and cooperatives which today is considered its single most important contribution to the study of agriculture (Pulver 1984). Also, a fl urry of research grew from that initial study and led to numer-ous graduate theses in agricultural marketing, including: G. S. Wehrwein (1913) “The Dairy Board of Wisconsin”, W. A. Schoenfeld (1914) “Sea-sonal and Geographical Distribution of Wisconsin Cheddar Cheese for the Year 1911”, J. H. Dance (1915) “The Distribution, Marketing and Value of Milk, Cream and Butter Produced on 222 Wisconsin Farms”, H. R. Walker (1915) “The Cooperative Marketing of Livestock in Wis-consin”, and E. T. Cusick (1916) “The Raising and Marketing of Wis-consin Tobacco”.

As the Department of Agricultural Economics grew, Taylor recruited two University of Wisconsin alumni as faculty to specialize in agricultural marketing. In 1913, Benjamin Hibbard was persuaded to join the faculty, having taught at the University of Iowa since graduating from Wisconsin in 1902. In 1917, Theodore Macklin returned to Wisconsin from Kansas State College. Macklin had been a student of Taylor’s and Hibbard was a classmate of the latter. Under these three, the University of Wisconsin became a leading center of work in agricultural marketing.

Hibbard, Taylor, and several of the graduate students in the department published a series of studies including (1914) “Agricultural Cooperation”, (1915) “Markets and Prices of Wisconsin Cheese”, (1915) “The Market-ing of Wisconsin Butter”, (1915) “The Marketing of Wisconsin Potatoes”, (1917) “Cooperation in Wisconsin”, and (1917) “Marketing of Wisconsin Milk”. The latter study led to a thesis and subsequent book on The Market-ing of Whole Milk in 1921 by H. E. Erdman. That book, as well as Hib-bard’s (1921) Marketing of Agricultural Products, and Macklin’s (1921) Effi cient Marketing for Agriculture, are considered to be seminal contribu-tions to the marketing literature (Bartels 1962).




Of the series of articles published between 1913 and 1917, Tay-lor observed that they all followed a common pattern. Each study was designed “to picture the marketing process clearly in order that the true character of the problems of marketing might be discovered” (1941, 22). Another characteristic of that collection of research was that it “followed through stage by stage the diff erent [marketing] functions . . . not using the term functions although studying functions” (Taylor 1944). It was in recognition of that fact that Converse thought Taylor might have had prior claim to Arch W. Shaw as originator of the functional approach (Converse 1944). In his eff orts to understand the discrepancy between prices paid to the farmer and those paid by the consumer, Taylor discov-ered that there were valuable functions being performed by middlemen in the marketing process. He never lost his compassion for the farmer, however. To the extent that there was a “marketing problem”, it seemed to Taylor to be one of educating the farmer in the techniques of market-ing so that he might perform those functions himself and collect that value added.

Taylor also experienced tension between his desire to maintain schol-arly detachment and the need for social activism. When he hired Hib-bard in 1913, Taylor expressed these views to the Dean of the College of Agriculture.

The function of the University, in the fi eld of marketing, became clearly defi ned in my mind. As I see it, our function is to investigate and edu-cate and not to agitate or organize marketing institutions. . . . It is espe-cially important just at this time because Hibbard will be called upon to go before the public on various occasions dealing with the subject of marketing. It seems to me entirely proper for him to give a historical and descriptive lecture on cooperation, pointing out its strengths and its weakness, but not his function to go to a given place to tell people specifi cally how to organize for a specifi c purpose. (1913)

Taylor felt that the work in the University on agricultural cooperation and marketing should be scientifi c–inductive, historical, and descriptive. Nev-ertheless, he also believed that research and teaching should result in prac-tical, profi table programs for state and federal legislation.

However Taylor did not completely accept the “Wisconsin Idea”, which was a unique philosophy of education associated with the Progressive Movement. It emphasized better government through better education, and social effi ciency through rational administration. The University of Wisconsin became very active in this philosophy during the early part of this century, and the state came to be described as “a laboratory for wise experimental legislation aiming to secure the social and political better-ment of the people as a whole” (Roosevelt 1912, vii). Taylor preferred to do his lobbying outside the university.




In 1917, Taylor and Richard T. Ely founded the American Association for Agricultural Legislation (AAAL) for the purposes of studying agricul-tural legislation and making recommendations on policy matters to the government. In a study program distributed to founding members, the fol-lowing topics were included:

- History of state marketing bureaus and departments, - The essentials of an effi cient state marketing bureau, - Present status of standardization and grading laws, - Relation of state marketing organizations to national regulation, - Cold storage legislation,

- Laws governing cooperative organizations of producers and con-sumers, and

- Federal marketing legislation (Ely 1917).

That study program refl ected a concern for land use, prices and credit, transportation, and the role of education in improving farm lifestyle. More importantly, it explicitly addressed marketing as an area of concern and study, specifi cally, the role of the state in the marketing process. Two years later, in 1919, the AAAL moved towards becoming a more schol-arly, and less political, organization when it was consolidated with the American Farm Management Association to form the American Farm Economics Association (Taylor 1939). That same year, 1919, marked the end of Taylor’s academic career at the University of Wisconsin. Except for a brief stint at Northwestern University from 1925 to 1928, he spent most of his remaining years working as a civil servant, but still involved in agricultural marketing.

Hands-On Learning and the Tarpleywick Experiment Farm

Recall that as a young man, Taylor had three ambitions: to get an educa-tion, to become a successful farmer, and to promote legislation to help farmers. In 1911, he added farm ownership and management to his resume. His pragmatic philosophy of education was stimulated on the job.

While giving the fourteen lectures on the economics of farm manage-ment in 1902–03, I made some interesting observations. Most of my students had received no more than a country school education, yet they grasped the principles of farm organization far more readily than the majority of the graduate students in Professor Ely’s seminar, where I had been in the habit of springing my ideas from time to time. The explanation would have been on the tip of Professor John Dewey’s tongue. The farm boys were familiar with the daily activities on farms . . . these boys readily integrated what I was saying with facts [experi-ences] with which they were familiar. (Taylor 1960, 52)




Taylor realized that mere instruction ends and real teaching begins when the student is able to associate the subject matter with previous learn-ing through experience. That realization led him to push for what today would be considered cooperative education. He lobbied the administra-tion of the University to require that students in agricultural economics have the equivalent of one year experience working on a farm before they graduated. That proposal was blocked by the dean of the College of Agri-culture, but Taylor continued his belief in hands-on learning and actively practiced it himself.

In 1911, Taylor purchased land just outside Madison and developed his own “experiment farm”, a dairy farm which he operated for eight years until 1919 when he moved to Washington, then continued ownership of the farm with a working partner for many years afterwards. Tarpleywick Experiment Farm (named after his father) was Taylor’s way of staying in touch with the reality of farming, and learning by doing.

PROMOTING LEGISLATION TO HELP FARMERS

Taylor’s third ambition had been to “go to Congress and promote legisla-tion to help farmers”. In 1919, he answered a call to Washington and served in the US Department of Agriculture for nearly six years. It meant a cut in salary and a move to Washington where his cost of living would be higher. However, it would serve “the cause”.

I went to Washington with the hope of helping in the further develop-ment of an economic service in the Department of Agriculture which would enable the farmer to carry on his farm operations with a clear mental vision of what was going on in the whole world insofar as it aff ected his economic welfare. (Taylor 1992, 7)

Taylor was appointed Chief of the Offi ce of Farm Management and Farm Economics in 1919, and became Director of the Bureau of Markets and Crop Estimates in 1921. In 1922, those two divisions were combined into the Bureau of Agricultural Economics, which was headed by Taylor until August of 1925. During these years, he emphasized the research work done by these government organizations and promoted legislation in the inter-ests of farmers. He also coordinated the research on problems of market-ing, production, and farm management, revised the work in crop estimates, and negotiated agreements between the US Department of Agriculture and nine European cotton associations for the establishment of universal stan-dards for American cotton (Taylor Papers Index, 1). By the time he left the Department of Agriculture in 1925, Taylor was in charge of the largest eco-nomic agency in the federal government with a staff of more than two thou-sand people and an annual budget of more than $5,000,000. He organized




the Bureau of Agricultural Economics into two production divisions, nine marketing divisions based on various commodities, and several additional general divisions such as statistical and historical research, agricultural fi nance, and agricultural cooperation. He might have accomplished more but was literally a victim of politics.

When Taylor joined the Department of Agriculture, the US President was Democrat Woodrow Wilson (PhD in History and Political Science) and the Secretary of Agriculture was W. A. Houston (Masters in Econom-ics), ideologically a supportive environment for Taylor. However, in 1921, Republican Warren G. Harding was elected President and was joined by Herbert Hoover as Secretary of Commerce. From the day of President Harding’s inaugural address, Taylor perceived interdepartmental [Com-merce and Agriculture] confl ict because each department served a diff erent master in the channel of distribution. Commerce served the information needs of merchants and manufacturers; Agriculture served the information needs of farmers.

With this basic confl ict in interest there will probably always be a feel-ing, on the part of certain representatives of commerce and industry, that the inspection service and the gathering and disseminating of eco-nomic information relating to agricultural marketing should be con-trolled by men who have the background and the point of view of the merchant and the manufacturer. On the other hand, farmers who have no private sources of information will fi nd it in their interest to see to it that this service be rendered for all in the interest of all. Furthermore, they must make sure that this service is supplied by people who know what kind of information the farmer needs to guide his farm manage-ment and marketing activities as well as appreciate the value of infor-mation to middleman and consumer. (Taylor 1992, 43)

It was evident to Taylor that Secretary of Commerce Hoover wanted all marketing information to come under the jurisdiction of Commerce. Hoover also believed that the Department of Agriculture should restrict its work to the production side of agriculture. This led to serious confl icts between Hoover and then Secretary of Agriculture (formerly editor of Wal-lace’s Farmer magazine and staunch supporter of Taylor) Henry C. Wallace who died in 1924, no doubt leaving Taylor politically vulnerable. Things had become progressively worse for Taylor under President Calvin Coolidge who was elected in 1923 and who, with the appointment of a new Secretary of Agriculture in 1925, wanted more changes. A newspaper headline on January 19, 1925 read “Coolidge Plans to Crush Clique in Agriculture . . . Clean-Up Due When New Secretary is Chosen: Appointee to be a Man in Favor of Hoover’s Farm Ideas” (Philadelphia Public Ledger 1925, quoted in Taylor 1992, 210). Evidently, Taylor was considered part of that clique and became part of the clean-up when he was dismissed on August 15, 1925.




Taylor clearly blamed Hoover for his dismissal. “The thorn in my fl esh that Hoover had inserted by forcing me out of the Department of Agriculture festered while [1928–1931] I was in Vermont” (Taylor 1960, 149).

Meanwhile, Richard T. Ely had moved to Northwestern University and in 1925 persuaded his former student and colleague to join the faculty where Taylor served, once again, as Professor of Economics. At age sev-enty-fi ve, Ely was transferring his Institute of Research in Land Econom-ics and Public Utilities from the University of Wisconsin to Northwestern University, and also wanted Taylor to manage the fi nances of the Institute. Taylor agreed, however friction developed between the two over how to manage the Institute’s funds, and that confl ict produced an unfortunate rift between the two friends.

For some time it had troubled me to fi nd myself out of harmony with Professor Ely, whom I had greatly admired as a teacher and as a per-sonal friend. After my removal to Vermont, I saw nothing of him for about ten years. (Taylor 1960, 146)

After four years at Northwestern, Taylor retired permanently from teach-ing. For three years he was Director of the Survey of Rural Vermont fol-lowed by two years in Rome as the US member of the Permanent Committee of the International Institution of Agriculture. In 1935, at age sixty-two, Taylor became Managing Director of the Farm Foundation, an organiza-tion established to manage funds to promote the improvement of rural liv-ing conditions. He held that position for ten years and, remarkably, added another seven years as agricultural economist for the same organization.

In retirement, forty-seven years after writing his seminal book on agri-cultural economics and with the help of his wife, Ann, Taylor (1952) pub-lished his only other major book, The Story of Agricultural Economics in the United States 1840–1932. It is a wonderfully detailed history of agricultural economics and marketing, and a must read for any student of marketing history.

***

Henry Charles Taylor was a farmer, civil servant, scholar, and through all those roles, he was also a teacher of marketing. He dedicated his life to studying the role of agriculture in the economy. Taylor had recognized a special class of farm management problem related to the marketing pro-cess. The problem did not necessarily lie with unscrupulous middlemen, since they performed essential functions for which a price had to be paid. The real problem, as Taylor saw it, was a lack of knowledge by farmers about marketing techniques. For his part, Taylor spent most of his life edu-cating those who worked in agriculture about farm management principles including marketing.




Taylor’s views on marketing and marketing education were made most clear in the Journal of Farm Economics (1924), fi ve years after leaving the University of Wisconsin and nearing the end of his time in Washington. In refl ecting on his teaching career, Taylor gave the following comprehensive defi nition of marketing.

Marketing may be viewed in the very narrow sense of selling what one has produced for sale. It may be broadened to include all those activities and institutions involved in the handling, storing, transfer-ring, transforming, and ultimate sale to consumers of specifi c products. To this enlarged concept may be added that of fi nding ways and means of improving the present marketing system. These may include stan-dardization, a better adjustment of shipments to the demands for the specifi c products in the various markets at a given time, and a better equalization of shipments throughout the season. It may include meth-ods of sale and methods of settling disputes such as public inspection services, systems of arbitration, and in this day of movements for self help among farmers in their eff orts to solve their marketing problems, the science and the art of cooperative marketing comes in for a large share of the time and attention of the student of agricultural market-ing. (1924, 20)

Taylor also outlined his model program of study in agricultural marketing. It began with courses in economic history and economic geography (his fi rst teaching assignment at Wisconsin). A historical background taught students “to take into account the dynamic forces as well as the static forces” (Taylor 1924, 23). Economic geography dealt with modes of trans-portation and locations of production and consumption as they aff ected the marketing of farm products. Other preparatory courses suggested by Taylor included money, banking and credit, accounting, statistics, and, commercial and agricultural law. This should be followed, he suggested, by courses in marketing functions and institutions which

should develop in the student’s mind a clear picture of the transactions that take place at each stage in the progress of the product from producer to consumer. It should develop an understanding of the forces which determine the bargaining power of buyer and seller, the part played by the offi cial standards for farm products, by the great market news ser-vices, by credit systems, and by organized markets. (1924, 24)

Taylor held a broad view of marketing, one which included consideration of the problem of creating for farmers a fair share of the national income. He was preoccupied with the general welfare rather than individual gain. In some ways, Taylor’s approach was that of a macromarketer, and in that sense his thinking was much like Edward David Jones’s (see Chapter 2, herein).




The predominant infl uences on Taylor’s thinking were his rural, Chris-tian upbringing during very diffi cult economic times, and his training under Richard T. Ely at Wisconsin. However, these infl uences were undoubtedly reinforced by the Progressive Movement in Wisconsin and by the method-ological approach and advanced curriculum development in agricultural economics of the German Historical School. Friendships were also infl u-ential in the work Taylor pursued. There is a remarkable section in his unpublished autobiography titled “The Importance of Friendships” where he refl ects on the infl uences of friends.

When I got back from Europe in 1901, my good friendship with Pro-fessors Ely and Scott was largely responsible for my getting an oppor-tunity to teach in the University of Wisconsin. Again, my friendship with Beardsley Ruml accounted for the fact that when I was through in Washington–when the ‘organized system’ had thrown me out–I had a series of opportunities outside of the organized system. . . . I have Henry A. Wallace to thank for my presidential appointment to serve as US member of the Permanent Committee at the International Institute of Agriculture in Rome. Ex-governor Lowden and Chris Christensen were responsible for the chance to transfer from Rome to the Farm Foundation in 1935. . . . Without men like Richard T. Ely, Beardsley Ruml, Henry A. Wallace, and Frank O. Lowden, I would probably have spent the remainder of my life after the age of fi fty-two as a farmer. (Taylor 1960, 237)

Henry Charles Taylor wanted to get an education, to become a successful farmer, and to lobby Congress for legislation that would help farmers. Through his teaching, his writing2, and his work as a civil servant, he succeeded in help-ing students of agriculture better understand the marketing process.



5 Percival White (1887–1970)Marketing Engineer

Percival White was likely one of the fi rst to articulate what we know today as the marketing concept (Tadajewski and Jones forthcoming). He has also been cited as one of the earliest writers to apply Scientifi c Man-agement to marketing (Lalonde and Morrison 1967; Skålen, Fougère, and Fellesson 2008; Tadajewski and Jones forthcoming; Usui 2008). Nevertheless, his real claim to fame is his pioneering work in market research in America (Converse 2009; Fullerton 1994; Lockley 1950; New York Times 1970). White’s obituary lauded him as a “leader in market research” (New York Times 1970). He was the founding President of the Market Research Council in 1927 (Market Research Council 1957) and posthumously elected to the Market Research Council Hall of Fame in 1981 (Market Research Council 1989). Over the course of his career he published twenty books, eleven targeted at the academic and profes-sional markets, another nine for a wider readership (see Appendix 5.1 for a complete list of White’s published books). Most of his books dealt with marketing; three were focused on market research. His (1921) Market Analysis was one of the earliest books to specialize in market research (Lockley 1950; Ward 2009). Both Market Analysis (1921) and Advertis-ing Research (1927a) were described as “fundamental and groundbreak-ing” (Kropff 1939, in Fullerton 1994, 55). And his Marketing Research Technique (1931) provided one of the most comprehensive accounts of research methods used in market research at that time (Bartels 1962; Converse 2009).

Clearly, Percival White was a major contributor to the academic literature, but he also sought to put his ideas into practice. A solo marketing consultant through the 1920s, he later merged his business with Pauline Arnold’s com-pany, ‘Arnold Research Service’, in the late 1920s which, in 1934 became Market Research Corporation of America (MRCA), one of the earliest pri-vate market research fi rms and through the 1930s and 1940s one of the larg-est such companies in America (Kropff 1939, in Fullerton 1994).

In spite of these achievements and accolades, we know very little about Percival White. Perhaps that is because White was not an academic.


Percival White (1887–1970) 71


He never taught at a university. Nevertheless, he was a pioneer in marketing.

This chapter begins by highlighting White’s family influences and early education which provided him with his training as a writer and fueled his interest in engineering. White’s contributions to marketing scholarship were concentrated in the period from 1921 through 1931, during which time he cultivated a successful career as a marketing consultant. Beginning in 1934, his consultancy activities focused on market research and led to the formation of the Market Research Cor-poration of America. In retirement after 1951, he continued to publish

Figure 5.1 Percival White.Photo Courtesy Lucy Sallick.




books that described important American industries based on his ear-lier consulting experience.

GENEALOGICAL BEGINNINGS AND INDUSTRIAL ENGINEERING: 1887–1920

Percival White was born in 1887 in Winchendon, Massachusetts, to par-ents Percival Wayland White and Edith Frazar (Wheeler) White. Percival Wayland White was a partner in the family business, Nelson D. White & Sons. Winchendon was an early American example of a company town and the fi rm that built and owned most of it was White & Sons, which gener-ated its income from cotton milling and distribution. Nelson White “was his own architect and mill engineer. He improved the whole village, graded the lawns, set out trees in an artistic manner; in fact, created the village of Winchendon Springs just as it is at the present time [1900]. It is regarded everywhere as a model manufacturing village” (White 1902, 149–50).

The mills originally manufactured white (no pun intended) goods but later changed to making denims. By the time Percival Wayland White became involved in the business, the family owned several mills in Winchendon, White Valley, Glenallan, and East Jaff ery, New Hampshire. Percival Way-land White was a full partner in the fi rm and active in sales management. One of his cousins, William Walker White, was considered one of the best mechanical engineers in America (White 1902).

Another cousin on Edith White’s side of the family, Charles Wheeler, earned his living as a teacher, high school principal, author, and master carpenter who published a comprehensive manual for woodworking in 1907, including many photos of Percival White and his brother Richard as children working in Wheeler’s well-equipped workshop. Wheeler spent a lot of time with Percy (as family members referred to young Percival), the two of them inventing an alphabet and language that was part Hawai-ian (Sallick 1993). Wheeler was especially infl uential in teaching Percy to work with his hands and in giving him an appreciation for planning and the use of technology. Later, when Percival began writing his books about marketing, Charles Wheeler was frequently acknowledged for his edito-rial assistance.

Percival Wayland White traveled extensively to Europe (not always for business), was a social climber, lived in a grand house, and ‘collected’ maiden voyages of ocean liners (Sallick 2010a). He frequently took his fam-ily with him on his travels, especially to Hawaii. His sister Julia married into the Castle family, whose sugar refi ning empire fi nanced their owner-ship of a “large hunk of Hawaii” (Sallick 1993) and eventually became the Dole Company. Percival White grew very close to his cousin Harold Castle in Hawaii and lived with the Castles while fi nishing high school and attending Oahu College for a year afterward.




The picture emerging is that Percival White grew up in a privileged environment rich with examples of craftsmanship, engineering, and busi-ness, and he traveled to other parts of the world. He later recalled his early education as having been provided “by shop work and extensive travel” (Cowan 1927, 460). That education stimulated his interest in engineering and technology as well as his appreciation for literature and music.

In college, White initially pursued his interest in literature and writing, graduating from Harvard with an undergraduate degree in 1909, followed by a Masters in 1910, both degrees in English Literature. While completing his graduate studies, White also took courses of instruction in science and tech-nology at the Lawrence Scientifi c School, then part of Harvard University. After completing his college education in July 1910, White married Mary Este Cliff , his high school mathematics teacher and started work as a news-paper reporter. Later in life, White observed that he had had three careers–as an author, engineer, and in market research (Advertising Age 1949).

In fact, he eventually combined all three, but started out as a feature writer for the Denver Post and then Boston Post from 1910 to 1912 spe-cializing in ‘scientifi c assignments’. Reporting on the installation of the Taylor system at the Watertown Arsenal and later research work at the Rock Island Arsenal, he became interested in organizational problems and Scientifi c Management (Cowan 1927). While his time as a reporter gave him fi rsthand knowledge of Taylor’s principles of management, it did not immediately develop into the successful career he later enjoyed as an author. . . . “He was saved from being a newspaper man by a hard-boiled Hearst editor who fi red him on the grounds that White could not write the brisk journalese expected of reporters” (Advertising Age 1949, 2).

In 1912 a family tragedy gave Percival White the means to pursue, in a more tangible way, his interest in engineering and product design. His father and only sibling were passengers on the ill-fated maiden voyage of the Titanic and both died in the disaster. Percival Wayland White was sur-vived only by his wife Edith and son Percival who inherited the bulk of his father’s considerable wealth, while Edith received $5,000 per year for the rest of her life (Sallick 2010b). By then, Percival and his wife Mary had given birth to their fi rst daughter, Matilda, who later played an important role in her father’s market research business.

White’s inheritance gave him the resources to pursue his growing pas-sion for automobiles, not buying or racing them like some men of means in those days. Rather, White wanted to design, build, and market his own cars. In pursuit of that dream, he and his wife moved to London, Eng-land, where he started the Percival White Engineering Works. The rationale behind this transatlantic move seemed obvious.

The great car manufacturers were in England. The Rolls Royces, the leaders in the industry were over there, and he traveled a lot as a child. He knew various places; he also told me that the French were doing




beautiful work but he wanted to build these. Now, he didn’t just build models. He built fi nished cars. And they actually ran and they were quite handsome . . . . Now you can imagine how much it costs to do that because they were all hand done; all hand done. And my grand-mother [Edith White] was very critical. “You know, those two they went up and spent up all his [Percival Wayland White’s] money”. (Riley 1995, 15)

Figures 5.2 (above) and 5.3 (below) Percival White’s Projecta Prototypes.Photo Courtesy Lucy Sallick.




White built two complete prototypes of what he called the Projecta (see Fig-ures 5.2 and 5.3). It was a monocoque-bodied two seat cycle car powered by a vee-twin engine, two speed gearbox, and belt drive to the rear wheels (Wise 2000, 440).

Ironically, the man who later pioneered important ideas in marketing never succeeded in getting his automobile to market. Before White could begin to set up distribution for the Projecta, he either ran out of money or was forced out of the car business by the start of World War I (White ca. 1919).

In 1914, the Whites returned to America with just enough funds left for Percival to open a business in Milton, Massachusetts, under the name Percival White Engineering Works, but with the less ambitious purposes of “a garage business and experimental engineers, also doing tool design and production work for outside concerns” (White ca. 1919). White soon left his wife and four daughters (Sallick 2010a). His oldest, Matilda, had not accompanied her parents to England, but was raised by her paternal grandmother who later adopted all four children when Percival’s fi rst wife, Mary, died in 1927.

Figures 5.4 Offi ce Work Station Designed by Percival White.Photo Courtesy Lucy Sallick.




From 1917 until 1920, White held various jobs in mechanical engineer-ing capacities. He used his brief experience as an automobile manufacturer to fi nd work during World War I as an automotive expert for the Ordnance Department of the US Army at the Rock Island Arsenal in Illinois where the Taylor system (Scientifi c Management) was being applied (Cowan 1927). He followed this with employment as a master mechanic at the US Gas Defense Plant on Long Island, New York. During this time, he joined sev-eral engineering associations including the American Society of Mechani-cal Engineers, Society of Automotive Engineers, Society of Industrial Engineers, and the Institution of Automobile Engineers. White maintained a fascination with mechanical devices throughout his life, later designing and inventing a clothes dryer, a hot plate for cooking, a surf board, various pieces of offi ce equipment (see Figure 5.4), and musical instruments (Sal-lick 2010b). In 1919 and 1920, he worked as director of development and foreign representative in Europe for the Aluminum Company of America (ALCOA). This led to a crossroads in Percival White’s career.

MARKETING COUNSELOR AND AUTHOR: 1921–1931

Up until this point in time, White seemed to subscribe to what today is termed a production orientation. He was fascinated with the design and manufacturing of products, but had shown little interest or ability in mar-keting–until he worked for the Aluminum Company of America.

During World War I he had a job with the Aluminum Company of America and . . . that’s where he got the idea of doing market research and he told me in great detail about his struggles with what he should do and how he should try to . . . earn a living . . . . [He became] inter-ested in the idea of mapping out markets . . . . When you start to think about it, what used to happen was that . . . somebody would have an idea for manufacturing a product. And they’d make it and then how were they going to sell it? Well, advertising developed. And you know, there were super salesmen, they’d come around with the vacuum clean-ers or whatever it was, and the whole idea was after you had the prod-uct, you sold it. And his idea was that the thing to do fi rst was to fi nd out . . . what the demand was for his product. You should learn all about who bought the products and why they used them and what they thought of them, and how they should be improved. It’s pretty obvious, when you think about it, but nobody had thought about it and so that’s what he had fi gured out. (Riley 1995, 134–35)

While astute companies had followed a customer orientation at least as early as the eighteenth century (Fullerton 1988; Jones and Richardson 2007), White was one of the fi rst to articulate what we know today as




the marketing concept. His writing from 1921 through 1931 repeated the theme that successful marketing depended on adapting products to con-sumers’ needs (e.g., White 1921, 1927a, 1927b, 1931).

After leaving the Aluminum Company of America, White began work-ing as a marketing consultant and author. In 1923, he fi led the following statement of purpose with an application for incorporation under the name “Percival White, Limited”.

To conduct a publishing and printing business, to act as literary agents, writers and editors, to conduct research and engineering work, and to undertake, do, engage in, transact and carry on, any and all kinds of manufacturing, mechanical, mercantile, trading, building, agricul-tural, lumbering, mining, quarrying and real estate business; and any and all other kinds of business incidental, ancillary, related, pertain-ing, necessary or proper to or connected with any one or all of the purposes and kinds of business in this clause mentioned and also any and all other acts and things which may be lawfully done by corpora-tions organized under section 7 of chapter 51 of the Revised Statutes of Maine. (State of Maine 1923)

Either he wanted to keep his options open, or his lawyer had a sense of humor! In any case, White’s real intention was to develop a consulting busi-ness and author business books at the same time. Undoubtedly he recog-nized the potential synergy between those two activities.

The inside cover page of his fi rst book, Market Analysis (1921), listed his occupation as ‘Market Counselor’ and his clients during the 1920s included the Burroughs Adding Machine Company, Warner Brothers, Crowell Pub-lishing, International Magazine Company, McFadden Publishing, Ford Motor Company, General Motors, and fi fty other fi rms (Market Research Corporation of America 1939a; 1939b). Nevertheless, few of those clients would have been on board before Market Analysis was written, so White had to do his homework. Major research studies by the Chicago Tribune and Milwaukee Journal are cited in Market Analysis and White borrowed heav-ily from the extant literature. His bibliography included almost every major name in marketing scholarship at that time (e.g., Arch W. Shaw, Paul Cher-ington, Paul Nystrom, and Melvin Copeland), and the only other market research text then available–C. S. Duncan’s (1919) Commercial Research.

White began Market Analysis by stating that “every business is con-cerned chiefl y with two things: First with producing a commodity, and, second, with marketing it. This book aims to describe the latter func-tion.” (White 1921, 1) Nevertheless, White’s metaphor and methodol-ogy for describing marketing and market analysis were drawn from the science of production and Scientifi c Management. The methods of solv-ing marketing problems in 1921, he observed, were similar to those of solving production prior to the widespread application of ‘Taylorism’. As




he explained, “the markets of the future are to be won only through the application of the same scientifi c methods which were so successful in the fi eld of production” (1921, 2). The “marketing engineer” must follow the example of the “industrial engineer” in building a scientifi c and rigor-ous framework for solving problems (1921, 11). This comparison recurs throughout the book and the scientifi c method defi nes his basic approach to market research. The logic he adopted mirrors that found in market-ing research textbooks today: problem defi nition, preliminary analysis including bibliographical work (gathering of secondary data), planning the campaign (research design), gathering, analyzing, and interpreting data, presenting the results, and applying the data (taking action).

Market Analysis is organized according to “the surveyor’s logical course or procedure” (1921, vii), that is, according to the process followed in plan-ning, designing, and carrying out market research. However the essence of White’s research process is explained in the fi rst three chapters. Chap-ter 1 outlines the key elements of market research. Chapter 2 provides an exposition of data sources, paying attention to questionnaire design, the use of mailing lists and cover letters, along with the basics of interviewing. Chapter 3 deals with data analysis and clarifi es the need for classifying responses, details the use of basic descriptive statistics, and describes vari-ous sources of error and bias. There is recognition of the need to consider sample size, but no explanation of how to actually calculate it.

The question of importance here, as is the case with answers to a ques-tionnaire, is how many replies are necessary to make results authorita-tive. This number varies with almost every investigation and, in fact, with every questionnaire or group of interviews. It depends fi rst and foremost on the size of the audience . . . . There must be a minimum number of replies to lend authority and accuracy to the results. This minimum number cannot be arbitrarily set, but must be determined by the investigator in accordance with the particular conditions. (White 1921, 51–52)

Other chapters focus on potential problems or researchable issues related to customers, consumers, the nature and size of markets, and the estimation of market potential. Two related chapters in Market Analysis discuss the estimation of market potential, a topic singled out by Bartels (1962) and Mudgett (1922) as one of the book’s noteworthy contributions. “Markets are measurable”, White begins. “A market may be compared to a sponge, which absorbs the output of business. It is necessary to determine how much this sponge will absorb, how fast it will absorb it, and many other facts, before it is possible to understand and reckon intelligently with the possibilities and limitations of that” (1921, 1).

Interestingly, in a refl exive move, White acknowledged the limitations inherent in his application of the scientifi c method to marketing.




The science of market analysis has not yet developed to the point where defi nite formulae can be laid down for the solution of marketing equa-tions. So far, every case must be worked out individually and according to the surveyor’s own lights. It is here that knowledge of hard-headed, cold-blooded, old-fashioned business must make up for the sketchy and experimental nature of his analytical data. The most we can expect is that an examination of the results obtained in other researches, and of the methods there employed, will supply him with the necessary ideas for going forward. (1921, 252–53)

Nevertheless, White does enunciate a basic approach for measuring market potential, simple yet compelling in its logic.

Thus, in the ordinary method of computing a market, we must know the life of the product under normal usage, who uses it, how many use it, who can aff ord to buy it, plus the specifi c limitations aff ecting the case in question. Multiplying the number obtained by the average price gives the value of the potential market. (1921, 253)

And therein lay a fundamental contribution of this book. It was prophetic, and it launched Percival White’s career as a marketing consultant special-izing in market research.

White used the same basic approach when writing Advertising Research (1927a) as he had with Market Analysis. Much of the material from Mar-ket Analysis about the research process is retained but he extended the discussions of product policy, consumer analysis, and market analysis. In this later volume, additional emphasis is placed on interviewing, statisti-cal analysis, and methods of generalization and verifi cation. And where the earlier book included extensive commentary on consumer character-istics relevant to markets and market groups (segments), White now noted that advertising research required an understanding of attention, stimu-lus, response, memory, and motives. Thus, a ‘psychological approach’ was added.

Recall that a notable feature of Market Analysis was its claim that mar-kets were measurable and included a discussion of how to measure them. In Advertising Research, he also claimed that the value of advertising was measurable where it was the sole means of promotion or where objectives were easily quantifi able (e.g., number of inquiries secured post-advertis-ing campaign). Here White called for the accurate recording of costs and responses to advertisements as elemental in the measurement of advertising value. The fi nal chapter of Advertising Research is provocatively titled “A Critique of Advertising” which, not surprisingly given its author’s vested interest in consulting for corporate clients, fails to deliver on the title’s promise except for a passing mention of waste in advertising (see White 1927b for an extended critique of ‘waste’ and ineffi ciency).




Rounding out White’s books on market research was Marketing Research Technique (1931). This text is quite diff erent from his two earlier market research books. First, it bears the infl uence of Pauline Arnold, who in 1926 had founded Arnold Research Service in St. Louis and by 1928 had moved headquarters to New York partnering with White in his consulting practice. Arnold was born in 1894 and earned a Bachelor degree in music from Knox College, worked as a professional musician through World War I and as a high school music director in St. Louis until 1926 when she started Arnold Research Service. At the time MRCA was founded in 1934, Arnold was a founding member of the American Marketing Society and, soon thereafter, of the American Marketing Association (AMA). She con-tributed extensively to the AMA through its Committee on Research. The use of a nationwide, local fi eld staff of resident interviewers was pioneered by Arnold (Market Research Corporation of America 1939a). Her com-pany was also the fi rst to off er coincidental radio surveys and conducted the fi rst national diary study for NBC (Beville 1988).

White and Arnold soon formed two partnerships–one as MRCA, the other in marriage. Converse (2009) applauded Marketing Research Tech-nique, as well as White and Arnold’s consulting business on which the book was based:

White’s 1931 book Marketing Research Technique leaves us the most complete account of market interview training and supervision in this period. His Market Research Corporation of America was a leading organization, and it probably represented some of the best technical practices of the early 1930s. White’s interviewing staff incorporated both resident interviewers, who worked in their own communities across the country, usually on a part-time basis, and traveling interviewers. The latter were attached to headquarters and worked on studies in the vicinity. But they also moved across the country on assignments that required tight coordination or off ered special problems. (2009, 96)

Marketing Research Technique was essentially a manual of instruction for fi eld workers. The introduction to the book provides a brief history of the development of marketing research (White credits two major infl uences–scientifi c management and the economic depression), moving quickly on to marketing research in a manner consistent with his earlier books (White 1921, 1927a). But the majority of Marketing Research Technique deals with the recruitment, training, and management of interviewers. Another distinctive feature is a detailed chapter that provides nine case studies illustrating the application of fi eld research. The remainder of the text is indebted to examples obtained from Arnold Research Service.

During the decade following his publication of Market Analysis, White’s consulting business fl ourished. At the same time, he continued to pub-lish books at a prolifi c rate, authoring or co-authoring another ten books




through 1931. He co-edited another volume, contributed chapters for two books written by others, and published a handful of articles. Of those eleven books authored by White during this period, seven focused on marketing; four others covered transportation, general business management (includ-ing a chapter on marketing), forecasting and planning (with a chapter on marketing), and gliding, a hobby of his.

Chain Stores: Their Management and Operation (1922) was co-authored with White’s friend and occasional co-author, Walter Hayward, and even-tually appeared in three editions. It was targeted at chain store managers, not as a college text. White’s infl uence was especially evident in claims that the chain store movement was “characteristic of all that is best in scientifi c control; . . . it stands for scientifi c management as applied to the great func-tion of retail merchandising [and] . . . is probably the most highly developed exemplar of modern distribution methods” (Hayward and White 1922, v). The Merchants’ Manual (1924) was co-edited with Lew Hahn, then manag-ing director of the National Retail Dry Goods Association, under whose auspices the volume was produced. The text bears White’s infl uence from the beginning, when it is stated that it “is . . . modeled somewhat on the engi-neering handbook” (1924, vii). It is just that–a handbook of how-to advice on merchandising and general management topics. Appearing soon after, Business Management: An Introduction to Business (1926a) and Forecast-ing, Planning, and Budgeting in Business Management (1926b) were college textbooks and covered what their titles suggest. They also drew somewhat from the marketing content of White’s other publications. His penultimate marketing book, Sales Quotas (1929), combined a discussion of research with the practice of setting quotas to manage a company’s sales force. As such, White positioned it as “a logical sequel to the author’s Market Analysis . . . . A working knowledge of market analysis is prerequisite to a practical application of any scientifi c quota system” (1929, vii). Two of the chapters presented case studies of actual companies’ quota systems.

In addition to those cited above, White penned two books about general marketing. The fi rst was a principles text; the second, more advanced in content, devoting attention to marketing management. Marketing Practice (1924) was co-authored with Walter Hayward and chronologically was the second of White’s major works on marketing. By that point in time, there were many widely distributed books about marketing elements, methods, or principles. Three early schools of marketing thought had emerged by that time–functional, institutional, and commodity schools (Shaw and Jones 2005)–and White devoted several chapters to each. At the end of every chapter, he provided an extensive bibliography, an uncommon practice for authors of that era. The most commonly cited sources were Chering-ton’s (1920) Elements of Marketing, Duncan’s (1920) Marketing: Its Prob-lems and Methods, Converse’s (1921) Marketing Methods and Policies, and Clark’s (1922) Principles of Marketing. These authors were trained as economists and wrote about marketing as a fi eld of applied economics




(Jones and Shaw 2002). White, of course, was an exception and he went to great lengths in Marketing Practice to make that clear, while being careful to justify his approach.

The economic aspect of marketing is treated briefl y. . . . Since practi-cally all courses in marketing follow upon earlier courses in econom-ics, there is no reason to enlarge upon this subject [economics] here. Most instructors in marketing have less diffi culty in obtaining teaching material on the economic side of marketing than on its business side. . . . The limits of this volume are such that the economic aspect of the subject cannot be given adequate treatment. Nor do the authors feel themselves competent to deal with it intensively. (White and Hayward 1924, v–vi)

True to his belief in the value of market research White had conducted, or at least claimed he had conducted, a survey prior to writing this book and the results suggested that “the majority of teachers are primarily concerned with showing their classes how marketing is accomplished” (White and Hayward 1924, vi), rather than with economic theory. Copious examples of actual “marketing problems of the individual business” are provided in several chapters.

In what may have been the fi rst of its kind, White included a chapter about the marketing of services and demonstrated a remarkably sophis-ticated view of services marketing. He recognized that even “when the housewife buys a pound of steak or the commuter purchases a cigar, the services of those who produced the steak or cigar are being bought. . . . In some cases, services are marketed together with some other utility. . . . Ser-vices come fi rst of all: they are fundamental” (White and Hayward 1924, 288). Categories of services are reviewed, as well as the intangibility of services and the functions they provide.

White had enough self-awareness in writing Marketing Practice to know that his forte was not in economics. It was, rather, in the applica-tion of engineering to marketing. His application of an engineering per-spective, suitably modifi ed and explained to marketing audiences, may have been his most distinctive contribution to early marketing thought. This approach to marketing was most ably expressed in Scientifi c Mar-keting Management (1927b).

Scientifi c Marketing Management (1927b) is quite unlike any of White’s other books, yet continues the same scientifi c theme that reoccurs through-out White’s scholarship. Where some of his previous publishing eff orts men-tioned the infl uence of F. W. Taylor and Scientifi c Management, this one adopted those ideas as its central theme. This is not unexpected, given the changing economic climate. Commentators in industry were rapidly com-ing to the conclusion that the economic system was, courtesy of Taylor’s (1911/1998) ideas on production effi ciency, outpacing consumer demand




for goods. In short, there needed to be a similar revolution in selling and marketing to the one that had already taken place in production.

Taylor himself realized the importance of the customer. He was quite clear about workers being paid an adequate amount of money for the tasks they undertook, and for management or the owners of capital to be fully compensated for the risk they incurred. But the customer was the lynchpin in the capitalist system for Taylor (1911/1998, 71). White’s work on sci-entifi c marketing management can be thought of as an extension of that logic. He stressed the importance of science (i.e., the measurement of the marketplace and determination of diff erent segments of the population), called for careful record keeping, the production and dissemination of rela-tively standardized sales talks, and told his reader to use psychological, sociological, and statistical theory, concepts, and practice to scrutinize the data that was collected in empirical study. Those who consulted Scientifi c Marketing Management were impressed with White’s panoramic contribu-tion. Cowan (1927), for instance, believed it was one of the most important texts available, specifying it as one of the three books that should be pres-ent in all business libraries.

In line with his intellectual debt to Taylor, White started Scientifi c Marketing Management with a critique of the ineffi ciency of marketing practice. He lamented the lack of intra-functional support in most orga-nizations. Diff erent departments, he asserted, often worked against each other, rather than operating like an orchestra, in harmony, with the satis-faction of the ultimate customer in mind. This suggested a role for greater planning and coordination of activities, so that no department was able to negate the valuable work of others. Writing against what was later thought to be the intellectual current of the time–that of either a production or sales orientation (Keith 1960)–White bemoans the use of ‘supersalesmanship’ in marketing practice. Supersalesmanship involved encouraging the customer to buy whatever products the organization was producing irrespective of whether such purchases were in the customers’ best interest.

White promoted the view that production should be based upon con-sumer demand, but not that all products desired by customers should be manufactured. There were, therefore, boundaries placed on the notion that business should act as if its customers were its “boss”. Instead, White sug-gested that careful analysis of the market was needed, not only to determine what people wanted and where goods were required. Of equal import, that analysis had to be combined with realistic fi nancial appraisal of whether it was cost eff ective to produce and distribute such items at all. Produc-tion and marketing decisions had to be based on research and realistic cost accounting procedures. Put simply, White’s interpretation of ‘scientifi c marketing’ practice took account of the fact that production, successful marketing, and satisfi ed customers, were all interlinked (e.g., White 1927b, 31–32, 75, 215, 248). Commercial success hinged on careful coordination of the relations among all parties concerned.




Understanding the customer and eff ectively educating the purchaser about the items available were the foundations of scientifi c marketing. And White’s argument cuts across marketing and sales orientations in much the same way as was applauded by Borch (1958) and Cowan (1924). As White explains in a statement reminiscent of Keith’s later (1960) argument,

Marketing centers in all cases around the needs of the consumer. This is an absolute shift from the old practice of making the producer the focus of all business relations . . . . Too many manufacturers have fol-lowed the tradition of making what pleased them, never dreaming they would not fi nd a market ready and waiting . . . . Scientifi c marketing is based on the theory of fi nding out what the consumer wants and then giving it to him . . . . Consumption is primary, production secondary; yet it is rare to fi nd a business which boldly faces this fact and which produces goods always with a view to the requirements of consump-tion. In the future, these requirements will have to be met, consciously and eff ectively, by business men. “What does the consumer need?” This question will stand at the beginning of every business problem. (1927b, 97, 99, 100)

It is no exaggeration to say that Scientifi c Marketing Management is a complex and fairly modern interpretation of marketing practice that White continued to refi ne throughout his later publications (e.g., White and White 1948). There is much emphasis placed on the central role of the consumer; the research department is focused upon in detail; appropriate training for sales staff demanded, and his writing adopted, a clear ethical orientation that cautioned against treating the customer badly in view of the long-term ramifi cations of this strategy. White considered good ethics to be good business. It forestalled government intervention into marketplace activities and reassured the public.

MARKET RESEARCH CORPORATION OF AMERICA: 1934–1951

The fi rst market research in America was probably conducted by advertising agencies during the 1890s (Converse 2009; Lockley 1950). Some companies not specifi cally in the research business formed market research departments during the period 1910 to 1920. An early and notable example was in 1911, when Charles Coolidge Parlin was made director of a research department for the Curtis Publishing Company (Ward 2009). Important institutional support developed in the academic community through the formation of the Harvard Business School’s Bureau of Business Research in 1911 and the founding of the National Association of Teachers of Advertising in 1915 (Converse 2009). The latter published the National Marketing Review (NMR) which merged




with The American Marketing Journal (TAMJ) in 1936 to form the Journal of Marketing. A content analysis of the fi rst 137 articles published during the early 1930s in NMR and TAMJ indicates that market research was a relatively popular topic, the subject of twenty of those articles, and the NMR included a regular feature titled ‘Progress in Marketing Research’ (Witkowski 2010, 380). By the mid-1930s, the leading private market research fi rms in America included Crossley Inc.; Cherington, Roper, & Wood; Ross-Federal Service; Houser Associates; A. C. Neilson; Clark-Hooper; and the Market Research Corporation of America (Converse 2009).

By the end of 1931, at the age of forty-four, Percival White’s contribu-tions to the marketing literature were largely behind him, but his great-est professional achievement was just unfolding. In 1927, he was elected the founding president of the Market Research Council (Market Research Council 1957). It was a sign of the respect held for him by the growing market research community. As mentioned above, in 1928 he met Pauline Arnold and convinced her to move her Arnold Research Service operation from St. Louis to New York.

His secretary told me all about [it], there was this woman named Pau-line Arnold that he had met and he was very fascinated by her and she ran a fi eld force and . . . I guess they talked a lot about possibly getting together and they fi nally did get together . . . . He persuaded her to come to New York and they formed a corporation, White and Arnold. (Riley 1995, 66, 139)

However the name of the company soon changed, most likely at the sugges-tion of the well-known public relations specialist, Edward Bernays.

Eddie Bernays, who was a great big shakes. He was US publicist num-ber one, very interesting, took a great interest in him [Percival White] and advised him a lot on how he . . . “ . . . should call it the Market Research Corporation of America, don’t call it White and Arnold”. (Riley 1995, 133)

Percival White and Pauline Arnold were married in 1931. A merger of their separate consulting fi rms made sense, not just because they were married, but because their abilities and experiences complemented each other. White was well connected in the New York area and had, by then, a decade of experience as a marketing consultant. His publication record alone gave him considerable credibility. Arnold had also achieved distinction in the development of coincidental radio surveys and a nationwide fi eld staff . Moreover, economic conditions favored consolidation. Market research must have been viewed as a luxury for potential clients at the depth of the Great Depression. As such, joining forces reduced the fi nancial risk for both partners. Thus, in March 1934, the New York Times reported:




The newly organized Market Research Corporation of America yes-terday named Percival White as president and Pauline Arnold as vice president. The corporation, a merger of Percival White Inc. and the Arnold Research Service Inc., is located in the RCA Building, Rock-efeller Center. (New York Times 1934, 39)

White and Arnold owned and operated the company until 1951, and although MRCA was not the fi rst private market research fi rm in Amer-ica, it was among the vanguard. Unfortunately, it is not possible to mea-sure the size of the fi rm by its billings, as these are not available. But by the late 1930s, it probably had the largest fi eld research force in the United States, with three thousand part-time employees spread across some one thousand cities and towns nationwide. It is fair to say then, that MRCA was an important company in the history of market research. Its staff and the services off ered were key indicators of the nature and scope of its operation.

Legs and Brains

“Legs or Brains?” was the title of a 1934 editorial by Percival White in Market Research. It referred to his belief that the fi eld of market research had expanded rapidly by the early 1930s, with the result that there were far too many legs and not enough brains among those doing research.

We are not at this time advocating state examinations for marketing [research] people. But we are recommending higher standard require-ments. So many people using their legs will never be true research; so many tons of completed questionnaires will never be true market-ing data; so many doorbells rung will never provide the answer to your sales problems, unless the background, experience, training, and brains, as well as the legs, are on the job. (White 1934a, 3)

MRCA had both legs and brains. Their interviewers were well trained and supervised by some of the most experienced market researchers in Amer-ica. A staff of some thirty-to-forty supervisors was based in the New York offi ce, but traveled the country training and supervising the fi eld force.

Market Research is only as good as the men and women who plan and supervise procedure, who collect and analyze facts, who seek to diagnose the origins of diffi culties, and to apply corrective measures. The essence of their work is drawn from vision, training, experience, patience, imagination, and integrity. We believe that the quality of ser-vice you receive will be determined by factors such as these. And that you should choose your market research consultants as carefully as you would your doctor or your lawyer. (MRCA 1939a, 11)




As principal executives of the company, White and Arnold were the origi-nal brains behind the operation. Later their activities were supported by Dr. Raymond Franzen, formerly Professor of Psychological Statistics at the University of California and author of several books and articles about psychology and statistics, and Matilda White, Percival’s oldest daughter, who played a key role in the company and later became one of America’s most notable sociologists.

Matilda White Riley began working part time for her father’s fi rm in 1928 while she was a freshman at Radcliff e College.1 After completing her under-graduate degree in English Literature (taking after her father), she worked as a research assistant in the Sociology Department at Harvard Univer-sity. Returning to Radcliff e to earn her Master’s degree in 1937, she then joined MRCA as an account executive and later served as Vice-President and Research Director until 1949. In 1946, Matilda was awarded an AMA prize for research design using probability sampling. While at MRCA, she published articles about the use of contraception based on client research (White and Riley 1940), on research method (White and Zeisel 1941), and on product testing (White 1946; White and White 1946a, 1946b, 1948), which seems to have been her specialty at MRCA. After leaving the company, Mat-ilda carved out a distinguished academic career as Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University and Bowdoin College, as Senior Research Associate at the Center for Social Sciences at Columbia University, and as Associate Director and Senior Social Scientist at the National Institute on Aging.

At least one other intriguing name was connected with the organization. In December 1937, the fi rm announced the appointment of Paul T. Chering-ton, noted marketing author and academic, as President (Market Research December 1937, 3). A month later, Cherington’s name remained on the cor-porate masthead, alongside White and Arnold (Market Research January 1938, 3). That said, he never joined the fi rm. He was employed as an indepen-dent consultant (1937–1939) prior to his appointment at McKinsey & Com-pany. The exact circumstances surrounding Cherington’s near association with MRCA remain a mystery. It is most likely that White was negotiating to hire Cherington as President and the negotiations fell through.

Off ering a Complete Line of Market Research and Consulting Services

By 1934, there were many organizations in America off ering market research as part of their service to clients. Advertising agencies such as J. Walter Thompson Company, publishing companies such as Curtis Pub-lishing, general management consultants such as McKinsey & Company, and even the federal government, all off ered market-related information to other fi rms (Ward 2009). However, MRCA’s specialization in market research allowed them to provide a wide range of services. Questionnaire surveys were still the bread and butter for MRCA, as they had been for




White in his initial consulting practice. They also continued to off er the coincidental radio survey pioneered by Arnold. During a radio broadcast, a telephone survey was conducted ‘coincidentally’ to gather information for audience measurement and opinions about radio advertising. Other ser-vices included laboratory stores, copy testing, product testing, and general marketing consulting.

Of course, MRCA undertook survey research in response to client-spe-cifi c marketing problems and questions. However, a substantial proportion of their survey research was shared-cost or ‘mass research’ based on fi rst gathering market data, and then selling the results to any interested cli-ent. Writing in 1934, with the economic depression clearly in mind, White explained the practice of “mass research” as “the collection and analysis of data on a wide scale, usually so that the results may be benefi cial to a number of organizations . . . . To some extent the result of four lean years . . . have taught business to take advantage of such economies as mass research aff ords” (White 1934b, 4). For example, the results of a survey of ten thousand women for their opinions about advertising was available in its entirety for $500 or any client could purchase results for a single product category for as little as $35. Another ‘mass research’ study surveyed two thousand visitors to the New York Automobile Show for opinions about new models and buying intentions. The most ambitious of these studies was MRCA’s survey of the home buying, building, and repair plans of fi ve thou-sand families in seven hundred American cities (Market Research January 1938). Some of the mass research conducted at MRCA had an interest-ing legacy. In retirement, Percival White and Pauline Arnold co-authored a string of books intended as reference works about major American indus-tries. Three of those are of interest since they were directly informed by mass research done at MRCA: Food: America’s Biggest Business (1959), Homes: America’s Building Business (1960), and Clothes & Cloth: Amer-ica’s Apparel Business (1961).

One example of White’s mass research is especially important because of the documentation of that study that survives today. In 1936, MRCA conducted a survey of American business leaders for their opinions about the roles and relative importance of economic research, industrial rela-tions, public relations, and market research, to business. The purpose was to “make a case for a scientifi c attitude toward the problems of American industry” (MRCA 1937). The fi nal report was titled ‘American Business Leaders Look Ahead’ and the results were available free of charge (Market Research October 1937), probably because of the public relations value to MRCA. In any case, what makes this study historically signifi cant is the relatively complete documentation that survives in the Edward L. Bernays Papers at the Library of Congress. The material includes correspondence between White and Bernays discussing the purpose and design of the study, iterations of the questionnaire design, a detailed description, including fl ow charts, of the steps and activities used for the survey and follow up activities,




all 442 responses, and various tables with the analysis and summaries of results. It is a remarkably complete archive of the paper fl ow, processes, and actual documents connected with a large-scale survey conducted by one of the leading market research fi rms of the 1930s.

A specialized version of their mass research was MRCA’s household inventory study. Conducted multiple times during the 1930s, it chronicled product ownership, as well as purchase intentions, for drugs and groceries, automobiles, refrigerators, electrical appliances, and various furnishings among thousands of US households. Magazine readership was included in the survey to establish print advertising infl uence. Results were broken down by demographic categories to generate usable data for clients. This inventory concept was extended by MRCA during the mid-1940s into a service that garnered considerable attention from the research community.

That research service was MRCA’s patented ‘Chronolog’ index. Taking several years to develop, upon its eventual launch in 1947, the industry press reported it as “one of the most exciting and important developments in top-grade precision sampling since the research science got out of knee pants” (Tide 1947, 72). The Chronolog combined a random sample of fi ve thousand American households with an ingenious package of question-naires designed to eliminate interviewer and respondent fatigue, along with other sources of potential bias (Tide 1948). In eff ect, it allowed MRCA to measure accurately and reliably market size and product usage, current consumption, and past purchases. Since the cost of each survey was met by twenty or so diff erent consumer goods manufacturers and advertisers, this yielded accurate data without high cost to individual clients.

In addition to market research, MRCA provided other forms of consul-tancy, sometimes pricing their services in an unorthodox manner. With the caveat that “in cases where we believe the situation is promising”, services were sometimes charged according to “a percentage of increase in sales volume, over a period” (Market Research March 1937, 3). MRCA was also an aggressive promoter. Provided the information was non-proprietary, they off ered sample reports and “free case studies” to illustrate how their research had been and could be used. Moreover, their research services were promoted in the company’s periodical, Market Research.

Market Research was a hybrid trade-academic journal published monthly by MRCA from April 1934 through to July 1938, and edited by Percival White. The content ranged from academically-oriented feature articles by authors, including Paul Lazarsfeld, Paul Cherington, Daniel Starch, Ren-sis Likert, George Gallop, Edward Bernays, Ernest Elmo Calkins, and R. O. Eastman, to association news and a help wanted section titled “The Research Man Market”. Percival White wrote editorials, but only one other article (1934b) that identifi ed him as the author. MRCA executives Pauline Arnold and Raymond Franzen occasionally wrote feature articles. Market Research also included a series of one-page biographical sketches, un-cred-ited but probably written by White, of those working at the cutting edge of




market research (including Cherington, Weld, Parlin, Coutant, and Starch). Occasional book reviews appeared, as did case studies of companies and their market research activities. Summaries and partial reports of survey work undertaken by MRCA were popular, and from March 1937 through to the fi nal issue in July 1938, Market Research included a series about the regulation of marketing, covering “Chain Store Taxation” (March 1937), “Fair Trade Acts on Resale Price Maintenance” (April 1937), and “The Robinson Patman Act” (May 1937), as well as other related topics.

Appropriately enough, in June 1935, MRCA conducted their own sur-vey of Market Research’s subscribers in an eff ort to determine their atti-tudes and preferences concerning the magazine. Readers liked the “Current Surveys” section and articles on market research techniques. Book reviews and White’s editorials, which were surprisingly breezy, shallow, and preoc-cupied with drawing attention to the value of market research, were viewed negatively. Not surprisingly, they criticized the journal for being “too much of a house organ” (Market Research June 1935, 31). This, along with the growing number of academic journals (e.g., the Journal of Retailing, the National Marketing Review, and eventually the Journal of Marketing), not to mention the continuing fi nancial strictures imposed by the Great Depression, contributed to the demise of Market Research in 1938.

Technology and Product Design: Lifelong Interests

Percival White was fi rst an industrial engineer, then later a marketing engineer applying the scientifi c mindset and methods of his engineering background to marketing. However he never lost his interest in technology and product design, and his Percival White Engineering Works Company continued in legal status even when not active with engineering projects. In that connection, by the end of the 1930s, MRCA added product develop-ment to its roster of services, not just the market research that sometimes accompanied new product development, but actual design, prototype pro-duction, and testing of new products. A Market Research advertisement in March 1938 illustrates this.

Have you an idea for a gadget? Some little idea (or big one) for a new product? Something you think might work, but hasn’t yet been tried? We can help you develop your idea. And at small expense. Not only from the actual consumer and market angle, but also the actual mechanical problems. If the idea is a good one, we can develop it, make it practical, build you a model, and test it on the market. Try us on product development. (11)

By 1938 when that ad appeared, White’s 125-acre estate in Stamford, Con-necticut included a well-equipped machine shop and small manufactur-ing facility where any such product development took place. During World




War II, the facility was even converted to war production of airplane and machine gun parts (Stamford Advocate 1943). Increasingly during the late 1940s, White’s time was spent in his Stamford workshop rather than at the MRCA offi ces in New York.

During those years, as the war progressed, father got very bored with the [MRCA] business and he decided to run another business and he started the White Engineering Works in Stamford. They designed equipment for building military materials. They did the machine tools. They used his great innovative talents and they [Percival and Pauline Arnold] completely left the business and I ran it . . . . [However] then they got sick of that and decided they’d come back into the business [MRCA]. (Riley 1995, 144)

By 1949, Matilda White decided to leave the family fi rm and her $18,000 a year salary for the poverty and freedom of academic life (Riley 1949) and MRCA began to unravel. Percival and Pauline tried to bring in a new Vice-President who they expected to purchase a twenty percent interest in the company and presumably oversee its day-to-day running (Arnold 1948). A memorandum touching on this anticipated hiring referred to the new Vice-President as ‘P. N.’. I do not know who ‘P. N.’ was, but speculate it may have been Paul Nystrom, who was a marketing faculty member at Colum-bia University, well-known author, and longtime consultant in retailing.

In 1951, White and Arnold sold MRCA to Samuel Barton who merged the fi rm with his Industrial Surveys Company under the MRCA name. Refl ecting on those seventeen years from 1934 through to 1951, Matilda White later observed, “They were in business successfully for quite a long time and . . . father . . . always lost interest in whatever he was doing” (Riley 1995, 140). The following year under Barton’s ownership, the com-pany’s revenues were close to two million dollars, yet it was losing money, not doing any advertising or promotion; indeed, it no longer had a single salesperson on its payroll (Gibson 1958). MRCA continued trading well into the 1990s, but has now ceased operation.

***

Percival White’s contributions to marketing thought began with the appli-cation of the philosophy and basic approach of Scientifi c Management to marketing in general and to market research in particular. Like F. W. Tay-lor, White sought to replace rules of thumb with scientifi c study to deter-mine the best way to manage marketing. This resulted in White’s writing about marketing effi ciency as well as the measurability of markets and market potential. White generously applied the engineering metaphor to marketing and its scientifi c method to market research. Rossiter (2001) describes marketing engineering as a recent school of thought in marketing,




but White was undoubtedly the original marketing engineer. He advanced the concepts of probability sampling and response bias controls through his ‘Chronolog’ technique in survey research. And while a marketing orienta-tion had been followed by astute practitioners for a very long time, White was certainly one of the fi rst to articulate the marketing concept and to fully spell out its implications for marketing.

The distinguished marketing historian, Stanley Hollander, often encour-aged his students and colleagues to look beyond the marketing academy when studying the history of marketing ideas noting that “practice is not entirely thoughtless and thought is often practice-driven” (1989, xx). Per-cival White was a pioneer marketing theorist and practitioner, translating his ideas into marketing practice. He turned his interest and background in industrial engineering on to marketing and wrote seminal works on market research and the application of Scientifi c Management to marketing, as well as several other important books all based on his concept of marketing engineering. During the 1930s, he founded and managed one of the earli-est, and soon one of the largest, market research fi rms in America, lead-ing the way in the development of fi eld research techniques, questionnaire design, and the use of random sampling. Despite not being an academic, Percival White made a defi nite intellectual, as well as professional, impact on the development of marketing in the early twentieth century.

He was also an opportunist. He further developed ideas that were already in circulation during the 1920s, but did so in a more systematic way than did any other writer. He was undoubtedly among the earliest to articulate a consumer orientation as the key to success in marketing. In the chronology of academically-targeted periodicals, his Market Research (fi rst published in April 1934) would seem to rank third behind only the Journal of Retail-ing (1925) and American Marketing Journal (January 1934). While he was the brains behind Market Research Corporation of America, his innovative genius was complemented by Pauline Arnold and Matilda White. Thus his professional impact was, at least in part, a family aff air. He was an inven-tor, but like many inventors he quickly moved on to the next new idea and left to others the job of maintaining his creations. In her oral history interview, Matilda White Riley repeatedly mentions her father’s constant boredom and lack of follow through (1995). That is surely a sign of genius, another word Matilda used to describe Percival White.

APPENDIX 5.1. BOOKS AUTHORED BY PERCIVAL WHITE

1921. Market Analysis: Its Principles and Methods. New York: McGraw Hill; 2nd ed., 1925.

1922. Chain Stores: Their Management and Operation (with W. Hay-ward). New York: McGraw Hill; 2nd ed., 1925; 3rd ed., 1928.




1923. Motor Transportation of Merchandise and Passengers. New York: McGraw Hill.

1924. The Merchants’ Manual (co-edited with L. Hahn). New York: McGraw Hill.

1924. Marketing Practice (with W. Hayward). New York: Doubleday.1926a. Business Management: An Introduction to Business. New York:

H. Holt & Company; 2nd ed., 1929.1926b. Forecasting, Planning, and Budgeting in Business Management.

New York: McGraw Hill.1927a. Advertising Research. New York: D. Appleton & Company.1927b. Scientifi c Marketing Management: Its Principles and Methods.

New York: Harper & Brothers.1929. Sales Quotas: A Manual for Sales Managers. New York: Harper

& Brothers.1930. How to Fly an Airplane: A Textbook for Beginners. New York:

Harper & Brothers.1931. Marketing Research Technique. New York: Harper & Brothers.1931. Gliding and Soaring: An Introduction to Motorless Flight (with

M. White). New York: McGraw-Hill.1948. Development and Marketing of New Products (with M. White).

New York: Funk & Wagnalls.1957. The Market Research Council, 1927–1957 (with A. B. Blan-

kenship, D. E. West, and H. A. Richmond). New York: Market Research Council.

1959. Food: America’s Biggest Business (with P. Arnold). New York: Holiday House.

1960. Homes: America’s Building Business (with P. Arnold). New York: Holiday House.

1961. Clothes and Cloth: America’s Apparel Business (with P. Arnold). New York: Holiday House.

1962. Money: Make It, Spend It, Save It (with P. Arnold). New York: Holiday House.

1963. The Automation Age (with P. Arnold). New York: Holiday House.

1965. How We Named Our States (with P. Arnold). New York: Criterion Publishing.

1968. Food Facts for the Young (with P. Arnold). New York: Holiday House.



6 George Burton Hotchkiss (1884–1953)A Pioneer in Advertising

On September 17, 1908, at the age of twenty-four, George Burton Hotchkiss went to the eighth fl oor of the New York University building in Washington Square for a job interview with Joseph French Johnson, Dean of the School of Commerce. He was ushered into a large classroom, one with seating available for about three hundred students. As Hotchkiss later recalled,

I was instructed to take the platform and deliver a lecture while they stood at the extreme rear and listened. This is another of the pictures I shall never forget–Dean Stoddard, a tiny man cocking his head side-wise to look up at Dean Johnson, a six-footer, while I attempted to deliver an impromptu speech. As always, the speech I thought of after-wards was better than the one I gave which was merely some platitudes beginning with “I’m glad to see so many of you here.” They would have been as amazed as I if I had begun, “You have the privilege of listening to the fi rst lecture by a man who will still be lecturing here forty-three years from now, when Commerce will occupy a whole building and New York University will occupy the whole East side of the Square and much more.” I did not have that foresight nor did anyone else. Fortu-nately my speech was brief. They said my voice carried well, and that was that. (Hotchkiss n.d., Chapter 6: 2)

And so began his career as a newspaper reporter, advertising copywriter, consultant, author, administrator, and of course, teacher of advertising and marketing.

In view of his background and training, it was an unusual decision for Hotchkiss, winner of a student poetry prize while at Yale University (Lucas 1961, 72), to accept a position in the School of Commerce where he ultimately specialized in advertising and marketing. Born in 1884 in Naugatuck, Connecticut, his education was in English (Yale BA 1905, MA 1906), his forte in writing, and his only work experience at that time was teaching English for two years at Beloit College. Indeed, it had been his ambition to teach English Literature, to interpret Shakespeare and Brown-ing, and to write poetry.


George Burton Hotchkiss (1884–1953) 95


Although he began his career at New York University (NYU) teaching Business English, Hotchkiss is best known to students of marketing his-tory as an advertising teacher and scholar. Less appreciated, but signifi -cant for their pioneering status, were his eff orts to teach and write about marketing history.

During his forty-three years at NYU, Hotchkiss published more than a dozen books, many appearing in multiple editions, and several of them widely adopted advertising textbooks. For example, in 1933 the advertis-ing trade journal Printers’ Ink surveyed its readers to determine what they considered to be the most essential reading on advertising. The fi nal list of the fi fteen “Best Books on Advertising” included Hotchkiss’s (1924) Adver-tising Copy.

Hotchkiss is considered to be the founder of the National Association of Teachers of Advertising (Ross and Richards 2008), which was formed in 1915 and merged with the American Marketing Society in 1937 to form the American Marketing Association (Witkowski 2010). In 1921–1922 he served as President of the NATA, and in 1937 as a Vice President of the American Marketing Association. In 1955, the American Advertising Fed-eration inducted Hotchkiss as the fi rst academic into their Hall of Fame with the following tribute.

In 1915 he developed and led the pioneer department of advertising and marketing at New York University and taught there until 1953. His books were widely used as textbooks and his teaching methods modelled by other professors. Many leaders in the advertising industry testifi ed warmly to his infl uence as a teacher. He was a pioneer in recognizing the value of advertising as an important phase of business education. He believed that students should be led to see advertising in relation to the whole process of market distribution and to understand its social as well as economic functions. Highly respected and often consulted by business leaders, he helped establish the acceptance and stature of the advertising curriculum. (American Advertising Foundation, n.d.)

Hotchkiss was also included in the original Journal of Marketing “Pioneers in Marketing” series (Lucas 1961) and received many other honors from the advertising and marketing community during his long career. His resi-due certainly qualifi es him for biographical attention.

PRAGMATISM AND TEACHING BUSINESS ENGLISH

Outstanding teachers don’t often get the recognition given to outstanding scholars. A good argument could be made that Hotchkiss was both, but it was in honor of his teaching that the NATA invited him in 1935 to speak at their annual meeting. In that speech, he summarized his pedagogical advice




with the statement, “make them work” (1936a). This refl ected his strong belief in the value of practical experience in studying and teaching advertis-ing. That belief had been nurtured over the years by the intense culture of pragmatism at NYU.

When it opened in late 1900, NYU’s School of Commerce was a dis-tinctly professional school, unconnected with the College of Arts; and it was founded by practical business men, who, instead of contributing an endowment, gave their time and energy to the task of instruction. As they could do this only after business hours, the classroom sessions were originally confi ned to evenings. (Hotchkiss 1933a, 356)

It was also assumed that students in the new School of Commerce were likely to be businessmen, themselves. Since they were working during the day, it followed that classes need only to be off ered in the evening. So, businessmen-turned-teachers met after regular business hours with other businessmen-turned-students to hold classes. A few years later, in 1904, a combined course of study allowed for late afternoon courses in “less techni-cal subjects like political economy and economic history, at other divisions of the University, while [students were] pursuing their business courses in the evening” (New York University 1950, 12), but it wasn’t until 1919 that a self-contained day division became part of the School’s organization.

Therefore, when he interviewed Hotchkiss in 1908, Dean Johnson was looking for instructors with proven ability in business aff airs, men who could “enrich their lectures with the fruits of their practical experience” (Madden 1936, 2). The Dean was a former business executive himself, had been a newspaper editor and publisher, and a member of the faculty of the Wharton School of Commerce and Finance before coming to NYU in 1901. Johnson had established a comprehensive curriculum in Journalism at Wharton in 1893 and was committed to doing the same at NYU. It was he who had off ered the fi rst course in Business English at NYU in 1905. In 1908, he wanted Hotchkiss to take over that course and to develop a cur-riculum in Journalism.

Hotchkiss’s training and teaching experience to date had given him some credibility in that connection. Indeed, he later published several books on business writing including Business Correspondence (1910), Handbook of Business English (1914), Business English (1916), Advanced Business Eng-lish (1921), and New Business English (1931). The latter sold more than 250,000 copies and, as an aside, Hotchkiss later admitted that his earnings from textbook sales were typically double his salary as a faculty member. Carbone (1994) credited Hotchkiss’s Business English as the fi rst impor-tant college textbook on business communication. However, teaching came fi rst and Johnson’s belief in pragmatism extended beyond Accounting, Marketing, and the other emerging fi elds of business study, to include Busi-ness English. If Hotchkiss wanted his faculty position to be a permanent




one, Johnson suggested, he had better get a day job! In a move that would seem surprising today, Johnson advised Hotchkiss not to continue graduate study for a PhD, but rather to get a job working for a newspaper. This, he felt, would be more valuable than the PhD for preparing Hotchkiss to teach courses in business writing.

Accepting Johnson’s advice, Hotchkiss decided to apply for a job as a reporter with the New York Evening Sun because, in his estimation, it was the best written newspaper in the city (Hotchkiss n.d., Chapter 6: 4). It also helped that, since the Sun was an evening publication, his reporting responsibilities would require only day work. The Sun did hire him, and he worked for two years under the fi nancial editor covering the stock mar-ket. As a reporter he was successful; as an investor, however, he was not. Indeed, losing $600 in the cotton panic of 1909 may have saved Hotchkiss from becoming a teacher of fi nance instead of advertising!

Meanwhile, Hotchkiss had found teaching at NYU both challenging and rewarding.

My Business English classes were small enough for comfort, and the character of the students, especially in the early years, was a constant revelation. There were mature men, many older than myself, who worked all day and came to night classes to learn. I gave them my best eff orts and they repaid me handsomely. (Hotchkiss n.d., Chapter 6: 3)

By 1911 his teaching responsibilities at the School included Business Eng-lish, News Writing, and Narrative Writing. That year he was promoted to Assistant Professor and appointed Assistant to the Dean (Johnson). And, through his newspaper job, he had become interested in advertising and had taught a course on advertising copy for the Advertising Men’s League. That presented another fork in the road.

PRAGMATISM AND TEACHING ADVERTISING

In the early 1900s, advertising clubs such as the Men’s League (later the Advertising Club of New York) were forming across the United States, in part driven by the desire for a professional status similar to that accorded the fi elds of law and medicine. There was widespread belief that a core of scientifi c principles of advertising was being discovered and that this sci-ence of advertising could form the basis of standardized instruction nec-essary for professional status (Schultz 1982). However, most universities, even those with business programs, did not off er instruction in advertis-ing. The advertising industry reasoned that if universities controlled that education, the industry might not be able to control the profession’s role in society (Schultz 1982, 25). Thus, many clubs began off ering their own courses. One of those was the Advertising Men’s League in New York




which, founded in 1896, was one of the oldest such clubs in the country. The League began off ering instruction in advertising in 1906, coinciden-tally enough, using classroom space at NYU, but those courses were taught by Harry Hollingworth of Columbia University and Frank Alvah Parsons, Director of the New York School of Applied Design (Ross and Richards 2008). Hotchkiss later taught copywriting for the League in 1910.

At NYU, advertising had been taught as early as 1905 when a course was off ered by William R. Hotchkin, advertising manager for the John Wanamaker store (NYU 1905–1906). However in 1913, the entire curricu-lum of the Advertising Men’s League was transferred to the NYU School of Commerce forming the basis of a new group of courses in advertising and marketing. In 1915, a Department of Advertising and Marketing was formed with Hotchkiss as the Head, a position he held through 1928. After 1920, Hotchkiss no longer taught business writing courses, having switched entirely to advertising and marketing.

He felt that as a Department Head he should be promoted to Full Profes-sor and met with the University Chancellor in 1915 to make his case.

“Aren’t you rather young to be a full professor?” I was prepared for that. “Yes”, I said. “But not so young as you were when you became a full professor.” He laughed and laughed. “Well, how about a com-promise? How about making you Associate Professor?” “Oh”, I said. “You did that last year.” This time his laughter fairly shook the ceiling. (n.d., Chapter 7: 6)

The following year, there were eleven diff erent advertising courses off ered by the new department headed by Full Professor Hotchkiss. During this early period of curriculum development, the emphasis was on copywriting, layout, and ad production. Hotchkiss had realized that most of his students in the copywriting course knew more about the practical aspects of the subject than he did! So, in 1912, he began his second full-time job on the side, this time as a copywriter for the George Batten Advertising Agency. He later remembered one of his best pieces of copy never published:

I recall vaguely one [advertisement] of women’s silk underwear that was headed ‘A Man’s View.’ The client rejected it as too daring. . . . Women’s underwear and other feminine intimacies are now advertised in ways that would have been thought scandalous in 1914. (n.d., Chapter 7: 3)

Examples of Hotchkiss’s copywriting during 1912–1914 can be found in print ads for the Alexander Hamilton Institute whose account the Bat-ten agency had, and for whom Hotchkiss was assigned to write most of the copy. He later admitted that he learned much about copywriting from Batten’s copy chief, Jim Adams. Even though he only worked for Batten until 1914, for several years afterwards when he published textbooks on




advertising, Hotchkiss was listed on the title page as “Professor in the Department of Advertising and Marketing, New York University, formerly with the George Batten Co., Advertising”. Evidently, the appearance of having practical experience was also important.

Universities were divided at that time about whether advertising courses should be off ered in Business departments or in Journalism departments. The jurisdictional choice was an important one, because it could funda-mentally aff ect the nature of instruction. In Journalism, advertising was viewed as a natural aspect of newspaper publishing with instruction cen-tered on how-to skills and on newspaper space sales. Business programs, on the other hand, emphasized the relationship between advertising and marketing management (Schultz 1982, 202). Despite the fact that he had originally been hired to develop the curriculum in Journalism, Hotchkiss favored placing the advertising courses in a Department of Marketing. Contrary to what we might have expected from Hotchkiss given his back-ground in newspaper work and teaching Business English, he expressed the opinion that “advertising should be viewed as a means of promoting the sale of goods and service–in other words as a function of marketing–rather than as a means of revenue” (n.d., Chapter 6: 11).

On the other hand, in Advertising Copy, Hotchkiss described that sub-ject as a “branch of English Composition” (1924, xix), yet one which was “a practical art rather than a fi ne art having the objective, as it does, of salesmanship” (1924, 5). He added that advertising copy needed to read like good literature since “before advertising copy can sell anything it must get itself read” (1924, 9). Bartels singled out this book for its cultural and liter-ary approach (1988, 41) and noted that in this way Hotchkiss’s perspective was diff erent from that of his contemporaries. Indeed, Bartels leaves the impression that the book is actually too cultural and literary to be useful to advertising practitioners. On the contrary, Hotchkiss had recognized that good literary skills and good advertising went hand in hand.

In 1935, because of his then long and notable success as an advertising teacher, the National Association of Teachers of Marketing and Advertis-ing (NATMA) invited Hotchkiss to their annual meeting to speak on the topic, “how to teach advertising”. His presentation was characteristically humble beginning with the opinion that

any teacher becomes recognized as an authority if he sticks around long enough. Some of his students are bound to succeed, no matter what he does. . . . The teacher needs only to have plenty of progeny . . . to be sure of fame. (n.d., Chapter 12: 2)

As one observer noted, this refl ected a sense of humor and humility that characterized the best teachers (Little 1936). In his own case, Hotchkiss could have cited his many students in copywriting. For example, the course he taught most consistently throughout his career was “Advertising Copy”




which usually exceeded one hundred students in enrolment. A substantial number of those students became successful writers of advertising copy and many went on to become important advertising executives (e.g., Ray-mond T. O’Connell, Chester La Roche, and Otto Kleppner who also taught advertising and wrote one of the most successful books on the subject, Advertising Procedure, in 1925).

Hotchkiss felt that the prerequisites for eff ective teaching included an interest in the subject and in students, “the ability to impart knowl-edge painlessly” and, of course, practical experience (1936b, 37). As he expounded on the latter requirement, it was clear that he recognized both an art and a science of advertising. Practical experience, he felt, helped a teacher to understand the limits of what advertising could and could not do. Someone who had used advertising would know, for example, that “the public is not as gullible as some of the critics of advertising seem to believe, and the safest way to make advertising permanently profi table to the user is to make it serviceable to the reader and buyer” (1936b, 37). In addition, he was sure that practical experience would humble those teachers who placed too much faith in advertising science.

A course in advertising cannot provide a set of ready-made solutions or even formulas which our graduates will be able to apply to the unknown problems of the future. . . . In such a dynamic, swiftly changing fi eld as advertising, formulas that are valid today are likely to be obsolete tomorrow. (1936b, 37–38)

Furthermore, he noted with approval that advertising was not a profession, since such a status would “certainly over-emphasize the formal qualifi ca-tions at the expense of natural talent and aptitude” (1936b, 37). Never-theless, he believed that formal qualifi cations gained through university coursework could provide an effi cient preparation for advertising practice, that students could be trained in some “basic principles that are sound and permanent” (1936b, 38). In short, one could teach the science of advertis-ing, but in order to do so eff ectively one had to be aware of the art or craft of advertising as well.

An Outline of Advertising: Its Philosophy, Science, Art, and Strategy, published in 1933, assumed a much broader perspective on advertising. That book, in Bartels’s opinion, “established Hotchkiss’s position among advertising writers and became one of the classical works in the fi eld” because it integrated advertising thought (1988, 41). In addition to chap-ters on conventional subjects such as copywriting, illustration and layout, and on media selection and campaign development (advertising strategy), Hotchkiss discussed the science and philosophy of advertising.

He felt that advertising needed to be understood in its relation to the whole process of marketing, including its history as well as its social and economic impact. This was an ambitious task. His historical analysis had convinced him that “the inner essence of advertising is constant” (1933b,




vii). That essence constituted the science of advertising and included how companies organized to carry out advertising; market research; and the psychology of selling including the principles of getting attention, creating interest, and the relation of branding to advertising. In the latter, Hotchkiss relied heavily on two extensive studies by himself and Richard Franken, a psychologist at NYU. Those studies were published under the titles Lead-ership of Advertised Brands (1923) and The Measurement of Advertising Eff ects (1927). Both publications reported the results of large-scale surveys of brand awareness, “probably the most extensive investigation that [had] yet been made of public familiarity with manufacturers’ names and brands, and the causes responsible for their prestige”, principally the infl uence of advertising (Hotchkiss and Franken 1927, ix).

The history of advertising warranted the better part of three chapters in An Outline of Advertising. Together with an assessment of the social and economic impact of advertising, these topics came under the umbrella of “philosophy of advertising”. In examining the social and economic impact, he also proposed that a concept of information utility be added to the other economic forms of utility which were then well-known to marketers. He used an analogy to an ancient Arabian Nights tale–where the king refused to decide which was the greatest miracle, a magic apple, a magic carpet, or the magic crystal of knowledge (since any one of the three was useless without the others)–to justify his claim that advertising, the magic crystal of knowledge, added value which was just as important as time, place, and possession utility (1933b, 68).

As for the social criticisms of advertising popular at that time, Hotch-kiss’s high moral stance and sense of optimism led him to respond that–advertising is a form of teaching and all teaching is ultimately biased; advertising cultivates, but does not create, emotional needs; like advertise-ments, taxicabs are invasive and too numerous–until you need one; and, most advertisers are not insincere, but rather actually believe their claims and are therefore blinded to others’ claims. Perhaps this last defence could be given for Hotchkiss as well.

When An Outline of Advertising was published in 1933, the Consumer Movement was reaching new levels of intensity (Beem 1973). Among the reactions to suspected business evils was the appearance of the so-called “guinea pig” books, such as Chase and Schlink’s (1927) Your Money’s Worth and Schlink and Kallet’s (1933) 100,000,000 Guinea Pigs. Critics of advertising were outspoken during that period and Hotchkiss became a (perhaps somewhat naive) vocal apologist for advertising and marketing. He observed in disgust that “merchants, salesmen, and advertisers are still looked upon as mere money makers at best, and parasites and robbers at worst” (1936b, 32), and warned that critics

aim to discredit the so-called capitalist system and gain converts for a [communist] system. . . . Practically all [their] propaganda books have a strong anti-advertising bias. This is to be expected. To induce




consumers to pay for advice on what to buy, it is necessary to make them distrustful of free advice. (1941, 228)

Hotchkiss attacked Wyand’s (1937) The Economics of Consumption, in particular, for its criticisms of advertising as false and misrepresentative. He turned the tables by carefully dissecting Wyand’s book for its own misrep-resentations through inaccurate quotations of source materials. Hotchkiss jumped to the defense of Paul T. Cherington who he felt was particularly mistreated.

Mr. Cherington, described by Wyand as a “prominent advertising agent”, is a scholar and scientist who was for several years director of research in a large advertising agency. His numerous published works will not yield a single example of quotation-garbling like [Wyand’s]. (1941, 231)

Hotchkiss admitted, of course, that some advertising was untruthful. How-ever, he excused it on the grounds that it was usually caused by careless-ness, bias, the desire to be interesting, limitations of space and time, or the lack of mastery of the technique of communication (1937, 6). His overall conclusion was that advertising

has been an indispensable element in the American system of free enterprise. That system has given us a high average standard of liv-ing; freedom for individual initiative; freedom of choice for consumers; freedom of speech, the press, and religion; rapid progress in science and invention; high literacy and excellent educational facilities. All these owe something to advertising. (1942, 105)

TEACHING MARKETING HISTORY

While his work in advertising was not without its historical dimension, his teaching and later writing about the broader topic of marketing history added a new dimension to Hotchkiss’s work and was a source of great personal satisfaction. He may have been the fi rst, starting in the early 1920s, to teach a university course in marketing history. That course, titled “History of Distribution”, was taught for several years without a text because there simply wasn’t one available that Hotchkiss felt was suitable, that examined how and why marketing had evolved to its cur-rent form in North America. Consequently, during a sabbatical in 1928–1929, he set out to write it.

Some ten years later, Hotchkiss published Milestones of Marketing (1938). Its completion was no doubt delayed by the diffi culties of tracing original sources that included handbills, newspapers, and royal proclamations, as




well as rare pamphlet sources. It was also slowed because one of the source materials for that research became a project in and of itself, one which took on a greater urgency for Hotchkiss than the more general study of market-ing history.

Wheeler’s Treatise of Commerce

As so often happens with historical research, Hotchkiss made an important and exciting discovery—what he believed to be the earliest known example of advertising on behalf of a business organization. A Treatise of Com-merce was written and published in 1601 by John Wheeler, a business man and Secretary of the Merchants Adventurers. Actually, its full title was “A Treatise of Commerce, wherein are shewed the commodities [economies] arising by a well-ordered and ruled Trade, such as that of the Societie of Marchants Adventurers is prooved to bee, Written principallie for the bet-ter information of those who doubt of the Necessaries of the Societie in the state of the Realme of England”. The Treatise was

signifi cant because it was the earliest extant example of advertising or publicity on behalf of a commercial organization. That organization was the greatest of its time, the Merchants Adventurers of England. Although the original book was published in two editions, probably totalling at least 4,500 or 5,000 copies, only a few were still known to exist. I deter-mined to edit it and reprint it, and to that end spent much time in tracing its background and results. (Hotchkiss n.d., Chapter 10: 5)

Hotchkiss added a “Foreword” and an “Introduction” in which he pro-vided a biographical sketch of Wheeler, discussed the signifi cance of the Treatise and the events which precipitated its publication, and included an assessment of its impact. That interpretation of the Treatise is fol-lowed by a complete facsimile of the original, and then an edited text of the Treatise. The latter is a modernized version with corrected punc-tuation and paragraphing (ever the teacher of English) accompanied by explanatory notes.

Hotchkiss wanted his edited reprint and interpretation of the Treatise to be published by the New York University Press and to be published in 1931 since that was the centennial of the founding of the University. Most of his sabbatical in 1928/29 and the available time in the subsequent two years was spent writing the Foreword and Introduction (which amounted to 120 pages) as well as editing the Treatise itself which he described as a painstaking job (n.d., Chapter 11: 3). Thus, the fi nished volume titled Wheeler’s Treatise of Commerce was published in 1931, before Hotchkiss’s more general study of marketing history was completed.

Foreshadowing the title of his general study of marketing history, Hotch-kiss commented of the Treatise that




its great claim to distinction is that it marks an important milestone in the development of marketing. In its substance it represents the characteristi-cally medieval theory of the trade monopoly, bolstered by monarchical authority and jealously guarded against competition. In its method, it anticipates the characteristically modern practice of winning popular support through the medium of the printed word. (1931, viii)

It was, as far as he was concerned, a case study of centuries-old commercial life and, as such, he thought it would be useful to businessmen and students interested in the problems of advertising and marketing.

Hotchkiss later claimed with pride that the book was an artistic success. Perhaps in that way, it marked the realization of his earlier ambition to interpret great works of literature, within the context of his actual career as a teacher of advertising and marketing. Seen in this light, the book can be considered a milestone in Hotchkiss’s career as a scholar.

Milestones of Marketing

The book Hotchkiss originally set out to write in 1928 was eventually pub-lished in 1938. It was distinctive as one of the fi rst, if not the fi rst, attempts by a professor of marketing to write a book about marketing history. Other pio-neer marketing scholars, especially those trained in the tradition of the Ger-man Historical School of Economics, such as Edward David Jones, Henry Charles Taylor, and Simon Litman, used a historical methodology as a means of developing a science of marketing but their purpose wasn’t to write His-tory. During the 1930s, there was growing interest in the early development of the marketing discipline and a few articles were published in the Journal of Marketing about that development (e.g., Agnew 1941; Converse 1933; Hagerty 1936). Only one journal article of that era examined marketing his-tory (Jones 1936) and no such book had yet been published.

The opening sentence of the introduction in Milestones quotes the offi -cial defi nition of marketing given at that time by the American Marketing Association and, in using that as his focus, Hotchkiss presents a historical analysis which is distinct from earlier histories of commerce and related sub-jects. In particular, he was concerned with the “motives and philosophies of business men and their governments [towards marketing]” (1938, xiv) which he felt were not dealt with in more general economic and commercial histories. During the late 1930s when Milestones was being completed, Hotchkiss saw an American public that was, in his opinion, mistakenly critical of business motives, and saw a degree of government interference that threatened essential business freedoms.

Ever since my year in England in 1928–29, I had been gathering mate-rial for my course in History of Distribution, with the idea of ultimately writing a book on the subject. The necessity of this became more and




more apparent as the New Deal, which was so scornful of a horse-and-buggy economy, persisted in adopting a series of governmental policies that were centuries older. Many were essentially the same as those of the mercantilist policies of England in the eighteenth century, against which the American colonies had rebelled in 1776. Some were pre-mer-cantile. It was not my purpose to analyze the current policies of either our government or those of other countries, but I hoped by informing people regarding the evolution of trade to dispel some current fallacies. (n.d., Chapter 13: 1)

The ambitious promise of Milestones was to trace the evolution of market-ing from the fi fth century through to the twentieth century. The only cave-ats were that Hotchkiss would describe only the most important steps in that evolution and that he would deal only with English-speaking countries (specifi cally, England and America). Hotchkiss believed that knowledge of the history of marketing would be useful to businessmen in their develop-ment of marketing plans and of even greater use to government, especially “those who mould and direct the policies of government toward business” (1938, vii). Therein lay one of the themes of the book. It is a story about the historical struggle of market forces against government regulation. Hotch-kiss’s milestones of marketing are the attempts through history by the Eng-lish, and later by American governments, to regulate marketing, and of the creative ways that marketers found to avoid that regulation. For example, English taxation led to the gild system with its charters and trade privi-leges. That was replaced by the system of monopoly markets and regulated monopolies of the great English trading companies such as the Merchants Adventurers, the subject of Hotchkiss’s earlier (1931) Wheeler’s Treatise. Later, mercantilism brought the regulation of foreign trade including trade with the American colonists–leading to a revolution. Soon, the historical drama of marketing forces against government regulation that occurred in England was repeated in America through trust monopolies, the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887, and the Sherman Anti-trust Act of 1890.

Technology plays a supporting role in Milestones. Hotchkiss described the post-Industrial Revolution improvements in transportation and com-munication that led to mass production and distribution. For example, a chapter is devoted to the development of large-scale retailing institutions such as department stores and chain stores. The Industrial Revolution also led to national advertising and, as an advertising specialist, Hotchkiss was now in familiar territory. He described in detail the methods of newspaper and magazine advertising, and the competitive role played by advertising when the whiskey and tobacco trusts were broken up. Hotchkiss labeled the period from 1900 to 1930 (where the book ends) as the merchandising era, characterized by the growing use of market research, the profession-alization of personal selling, telephone selling, radio advertising, and the widespread growth of branding. The publication date of Milestones (1938)




gave Hotchkiss just enough perspective on the Great Depression to indict the New Deal. He likened the National Recovery Administration to the medieval gilds, both of which he felt tried to manage employment, produc-tion, prices, and the quality of goods sold to consumers.

Milestones in Marketing had little impact when it was published in 1938 and, sadly, it has been virtually ignored by marketing historians since then. In his review of the book when it was published, Maynard (1939) described it as “an objective but penetrating description of marketing aspects of the New Deal” and a “challenging presentation of the merchandising era” (411). Maynard also complemented Hotchkiss for using “voluminous treat-ments of economic and industrial history and [for having] supplemented this material with much original research in libraries both at home and abroad” (411). Bartels (1962) included Milestones in the bibliography of his encyclopedic, The Development of Marketing Thought, but there is no mention beyond that. Perhaps the most complimentary assessment was from Savitt (1980) who described it as “the major comprehensive work [on marketing history]” to that point in time (52).

Whatever its ideological bias, Milestones in Marketing drew the literary praise which Hotchkiss valued greatly.

It was highly praised by a few people whose opinions I value. The late Roy Dickenson, then editor of Printers’ Ink, said he considered it my best work. Lord Stamp was most enthusiastic and among other things said, “so scholarly and yet so readable”. . . . The book added somewhat to my reputation. (n.d., Chapter 13: 3)

Given the dramatic increase of interest in marketing history since the early 1980s and the corresponding scarcity of references to this book, Milestones of Marketing seems to be a forgotten example of early historical research in marketing. It was also the last major original writing of Hotchkiss’s career.

CREDIT WHERE CREDIT IS DUE

In 1943, Hotchkiss returned to the position of Department Head which he had held from 1915 to 1928. This was intended as a temporary assignment only for the duration of the war, but lasted until 1950. Thus, for twenty of his forty-three years at NYU, he served as Head of the Marketing depart-ment. The latter years as Department Head were diffi cult ones for Hotch-kiss. After the war, there was a signifi cant increase in student enrolment, resulting in increased administrative complexity. By then, he was over sixty years of age and his health was beginning to fail.

In 1950, Hotchkiss was invited to attend the inaugural Paul D. Converse Awards sponsored by the Illinois chapter of the American Marketing Asso-ciation. About a dozen scholars were being honored for their contributions




to marketing science. Hotchkiss was not personally a recipient of the Con-verse Award, but had been asked to accept on behalf of the deceased Paul Cherington, whose widow was a cousin of Hotchkiss’s wife, Margaret. As Hotchkiss refl ected on the distinguished group of scholars being honored, he observed that the contributions and role of New York University in the development of the marketing discipline had not been given their due.

Both Cherington and [L. D. H.] Weld had been members of the NYU faculty; so likewise were two others on the list, Ralph Starr Butler and Melvin T. Copeland, although the latter was not in our Department of Marketing. When the University connections of these men are men-tioned, Butler is usually associated with Wisconsin, Cherington and Copeland with Harvard, and Weld with Yale. Individually this is fair enough, but the aggregate contributions of New York University to education in the fi eld of marketing are probably greater than those of any other institution. (n.d., Chapter 18: 2)

Perhaps he felt that his own contributions had not been adequately recog-nized by the marketing academy. But if he felt that recognition of NYU was lacking, he must have been gratifi ed with his own personal recognition by the University in 1950. That year, the School of Commerce celebrated its fi ftieth anniversary and at the commencement exercises Hotchkiss was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters.

Offi cially, Hotchkiss retired in 1951, but continued to teach a reduced load. He wanted to be usefully employed as long as possible, in part, for fi nancial reasons. “Like other professors my age, or near it, I needed to make the most of the few productive years remaining to me. At best my income from annuities and teaching would be less than a third of my former [full time] salary of $10,500” (n.d., Chapter 18: 8). However, during the spring semester, he was forced by heart problems to quit teaching altogether. This must have been diffi cult for someone who defi ned himself fi rst and foremost as a teacher. Yet, he saw this as his fi nal opportunity to write his memoirs and “the great novel or epic that had been postponed for so long” (n.d., Chapter 18: 3). His death two years later saw the former completed but unpublished, and the latter remained an unfulfi lled, lifelong ambition.

***

George Burton Hotchkiss’s greatest contribution to advertising and market-ing may have been his teaching. He dedicated his book Advertising Copy (1924) to “the anonymous copywriter whose work has made other names famous”. That same dedication might also be made to Hotchkiss, a teacher whose eff orts helped make others famous.

Advertising Copy also exemplifi ed his considerable contributions to the advertising and marketing literature. Together with An Outline of




Advertising: Its Philosophy, Science, Art, and Strategy (1933b), these are undoubtedly his key writings about advertising. However, to those I would add the under-appreciated Milestones of Marketing (1938) for a complete listing of his most valuable contributions to the marketing literature.

Hotchkiss was distinctive as a pioneer teacher of marketing because of his background. Most university teachers of marketing at that time were educated in economics; he was not. Trained in English, Hotchkiss stressed the accuracy of communication in advertising, rather than its economic jus-tifi cation or its psychological eff ects. And this led him to adopt a somewhat unique defence of advertising and marketing against its critics.

In other ways he was more typical of early twentieth-century marketing teachers. For example, most university marketing professors from the early twentieth century spent signifi cant portions of their careers working full time either for government or business. Although he came to NYU without any business experience, he quickly acquired some and became a vocal advocate of practical training for marketing teachers as well as for students.

Hotchkiss’s interest in advertising was stimulated through his work as a newspaper reporter. Because of his training and experience in journalism, his interest naturally focused on advertising copywriting. However, as a teacher in a university business school, he also recognized that advertis-ing was only one part of marketing. That helped provide his writing with a balanced perspective on the art and science of advertising and probably contributed to its immense popularity with students and other teachers.

If his writing about advertising and marketing history also seemed defensive and apologetic, it should be remembered that much of that work was written during a time of economic depression, and hence, of height-ened scrutiny and criticism of business practice. This was also a time of unprecedented government intervention and experimentation through leg-islation aimed at controlling business activity. Hotchkiss believed in indi-vidual freedom and laissez-faire. His training in English and his experience teaching and writing about business communication had convinced him that accuracy and truthfulness ultimately yielded the most eff ective form of communication–that, and a voice that carried well.



7 Theodore N. Beckman (1895–1973)Mr. Wholesaling

Theodore N. Beckman was a faculty member at Ohio State University (OSU) for some fi fty-two years, from 1921 until his death in 1973 (Emeritus from 1965 to 1973). He often used the formal title, “Professor of Business Orga-nization and Consulting Economist”, but signed his correspondence simply, “Theo”. Students thought of him as their “marketing dad”, but in formal settings, referred to him as “Mr. Marketing” (Otteson 1965, 74) or “Mr. Wholesaling” (Beckman 1965c). In a biographical sketch of Beckman pub-lished in the Journal of Marketing’s “Leaders in Marketing” series, John Wright described “TNB” as a teacher, author, consultant to government and business, and contributor to marketing thought (1965, 63). More than that, Beckman fi lled those roles with incredible drive and notable success.

A selection of Beckman’s major publications is included in Appendix 7.1. During his career, he published over two hundred articles and seven books, including seminal works in the areas of wholesaling (Goehle 1987), credit (Powers 1989), and marketing productivity (Shaw 1987), as well as a Principles text that evolved through eight editions. He supervised over fi fty doctoral students at Ohio State, many of whom became well known scholars in their own right, including William Davidson, Arthur Cull-man, James Davis, Robert Miner, Robert Bartels, Robert Buzzell, Schuyler Otteson, William Lazer, and David D. Monieson, to mention only a few. He consulted extensively to businesses, trade associations, federal and state governments, and as a result, was in great demand as an expert witness. Indeed, Beckman was so busy working, that he had time for little else. His curriculum vitae dated “1961” lists his hobbies as “my three daughters and general family life, for I have so little of them” (1961).

Throughout his life, Beckman received many awards and honors. He was entered into the Hall of Fame in Distribution at the 1953 Boston Con-ference on Distribution, received the American Marketing Association’s Paul D. Converse Award in 1961 for original contributions to the science of marketing, was named Marketing Educator of the Year by Sales & Mar-keting Executives International in 1962, and was honored by Ohio State University that same year with the Alumni Award for Distinguished Teach-ing. In 1971, Beckman was awarded the Golden Mercury (a symbol of




commerce) by the Netherlands Association of Marketing (NAM). At the time, he was only the second individual to have been so honored in the NAM’s fi fty-year history.

Beckman served as an Associate Editor of the Journal of Marketing from its inception in 1937 through 1938. He was Vice President of the American Marketing Association in 1939 and of the American Statistical Association in 1940. Finally, Beckman was listed in nine diff erent Who’s Who directo-ries, including Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who in World Jewry, Who’s Who in Commerce and Industry, Who’s Who in American Education, and Who Knows–and What.

Clearly, Theodore N. Beckman made an impact on the marketing dis-cipline. There is more than suffi cient residue for him to be worthy of bio-graphical attention. As for my personal interest in Beckman, like many others I can trace my own academic roots to him. He was my ‘marketing grandfather’–my thesis supervisor’s thesis supervisor. My curiosity about his life and career is as natural as the interest we all have in genealogy.

STUDYING MARKETING AT OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY

Theodore N. Beckman was born on September 3, 1895, in Dzigovka, Russia, the son of Nahum and Pearl Beckman. There he attended the Gymnasium, a high school emphasizing classical training in preparation for university. It is uncertain precisely when Beckman immigrated to the United States, but in 1914, about the time he would have fi nished high school, he enrolled as a student in the Faculty of Arts at Ohio State University in Columbus. During the next three years, he attended OSU full time and since he held no signifi cant scholarships or fellowships during that period, we can assume either that his family fi nanced his education or that he worked his way through college. Given the intense work ethic he demonstrated throughout his life, the latter is quite likely.

From 1917 to 1919, Beckman left the university to serve with the US Army during World War I, achieving the rank of Second Lieutenant. Most of that time was spent with the American Expeditionary Forces in France, although he also served in the Medical Corps and Infantry. He later related some of his post-war experience to students in one of his classes.

He estimated Allied damages to German property during the war. This off set German damages to Allied property. It was one of the bases of reparations between the countries after WWI. There was no extensive bombing of Germany during the war. There was some, however, and the American government wanted to be sure all of it [was] counted. Beckman discovered that the telegraph operator at each train station had to record when bombs dropped. We then understood why he was so well suited for his later job developing operational defi nitions for the


Theodore N. Beckman (1895–1973) 111


Census of Business. We also understood why he was such a stickler for detail. (Whitmore 2005)

After the war, Beckman returned to OSU to fi nish his undergraduate degree, but switched to the College of Commerce and Journalism. That academic year (1919/20), Beckman seems to have found his calling.

During 1919/20, there were several marketing courses off ered at OSU, but the ones most likely attended by young Beckman were those off ered by James Hagerty and Walter Weidler. Hagerty was the Dean of the Col-lege of Commerce, having joined the OSU faculty in 1901 as an instructor in Economics and Sociology. In 1905, Hagerty taught what is considered one of the fi rst courses in marketing to be off ered at an American univer-sity (Bartels 1962, 29). That course evolved rapidly until, in 1916, it was titled, “Marketing”, and covered a full year of study. The 1919/20 calendar description for that course is noteworthy, since it was required of all stu-dents majoring in marketing and is therefore likely to have been the fi rst course in marketing taken by Beckman.

The fi rst semester will be devoted to the study of marketing of raw mate-rials, partially manufactured products and agricultural products. The evolution of methods and institutions of marketing from those of simple industrial communities to those of complex industrial societies. Produce exchanges, their functions and methods. City markets, their functions and the need for regulation and control. A comparison of the cost of the various methods of marketing farm produce and raw materials, and the eff ect of these methods on the cost of living. The second semester will be devoted chiefl y to the study of methods of marketing manufactured products. A study of the functions, methods, and costs of marketing of the retailer, jobber, commission merchant, selling agent, broker, manu-facturer’s selling organization, traveling salesman, etc. The functions and effi ciency of the department store, mail order house, syndicate store, cooperative purchasing organizations, etc. The tendency toward direct selling, a more thorough organization of the market of the producer, price fi xing, etc. Mercantile credit and its use by the various distributing factors. (Ohio State University 1919/20, 56)

The amount of assigned reading in this two-semester course would likely drive today’s students running. It included Cherington’s (1913) Advertising as a Business Force, Weld’s (1915) Marketing of Farm Products, Shaw’s (1916) An Approach to Business Problems, and Hagerty’s own (1913) Mer-cantile Credit (Hagerty 1936, 22–23). The heavy reading assignment would have included elements of all three traditional schools of marketing thought (functional, institutional, and commodity) as well as a historical perspec-tive, resulting in a comprehensive introduction to the fi eld of marketing. Topics included in that course–such as the cost and effi ciency of marketing




and their eff ect on the cost of living–became a theme throughout much of Beckman’s own work. As well, the second semester of that course provided students a thorough background in retailing and wholesaling, subjects in which Beckman later specialized and about which he wrote textbooks.

Hagerty noted that his course was, by necessity, very descriptive. How-ever, there were a few basic principles taught, one of which was adopted by Beckman as the predominant research theme throughout his career. Hagerty taught that, relative to the costs of production, the costs of mar-keting were increasing and that careful measurement of these costs was necessary in order to determine the extent to which “the methods of dis-tribution are wasteful and extravagant and impose a heavy burden on con-sumers” (1936, 27). Even as an undergraduate, Beckman disagreed with the hypothesis that distribution cost too much. He “felt that the treatment of the wholesaler was entirely erroneous” (quoted in Bartels 1962, 221), and later in his academic career followed Hagerty’s advice about measuring the costs of wholesale distribution to determine its effi ciency in an attempt to prove his teacher wrong. Three other courses required of undergradu-ates majoring in marketing that year were “Principles of Salesmanship”, “Exporting and Importing”, and “Retailing and Wholesaling”. Those were all taught by Walter Weidler who later became Beckman’s thesis supervisor for the Master’s degree.

Beckman graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration in 1920 and immediately went on to graduate work in marketing at OSU. Actually, he did take time out to marry Esther Baker on July 27, literally during the summer break between spring convocation and the fall term in which he began his Master’s degree! Two graduate courses he cited for having an impor-tant infl uence on him were “History of Economic Thought”, taught by M. B. Hammond, and “Wholesaling and Retailing”, by Walter Weidler. Throughout his career, Beckman maintained a strong belief that economics was the theo-retical foundation for the study of marketing problems. In an interview given in 1966, he expressed the following view:

I do not believe that economic theory and marketing theory can be separated, unless it is for the purpose of partial analysis. . . . We can-not have it [marketing theory] without economic theory. We cannot solve any marketing problems without a theoretical mooring. Facts constitute marketing, but the questions of what, how and why must be moored in economic theory. (quoted in Kangas 1966, 147–48)

In an uncharacteristic instance of crediting another individual’s infl uence, Beckman added that the economics course which aff ected him the most was M. B. Hammond’s on the “History of Economic Thought”, which he took as a Master’s student in 1921. That course, together with the historical per-spective evident in Hagerty’s undergraduate course in marketing, may also help to explain the historical content in some of Beckman’s later books.




Beckman later cited as infl uential in directing his career the course on “Wholesaling and Retailing” taught by Walter Weidler. When Beckman chose to write his Master’s thesis on wholesaling (“The Wholesale Grocery and Dry Goods Trades of Columbus, Ohio”) in 1922, it was Weidler who supervised him. The choice of wholesaling as a topic for his thesis was an important one, since the study of wholesaling was not yet developed and it maintained Beckman’s interest throughout his life. He once wrote,

just as a psychiatrist looks at early experiences of an individual for a possible explanation of later developments, so may the early writings of an author, as in this case, provide a clue to some of his later works and perhaps furnish a better insight into the nature of subsequent contribu-tions. (1959, 430)

In that instance, Beckman was referring to the work of Harold Maynard, specifi cally to the latter’s doctoral thesis, but the notion seems to apply to Beckman as well. His Master’s thesis was a careful investigation into the processes involved in handling dry goods from the wholesaler to the retailer. He developed classifi cations of jobbers and merchandise, looked at the factors infl uencing location, and examined the operating expenses of wholesale dry goods businesses in Columbus, Ohio. His expressed purpose was “to serve the need for scientifi c research in marketing . . . where the lack of a suffi cient amount of specifi c and accurate information is deeply felt” (1922, 1). Indeed, this ‘scientifi c’ study of wholesaling provided the philosophic approach and substantive basis for most of Beckman’s later research and writing.

During his Master’s degree, Beckman also began to teach at OSU. In 1920/21, he was listed in the faculty directory as an “Assistant” in Econom-ics and Sociology, teaching economics. Early in 1921, Dean Hagerty also asked Beckman to become an instructor for the Columbus chapter of the Institute on Credit of the National Association of Credit Men (Bartels 1962, 222). The course Beckman taught was off ered under the joint auspices of the Institute, of which Hagerty was the Director, and the College of Commerce, of which Hagerty was the Dean. Keeping in mind that Hagerty was also the author of a seminal book on the subject of credit (Powers 1989), it should be no surprise that Beckman not only agreed to teach the course, but also wrote his doctoral dissertation on that topic. As Beckman described it,

I hesitated to accept the appointment. The urging, however, persisted and I succumbed to the pressure, largely out of deference to and respect for Dr. Hagerty. My class in credits and collections consisted of busi-nessmen, some of whom had as high as fi fteen years of practical experi-ence. It became necessary, therefore, for me to study the subject both intensively and extensively to gain as much practical knowledge as pos-sible. To accomplish the latter purpose, I spent a great deal of my time




during the fi rst year in the credit offi ces of the various concerns in Columbus, Ohio.

When the course was introduced at the University in the summer of 1922, I found the literature inadequate and completely out of date. Our readings, therefore, had to be supplemented with lectures based upon my studies of the practical operations of credit departments. The more familiar I became with credit and collection management problems and techniques and with the underlying theory, the more dissatisfi ed I was with the existing textbook material and other miscellaneous readings. It was thus purely a matter of necessity to provide adequate material for my teaching that I started out deliberately in 1922 to prepare a book on credits and collections. (quoted in Bartels 1962, 222)

It seems likely, however, that Beckman’s motives were somewhat more complex since that book, Credits and Collections in Theory and Practice (1924), served at the same time as his doctoral dissertation (his was the fi rst PhD awarded in business at OSU). Hagerty’s own book, Mercantile Credit (1913), was by then only eight years out of date; it would likely have been easier to revise that book than to start a new one unless there were more complex reasons for doing so. In any case, Credits and Collections marked the end of Beckman’s formal apprenticeship for life as a scholar . . . BSc (1920), MA (1922), and PhD (1924), all at OSU.

It is curious that Beckman completed all of his university training at one institution, yet rarely if ever acknowledged the infl uence of his teach-ers. By contrast, he often cited the contributions of business people. For example, in responding to Bartels’s enquiry about “the infl uences that had contributed to shaping his interest in and outlook upon marketing” (1962, 220), Beckman responded, “The most important contribution to my expe-rience and training has probably come from the many and varied contacts I have enjoyed over the years with business groups and business individuals” (quoted in Bartels 1962, 221). In his Master’s thesis, Beckman includes a lengthy list of acknowledgements (1922, 2–3, 38–39), all of them indus-try contacts, but not one word of recognition for his supervisor, Walter Weidler. Furthermore, it is likely that Weidler, who had worked for one of the largest wholesalers in Ohio and had several family members employed in the wholesaling business (Bartels 1962, 235), introduced Beckman to some of those industry contacts. It is unclear whether Beckman felt that an acknowledgement was unearned or was simply unnecessary. Apparently, his praise was not given easily.

PROFESSOR OF BUSINESS ORGANIZATION . . .

Beckman was on a fast track to Full Professor. He was appointed Assistant Professor of Business Organization at OSU in 1924 and by the end of that




decade he had risen rapidly through the ranks and established his reputa-tion as a scholar, publishing four books in four years and supervising the fi rst US Census of Wholesale Distribution.

Credits and Collections (1924) was an early and important contribution to the fi eld of credit management, appearing in eight editions over a forty-fi ve-year period. By 1926, Beckman had extended considerably the work from his Master’s thesis into a book titled, Wholesaling, a contribution even more seminal than his work on Credit. Goehle described it as the fi rst comprehen-sive study of the fi eld of wholesaling, marking the emergence of wholesaling as a distinct fi eld within marketing (1987, 225 and 234). Beckman felt that wholesaling was “in many ways the most signifi cant part of the marketing system” and that his appointment to supervise the US Census of Whole-sale Distribution in 1929 was his “most important assignment in this fi eld” (1965c). In 1927, together with his OSU colleagues Harold Maynard and Walter Weidler, Beckman published Principles of Marketing, a text that even-tually appeared in eight editions and at its peak was in use by over two hun-dred colleges and universities (Beckman 1970). By 1929, Beckman had also published (with F. E. Held) Collection Correspondence and Agency Prac-tice (1925), and numerous articles on wholesaling in various trade journals. These eff orts ensured him a promotion to Associate Professor in 1929, a year that also marked the beginning of his highly successful consulting activities.

In 1929, he was appointed Consulting Expert in Charge of the Census of Wholesale Distribution for the US Department of Commerce. The Census statistics were collected in 1930 and covered wholesale operations for the year 1929. That was an invaluable opportunity to “serve the need for scien-tifi c research in marketing where the lack of a suffi cient amount of specifi c and accurate information is deeply felt” (1922), which had been Beckman’s objective in his Master’s thesis. It was also an opportunity to measure the costs and effi ciency of wholesale distribution, the challenge Hagerty had given him as an undergraduate. Finally, it was an opportunity to begin defi ning and classifying the various types of wholesalers and their func-tions. Beckman described the purpose of the Census as follows:

One aim of this census is to present data on the geographical distribu-tion of specifi c commodities. A second aim is to present a statistical picture of the marketing mechanism of the Nation and its various sub-divisions, showing the marketing facilities which exist in each portion of the country, and their relative importance as measured by volume of trade. A third aim is to supply data bearing on the relative effi ciency of the diff erent parts of our distribution system. Classifi cations are the basis for these latter and perhaps more important phases of the Census of Distribution. (1931, 3)

The fi rst and second aims were fully satisfi ed. These were the more descrip-tive results of the Census. The third aim was partially satisfi ed, to the extent




that it developed a set of classifi cations. However the determination of the relative effi ciency of diff erent parts of the distribution system remained unre-solved for Beckman, although he was preoccupied with that important issue throughout the rest of his career. His later work on effi ciency and productivity in marketing was, in fact, considered by some to be his single most important contribution to marketing thought (Davidson 1965, v). There were, however, more immediate contributions arising from the Census work.

The defi nitions and classifi cations of wholesaling resulting from the Census were extremely important. Beckman incorporated these into the second edition of Wholesaling in 1937, thus establishing it as a major devel-opment in the fi eld.

With the publication of Beckman and Engle’s 1937 edition of Wholesal-ing, a framework for the study of wholesaling appeared. Their attention to defi nitions further delineated the institutions and functions comprising the fi eld. They clearly identifi ed the necessary distribution functions in the marketing process. By arguing that certain of these cannot be elimi-nated but must be performed by someone in the channel, they clarifi ed the relationship of wholesaling to marketing in general. Thus, their work provided the basis for understanding a marketing system comprised of interrelated functions and institutions. (Goehle 1987, 237)

Supervising the work on the Census and writing the many resulting reports consumed much of Beckman’s non-teaching time during the period from 1929 to 1932, but it seems to have provided the justifi cation for a promotion to Full Professor, which he received in 1932. Beckman’s rise through the aca-demic ranks must have seemed swift, even by the standards of that day. So what does a thirty-seven-year-old Full Professor do with his spare time?

. . . AND CONSULTING ECONOMIST

Some time after his promotion to Full Professor, Beckman began to use the title “Professor of Business Organization and Consulting Economist”. This refl ected his deep belief in the essential connection between economic theory and marketing, as well as his growing involvement in consulting. With his academic status and reputation secure, Beckman pursued consult-ing opportunities with government, private businesses, and trade associa-tions. At one point, he reportedly considered resigning from OSU, believing he could earn much more income from consulting full time. He took a leave of absence for one year reportedly betting his long-time friend and Depart-ment Chair, Harold Maynard, that he could earn $100,000 in that year. He did (over a million dollars today). However Maynard warned Beckman he wouldn’t be in such demand for consulting if it were not for his academic position, and convinced him to remain at OSU.




Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Beckman consulted for numerous federal and state government departments. His public sector consulting included work for the Allied Food Commission, Bureau of Census, US Department of Commerce, Federal Trade Commission, US Department of Labor, State of Florida (involving chain store tax law), National Defence Advisory Commission, War Production Board, Bureau of Internal Reve-nue, and the State of Ohio (Attorney General’s offi ce). His work with the Bureau of Census continued through a second census of wholesale distribu-tion from 1932 to 1935. At about the same time, he also acted as an advisor to the US Department of Commerce’s Committee on Elimination of Waste in Distribution, an issue that was extremely important to Beckman.

His private sector consulting included the grocery business, optical sup-plies, botanical industry, tires and rubber products, dry goods, pharma-ceuticals, lumber, hardware, electrical equipment, and businesses in the plumbing and heating industry. Ohio State University required faculty members to fi le a request for permission to engage in consulting for private industry. As an indication of just how busy Beckman was, in the year 1949 alone he fi led nineteen such requests!

As early as 1933, yet with much greater frequency during the 1950s, Beck-man was in high demand as an expert witness for various court proceedings. Many of those appearances required him to testify about the defi nition of wholesaling, the distinction between wholesaling and retailing, or the nature of wholesaling functions and transactions. Occasionally, he testifi ed about the nature of competition and comparative effi ciencies in diff erent channels of distribution.

Part of Beckman’s motivation to work outside the university was derived from his concern with the connection between theory and practice–in this case, between marketing concepts and legal developments. As he stated in a request for permission to perform outside service,

The testimony will revolve around the questions as to what is manufac-turing, what is a retail sale, and what is a retail establishment. My interest in this case is purely academic, as I have been working on these technical questions for years and am anxious to get as many court decisions bear-ing on these points as possible in order to promote better statistics in the fi eld of marketing and to clarify some important concepts. (1954)

Furthermore, Beckman believed that consulting was essential for eff ective teaching. He understood that laws and legal decisions had a tremendous eff ect on marketing and believed that a student’s education was incom-plete if the legal framework for marketing wasn’t part of the curriculum. In another request for permission to perform outside work, he wrote,

I regard this as the most constructive work any faculty member in com-merce can do. In addition, such work gives one a keen insight into the




problems of business and its relation to the government. As this has been on the wholesaling level, it fi tted into the work I do in teaching the course in Wholesaling and in doing research on the subject. In fact, I know of no better laboratory. (1954)

Whatever his motives, fi nancial or pedagogical, he felt a strong need to combine teaching with doing.

ABOVE ALL ELSE A TEACHER

Of course, the Professor of Business Organization and Consulting Econ-omist was fi rst and foremost a teacher. In 1962, Beckman was doubly honored in that connection, by the Sales and Marketing Executives Inter-national as Marketing Educator of the Year, and by OSU with the Alumni Award for Distinguished Teaching. In his biographical sketch of Beckman, John Wright claimed that, “above all else the fame of ‘TNB’ is rooted in his profi ciency in–and love for–teaching” (1965, 63).

One former student described him as a “ferocious” and “formidable” teacher who expected perfect attendance in his classes (Monieson 1992). Another added that “most of the students in my classes were terrifi ed of Beckman; I thought he was demanding, but fair” (Whitmore 2005). Yet another observed that “anyone who coped with the thrust-and-parry of the Beckman version of the Socratic Method came away with humility as well as knowledge” (Wright 1965, 63). If students missed a class, they could expect to be called upon the next day with a question on material lectured about in the missed class! His course exams were very demanding. In one example, extensive memorization of statistics and facts about court deci-sions was required (Beckman 1965a).

In 1965, Beckman retired from classroom teaching, although as Pro-fessor Emeritus he continued to work with doctoral students. Of the thousands of students he taught during his half-century in the classroom, perhaps the most profound infl uence was felt by his PhD students. Between 1930 and 1966, Beckman supervised fi fty-three doctoral students–one quarter of all the non-accounting OSU business PhD graduates during that period of time! One of them commented that of all the roles Beck-man fi lled during his career–teacher, researcher, and consultant–the one that would not have been served the same by anyone else was his teach-ing of graduate students. Many went on to very distinguished careers. Among those, Davidson and Monieson are also the subjects of biographi-cal essays in this book. As strange as this may sound to doctoral students and recent graduates today, Beckman’s doctoral seminar was based on his Principles text. Students would analyze that text page by page, taking apart each table and carefully examining the sources of information. One result of this meticulous study was that his graduates were extremely well




prepared for teaching. One of them observed that “he gave you an incred-ible education, a manner in which to evolve course content. . . . At least you knew you were going to interpret Beckman’s text in the right way” (Monieson 1992).

At a symposium to honor Beckman upon his retirement in 1965, one of Beckman’s former students paid tribute to him on behalf of the “veritable army of PhDs” he taught. He cited Beckman’s brilliant mind; his ambition and an unusual capacity for hard work; a love, respect, and concern for his fellow man; and his integrity.

Thanks for your scholarly contribution. Thanks for what you taught us. Thanks for how you taught us. Most importantly, thanks for instill-ing in us a sense of values which have profoundly aff ected not only our lives but also, through us, the lives of many future generations. (Otteson 1965, 78)

***

Beckman once posed the following exam question to his doctoral stu-dents: “Since the inquiring mind of a graduate student is concerned not only with the subject matter, but also with the personalities that have made special contributions to it, you are asked to identify each of the following with reference to affi liation and to indicate the type or char-acter of major contribution for which he is generally known” (Beckman 1965a). There followed the names of several eminent marketing schol-ars. In a rare instance of humility, Beckman’s name was not included. It should have been.

Beckman’s most signifi cant work appeared in his textbooks. It should be kept in mind, however, that this medium was more important in his era (as a means of publishing original ideas) than it is today. There were only a handful of textbooks available at that time and the periodic literature was just beginning to develop. The Journal of Marketing, for example, only began publication in 1936. Beckman’s Principles of Marketing textbook was not his most important contribution to marketing scholarship, but that was where his philosophy of marketing was most clearly expressed and therefore is prerequisite to understanding the contributions for which he is generally known. As a college textbook, Principles was unusual because of the close attention given to epistemological issues, especially in the fi rst chapter where careful distinctions were drawn among facts, prin-ciples, and theories. When Principles was fi rst published in 1927, Beck-man believed it was time to move beyond earlier qualitative, descriptive treatments of marketing, to a more scientifi c study of the subject (May-nard and Beckman 1952, 19). This required an emphasis on principles, which he defi ned as “explanatory statement[s] of general truth, derived from a study of facts set up in a cause and eff ect relationship, that always




applies under given conditions or assumptions” (Maynard and Beckman 1952, 20).

Beckman was at the forefront of those who rationalized the fi eld of marketing. Much of his work centered on conceptualizing the various activities and institutions involved in the marketing process, on care-fully defi ning those concepts, and on developing ways of measuring them. In short, he pioneered in the development of marketing science. He focused his attention on wholesaling and the value it adds to market-ing because when he began his career most of what had been written about wholesaling was critical and didn’t seem accurate to Beckman. Conventional wisdom was that middlemen were “parasites” and should be eliminated (1965c). Beckman didn’t agree and set out to “search for the truth” (1965c).

Inspired by the work for his Master’s thesis (1922), and supported by the extensive data collected for the Census, Beckman developed a compre-hensive classifi cation system for the fi eld of wholesaling. Intellectually and professionally, what concerned Beckman most deeply was the apparent mis-conception that marketing was an unproductive, unnecessary part of the economic system. As a senior during his undergraduate studies he believed that, contrary to what was being written and taught at that time, marketing activities were both productive and necessary. This belief became the theme for most of his life’s work. With his earliest major research study (1922), he began to identify the productive functions of wholesaling and to measure their costs. Later (1940), he expanded his attention conceptually to distin-guish between costs and results, using the term “effi ciency” to represent the ratio of marketing output (results) to input (costs). During the 1950s, Beckman focused on the output component and developed the concept and measures of “value added by marketing”, which he defi ned as the economic value of the functions performed in the marketing process (Beckman, Buz-zell, and Monieson 1956).

His precise defi nitions of the types and functions of wholesaling were original and remained substantially unchanged for several decades. Of all Beckman’s writing, this work also had the widest appeal. It spanned the academic textbook and periodic literatures, government and trade publications. However, Beckman had only considered these defi nitions and classifi cations as the basis for a more important task, determining the relative effi ciency of the diff erent parts of the distribution system.

His fi nal published article continued that theme of examining the effi -ciency in the distribution system, but this time in retailing rather than in wholesaling, and from a distinctly historical perspective (Beckman 2011). While there was a historical backdrop to some of Beckman’s writing, his only exclusively historical work was a paper titled “A Brief History of the Gasoline Service Station” published posthumously in 2011 in the Journal of Historical Research in Marketing. Beckman made history as a pioneer in marketing.




APPENDIX 7.1. SELECTED PUBLICATIONS BY THEODORE N. BECKMAN

Books

1924. Credits and Collections in Theory and Practice, 1st ed.; 1930, 2nd ed.; 1938, 3rd ed.; 1939, 4th ed.; 1949 (with R. Bartels), 5th ed.; 1955, 6th ed.; 1962 (single author), 7th ed.; 1969 (with R. S. Foster), 8th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill.

1925. Collection Correspondence and Agency Practice (with F. E. Held). New York: McGraw-Hill.

1926. Wholesaling. New York: Ronald Press.1927. Principles of Marketing (with H. H. Maynard and W. C. Weidler),

1st ed.; 1932, 2nd ed.; 1939, 3rd ed.; 1946 (with H. H. Maynard), 4th ed.; 1952, 5th ed.; 1957 (with H. H. Maynard and W. R. Davidson), 6th ed.; 1962 (with W. R. Davidson), 7th ed.; 1967, 8th ed. New York: Ronald Press.

1937. Wholesaling Principles and Practice (with N. H. Engle), 1st ed.; 1939, 2nd ed.; 1951, revised printing; 1959 (with N. H. Engle and R. D. Buzzell), 3rd ed. New York: Ronald Press.

1938. The Chain Store Problem (with H. C. Nolen). New York: McGraw-Hill.

1949. Cases in Credits and Collections (with S. F. Otteson). New York: McGraw-Hill.

Studies and Monographs

1931. Wholesale Distribution–Defi nitions and Classifi cations. Census of Distribution, 1930 (Distribution no. W-100). Washington, DC: US Government Printing Offi ce.

1933. Wholesale Distribution (volumes I and II). Fifteenth Census of the United States. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Offi ce.

1935. Wholesale Distribution (volumes I–VII). Census of American Business. Washington, DC: Bureau of the Census, US Department of Commerce.

1956. Value Added by Distribution (with D. D. Monieson and R. D. Buzzell). Washington, DC: US Chamber of Commerce.

1964. Statement of the Philosophy of Marketing of the Marketing Fac-ulty, The Ohio State University. Columbus, OH: Bureau of Busi-ness Research.

Articles

1923. Sources and Treatment of Surplus. Journal of Accounting 35 (5): 343–50.




1928a. A Barrage of Facts that will Beat Down the Barriers of Ignorance. Industrial Distributor and Salesman (November): 229.

1928b. How Electrical Wholesalers Serve their Trade. The Jobber’s Sales-man 9 (10): 13–14 & 94–98.

1928c. What is the Way Out? Automotive Wholesaling 5 (2): 14–15 & 25–27.

1928d. The Economic Functions of Electrical Wholesaling. The Jobber’s Salesman 9 (9): 5–6 & 114–120.

1929a. The Place of the Distributor in Industrial Marketing. Industrial Distributor and Salesman (February): 14–15.

1929b. The Industrial Distributor–A True Purchasing Agent. Industrial Distributor and Salesman (March): 10–11.

1929c. Quality Buying and Hand-to-Mouth Selling. Industrial Distribu-tor and Salesman (April): 10–11.

1929d. An Opportunity for the Industrial Distributor. Industrial Distribu-tor and Salesman (May): 14–15.

1929e. Distributors Render Financial Assistance and Advice to Customers. Mill Supplies (June): 58–59.

1929f. The Distributor Sells–But He Furnishes Essential Services, Too. Mill Supplies (July): 52–53.

1929g. The Distributor Cultivates His Territory Intensively. Mill Supplies (September): 56–57.

1929h. The Distributor Simplifi es Credit and Accounting Problems. Mill Supplies (October): 50–51.

1929i. The Distributor Assumes Risks for the Manufacturer. Mill Sup-plies (November): 44–45.

1929j. The Future of the Mill Supply Distributor. Mill Supplies (Decem-ber): 44–45.

1930a What the Census of Distribution Means to Distributors. Mill Sup-plies (February): 24–25.

1930b. Establishing the Economic Advantages of Wholesale Distribution. Hardware Trade Journal (July): 35, 38–39 & 42.

1931a. Conditions in the Plumbing and Heating Industry. Domestic Engi-neering (August): 95–106.

1931b. Why We Have Hardware Jobbers. Hardware Trade Journal (Octo-ber): 16–18 & 36.

1940. Criteria of Marketing Effi ciency. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences (May): 133–40.

1942. Signifi cant Current Trends in Wholesaling. Journal of Marketing (April): 9–11.

1944a. Large versus Small Business after the War. American Economic Review 34 (1): 94–106.

1944b. Price Control in the Postwar Period. Personal Financiers 17 (6): 15–19.

1945. Gearing Distribution to Postwar Conditions. Conference Board Business Record 2 (5): 144–45.




1949. A Critical Appraisal of Current Wholesaling. Journal of Marketing 14 (2): 307–16.

1954. The Value Added Concept as Applied to Marketing and its Impli-cations. In Frontiers in Marketing Thought, ed. S. H. Rewoldt. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

1957. The Value Added Concept as a Measure of Output. Advanced Management 22 (4): 6–9.

1958. The Evolution of Marketing and Marketing Concepts. In Proceed-ings of the Conference of Marketing Teachers from Far West-ern States, ed. D. J. Duncan, 1–11. Berkeley, CA: University of California.

1958. Productivity: Facts and Fiction (with R. D. Buzzell). Business Hori-zons (Winter): 24–38; reprinted in Advanced Management 33 (11): 19–25.

1959. A Pioneer in Marketing: Harold Maynard. Journal of Marketing 23 (April): 429–31.

1961. The Role of Wholesaling and Wholesalers in our Economy. Depart-ment Store Economist (January): 178–81.

1963. A Challenge for a Reappraisal of the Basic Nature and Scope of Marketing. In Emerging Concepts in Marketing, ed. W. S. Decker, 3–15. Chicago, IL: AMA.

1965. Marketing Productivity–Appraisal and Challenge. In Marketing Productivity: Papers of the Theodore N. Beckman Symposium on Marketing Productivity, ed. J. L. Heskett, 59–72. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University.

1969. Value Added: Economic Concept and Basis for Taxation. Retail Overview 2 (3).

2011. A Brief History of the Gasoline Service Station. Journal of Histori-cal Research in Marketing 3 (2): 156–172.



8 David D. Monieson (1927–2008)Philosopher and Pragmatist

David D. (Dan) Monieson was my teacher, mentor, and friend. Monieson retired from teaching in 1991 after more than thirty-fi ve years in the mar-keting academy. Following graduate studies at Ohio State University (OSU), he began his academic career at the University of Toronto in 1955, followed by three years as a member of the faculty at the Wharton School of Busi-ness, then settled down in 1961 at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada where he remained for the balance of his career. Monieson twice won the Queen’s Commerce Society’s Teaching Excellence Award and in 2009 was among the fi rst individuals inducted into the Queen’s School of Business Faculty Hall of Fame. He was fi rst and foremost an outstanding teacher. As a consultant, he worked with government and quasi-govern-mental organizations, with multinational companies in pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, toiletries, confectionaries, and with advertising agencies. Mon-ieson wrote and published selectively, but his scholarship is nonetheless important. He wrote the lead article, “What Constitutes Usable Knowledge in Macromarketing”, for the Journal of Macromarketing (JMM) when it began publication in 1981 and won JMM’s 1989 Charles C. Slater Memorial Award for most outstanding article published in 1988–“Intellectualization in Macromarketing: A World Disenchanted”. His work has also been pub-lished in the Journal of Marketing, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, and, in true earlier twentieth-century tradition, some of his most interesting and important work was published in conference proceedings. He held the Nabisco Brands Chair in Marketing at Queen’s for over fi fteen years. Monieson was a pioneer in Canadian marketing.

PREPARATIONS FOR A CAREER IN MARKETING

Monieson was born on August 17, 1927, in Montreal, Canada. His grand-parents had emigrated from England in the late nineteenth century and founded the London Paper Box Company in Montreal. Monieson grew up during the Great Depression, but didn’t suff er. His father worked for the family business as sales manager and provided a comfortable life for his


David D. Monieson (1927–2008) 125


family. In high school, Monieson sang in the choir, played ice hockey, and led a full life. There would eventually be some pressure to join the family business, but his mother didn’t want him to take that path. She wanted him to “do something with his life” (Monieson 1998).

After high school, Monieson enrolled at the University of Vermont (UVM) where he earned his Bachelor of Science degree in economics with a minor in statistics. A career in teaching had never occurred to him, but aptitude tests taken while he was an undergraduate student suggested that he was suited for business, social work, or teaching. One of Monieson’s favorite instructors at UVM was a professor of economics who had earlier taught at Miami University of Ohio where he recommended Monieson go for graduate studies. However after graduation from UVM in the spring of 1949, there was subtle pressure from his uncle, who managed the London

Figure 8.1 David D. Monieson.Photo Courtesy Lois Monieson.




Paper Box Company, to join the family business. His uncle insisted that he learn the business from the ground up, so Monieson began working in the factory punching cardboard for a salary of $25 per week. When it became clear to him that he would have to wait a long time for an offi ce job, he decided to take his UVM professor’s advice and enrolled in the MBA pro-gram at Miami University of Ohio in the Fall of 1949.

He should have completed the MBA in one year but the research for his thesis on the coal industry dragged on through the summer and autumn of 1950 so, during the Fall semester of 1950, he taught a course in Introduction to Business while still completing his MBA. Of that initial teaching experi-ence, Monieson recalled that he quickly learned to be prepared but also spon-taneous; he learned that he had to be himself in the classroom. However, at that point in time he was not considering a career in teaching.

When he graduated from the MBA program in late autumn of 1950, Monieson interviewed with the Standard Register Company and was off ered a job in Dayton, Ohio. He wanted a job in sales because of the earnings potential, but failed the social independence test required to be a sales representative. Instead, he was off ered and accepted a staff position in the marketing department. A few months later, however, an illness in the family pulled him home to Montreal and, reluctantly, he resigned from Standard Register.

Back in Montreal, Monieson began looking for work. In addition to sales, he was interested in market research and applied for positions at sev-eral advertising agencies and research houses including Young & Rubicam where he met Hal Poole, who was the market research director there and who would later become Monieson’s colleague at Queen’s University. Mon-ieson eventually accepted a position as assistant manager of the Methods Research Section of Canadian Industries Limited (CIL). Methods Research involved the management of paperwork systems and inventory control; but Monieson was still interested in market research. CIL promised him a job as market research manager but fi rst wanted him to go back to school for more graduate coursework in statistics and research methods. So, late in the summer of 1952, Monieson contacted Professor Harold Maynard at Ohio State University (OSU) and was soon enrolled in the PhD program at OSU. He had no intention of completing the PhD, but simply wanted to take some graduate courses as preparation for a market research position at CIL in Montreal. This was a major crossroad.

INTELLECTUALIZATION AT OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY

At OSU from 1952 through 1954, Monieson’s most memorable teachers included Harold Maynard, William Davidson, Ralph Currier Davis, and Theodore N. Beckman, who supervised Monieson’s doctoral dissertation. His classmates included Robert Buzzell (who became a professor at the




Harvard Business School) and William Lazer (who became a professor at Michigan State University and later President of the American Marketing Association). And there was another student at OSU who had a profound and lasting infl uence on Monieson. In November of 1952, in the music room of the student union, he met Lois Glenn with whom he fell in love and later married. Lois was more than a romantic interest for Dan. She was a graduate student in sociology and later encouraged his interest in the sociology of knowledge.

Harold Maynard had a strong interest in the history of the marketing discipline and taught a seminar on the history of marketing thought. For the most part, the reading materials for that course were taken from Rob-ert Bartels’s dissertation work on “Marketing Literature–Development and Appraisal” which was supervised by Maynard and Beckman, com-pleted in 1941, and eventually published in 1962 as The Development of Marketing Thought. Monieson recalled that Maynard’s offi ce walls were covered with pictures of pioneer marketing scholars. Interestingly, the historical component in Monieson’s own dissertation was quite diff erent from Bartels’s work as it traced portrayals of the role of marketing middle-men as producers of value from ancient Greek scholars through various schools of economics including the Mercantilists, Physiocrats, Classicists, Austrian School, Neoclassicists, and twentieth-century dissenters–none of which had been discussed in Bartels’s work. Monieson never published any of the historical material included in his dissertation,1 but those ideas eventually became part of the marketing history literature during the 1980s when Donald Dixon and Eric Shaw began to write about them. It did, however, kindle Monieson’s interest in understanding the roots of the marketing discipline and how it evolved over time. That interest in the history of marketing thought became an important part of his later contributions to the marketing literature (see Jones and Monieson 1987, 1988b, 1990a, 1990b, 1992).

His most infl uential teacher at OSU was Theodore N. Beckman, who he described as “a master who commanded attention” (Monieson 1992). One of the fi rst courses he took in the OSU doctoral program during the fall of 1952 was Beckman’s. Even in his graduate courses, Beckman locked the door when the seminar was to begin; no amount of knocking would get a student admitted once the class was in session. Students were “in mortal fear” of Beckman’s questions and Monieson admitted that Beck-man “scared the hell” out of him (1998). Nevertheless, he soon became Beckman’s graduate assistant for the undergraduate course in Credits and Collections. Later, Beckman supervised Monieson’s (1957) dissertation on “Value Added as a Measure of Economic Contribution by Marketing Insti-tutions”. At OSU, and especially as Beckman’s student, Monieson gained “an incredible education in marketing” (Monieson 1998) and developed a strong belief about the integration of theory with practice–one that laid the foundation for his subsequent consulting work.




During the 1950s, Beckman developed the concept of “value added by marketing” and focused his attention on developing measures of that value. He wanted two doctoral students to work on the topic. With Monieson’s undergraduate training in economics and statistics, he was a likely candi-date. Monieson had been interested in the start-up of the Canadian Broad-casting Corporation as a topic, but “Beckman ignored that” and told him that he should work on value added (Monieson 1998). While Beckman provided the conceptual foundation for him, it was up to the student to fi g-ure out precisely what he was going to do with it. Monieson’s dissertation further developed the concept of value added by marketing and devised methods of measuring the value added by marketing institutions. These measures were tested using data from the 1948 US Census. Except for the historical content, Monieson’s dissertation was a rigorous empirical study heavily laden with economic statistics. It was an exercise in what he later termed “intellectualization”.

Monieson’s notion of “intellectualization” (1988a, 1989) refers to a process of continuous rationalization of society’s activities, includ-ing marketing, to create an ordered and predictable world. It is a linear kind of thinking with teleologic and reductionist overtones, where every phenomenon can be rationalized and calculated, where values and value judgments have no place, resulting in what Monieson called disenchant-ment. Intellectualization seemed necessary for academic respectability, but it stood in the way of understanding the beauty, magic, and poetics of marketing. He soon felt that disenchantment and struggled for most of his career to fi nd a balance between scientifi c knowledge and what he termed “usable knowledge”.

INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT AT WHARTON

Through connections between Maynard and Queen’s University econo-mist William MacIntosh, Monieson was off ered a one-year sabbatical replacement position at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. During the 1954/55 academic year at Queen’s, Monieson was still completing his doctoral dissertation, but presented some of his fi ndings (Monieson 1955) at the December 1954 American Marketing Association conference in Detroit. In the audience for that session was Wharton Professor Reavis Cox, who was suffi ciently impressed to tell Monieson to contact him when the dissertation was fi nished.

In 1956, he sent a copy of the completed work to Cox who invited him to come to Wharton. Monieson joined the faculty of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania as an Associate Professor in the autumn of 1958. His experience at OSU may have provided the launch pad for Monieson’s academic career, but Wharton fueled his intellectual curiosity. The academic culture of Wharton was very diff erent from that of OSU.




The latter was traditional in its emphasis on economics and the department was heavily infl uenced by Beckman’s thinking. Wharton was more eclectic and multidisciplinary, its faculty including Reavis Cox and Wroe Alder-son both of whom were interested in Monieson’s work measuring value added and shared Monieson’s interest in history. The faculty also included Ralph Breyer, whose ideas about wholeness and order in marketing and the organic nature of social groups was ultimately an important theme in Monieson’s later work.

Between 1944 and 1959, Alderson worked primarily as a marketing con-sultant (Wooliscroft 2006). He joined the faculty at Wharton full time in autumn of 1959, a year after Monieson arrived, so they overlapped for only two years. Even so, it was an important two years for Monieson’s intellec-tual development. Before arriving at Wharton, Monieson had “absorbed” Alderson’s (1957) book, Marketing Behavior and Executive Action, and found its sociological approach very appealing. He adopted it for his MBA course in marketing management when he joined Queen’s University full time in 1961 and later credited Alderson’s book, along with E. O. Wil-son’s (1975) Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, as the most infl uential in his thinking. At Wharton, he also became interested in epistemology as he began to question how one learned about marketing.

The students in Monieson’s 1958 Fall semester MBA class at Wharton included Louis Stern, Henry Assail, G. David Hughes, William Rude-lius, and Stanley Shapiro–all of whom went on to distinguished academic careers. Monieson was instrumental in guiding Shapiro’s dissertation and the two later became close friends and colleagues. Wharton was intellectu-ally stimulating for Monieson, but his ideas about epistemology in market-ing, about the biological and evolutionary dimensions of Alderson’s work, and about the fusion of other disciplines with marketing, which began to take form during this time, were not fully developed or published until many years later.

SETTLING DOWN AT QUEEN’S UNIVERSITY

For family reasons, in 1961 the Moniesons moved to Kingston, Ontario and he joined the Queen’s School of Business as a faculty member. This would be home for the rest of his career. His graduate studies at OSU gave him a solid education in marketing, an appreciation for the history of the discipline, and a sense of the importance of consulting in ‘feeding’ his teaching. The latter would also infl uence his thinking about epistemology in marketing. His three years at Wharton had been intellectually stimulat-ing and planted the seeds of some of Monieson’s later contributions to the marketing literature on usable knowledge and Complexity Theory. In the years leading to his appointment at Queen’s, instrumental connections had been made with scholars such as Theodore Beckman, Wroe Alderson, and




Stanley Shapiro, all of whom infl uenced Monieson’s later work. But for now, as he settled into his university career, he focused on his teaching. Teaching was job one, then, and throughout his career.

At Queen’s, Monieson taught the MBA course in Marketing Manage-ment using a combination of seminar discussions of assigned readings and some case discussions. The readings drew heavily from Alderson’s book, cited above, John Howard’s (1957) Marketing Management, and jour-nal articles from the Harvard Business Review and Journal of Market-ing (Hickey 1961). In his undergraduate courses, however, conventional textbooks such as Maynard and Beckman’s (1952) Principles of Marketing and later Kotler’s (1967) Marketing Management provided the grist for his teaching mill. As described by Trebuss (2010), Monieson’s sense of drama, forceful personality, and spontaneity in the classroom made him a legend at Queen’s. Several of his students during the 1960s went on to distinguished careers including Mel Goodes with Warner-Lambert, Tom Kinnear at the University of Michigan, and Paul Myles who for years directed Canada’s largest marketing / public opinion research fi rm, Goldfarb & Associates.

Monieson inspired incredible loyalty among his students. Early in his career at Queen’s, he was asked to teach an MBA course for engineers. It was the late 1960s, when gender stereotypes were being questioned and fashion was changing rapidly to refl ect these blurring lines. Monieson arrived on the fi rst day of class fashionably dressed in a grey suit and pink shirt only to be met with derision and laughter from his largely male, conservative audi-ence of students. He met the challenge head on, betting that all the men in the class would be wearing pink shirts by the end of the semester because their girlfriends were the infl uencers and/or decisionmakers when it came to making clothing purchases. Despite what could have been a rocky start, Monieson won over the class. As a mark of the great respect he had earned, the entire class showed up for the last session wearing pink shirts!

During the early 1960s, Monieson began to truly appreciate the impor-tance of consulting to his teaching. He had little business experience, so consulting provided a vital link to marketing practice. It provided him with examples to use in class and added depth to his teaching. His cli-ents included Canada Iron and Foundry, Frigidaire Canada, the Cana-dian Royal Commission on Food Price Spreads, the Institute of Canadian Advertisers, Canadian Advertising Agency Practitioners, Canadian Credit Men’s Association, Molson’s Breweries, Canadian General Electric, Shell Oil Company, J. Walter Thompson Advertising, and Nestle. In 1964, he began a thirty-year consulting relationship with Warner-Lambert Canada (WLC) initially working with WLC President, Donald McCaskill, who would become one of his closest friends. In 1964, McCaskill was introduc-ing the brand management system at WLC. Monieson developed and deliv-ered a course on brand management for WLC and worked extensively with their brand managers. In 1965, Monieson was instrumental in bringing Mel Goodes to WLC. Goodes had earned a Bachelor of Commerce degree




from Queen’s in 1957 and met Monieson at Queen’s that year (even though in 1957 Monieson was still a faculty member at the University of Toronto). Goodes joined WLC and worked there for thirty-four years, eventually becoming Chairman and Chief Executive Offi cer before retiring in 1999. Goodes and Monieson formed a close friendship and collaboration that resulted in Monieson consulting for Warner-Lambert well into the 1990s. For over thirty years, Monieson was instrumental in executive development at Warner-Lambert worldwide. He was successful as an executive educator because he was “pragmatic . . . a great communicator . . . and trustwor-thy”. He had a “magical way” of handling a group of executives, of getting them to open up and participate in a case discussion (Goodes 2007).

Ironically, during the 1960s, Monieson’s consulting experiences fed a growing disenchantment with his teaching as he became increasingly aware of the disparity between what was written in marketing textbooks and what was actually practiced in business. He had begun to see a tension between science and tacit, ordinary, personal knowledge. He took a sabbatical in 1968/69, travelled extensively, and began reading about the philosophy of science. He sought out and read critiques of marketing such as John Ken-neth Galbraith’s (1967) and Paul Baran’s (1973) works in economics. At the end of the sabbatical year, he resolved to change his approach to teaching and to write about the disparity between what was typically taught in busi-ness schools and what was actually practiced by business people.

IN SEARCH OF USABLE KNOWLEDGE

Monieson’s search for usable knowledge began in earnest during the 1970s, a decade he later described as a time of personal discovery. His consulting work had convinced him that marketing practitioners didn’t practice what most marketing teachers taught, that practitioner knowledge was very dif-ferent from the knowledge that marketing scholars developed and published. Each thinks and knows diff erently; each uses a diff erent epistemology. But for marketing knowledge to be meaningful, it must be usable for practitioners.

By 1971, Monieson had shifted his teaching entirely to the case method. His MBA course in marketing strategy that year was actually very similar to the course he taught at Wharton ten years earlier, except that there was even heavier use of cases. A textbook was recommended, but not required and, as he did at Wharton, he provided students with copious notes for background reading. However, all of the in-class time was now spent ana-lyzing and discussing marketing cases (Monieson 1971). By 1982, his MBA course was exclusively case-based; no textbook was even recommended and no notes were provided. There were learning points summarized at the end of every class, what Monieson called his “aphorisms” or “rules of thumb”. Even in his MBA course, he questioned how we know what we know and discussed with students the role of tacit knowledge. While




acknowledging popular models of marketing behavior such as the product life cycle and various grid models of decision-making, Monieson criticized them as rigid and deterministic, arguing that the very reason they were popular was because they brought “order to chaos”, a phrase he borrowed from Dissipative Theory.

During the early 1970s, Monieson became a student again, reading voraciously across a wide range of disciplines including the philosophy of science, epistemology, sociology, biology, history, physics, chemistry, and economics. Over the next twenty years, there were two common threads through his reading and thinking–epistemology and Complexity Theory. Monieson came to believe that any general theory of marketing must be based on Complexity Theory and any understanding of Complexity The-ory must embrace a broader approach to epistemology than the one that had dominated the marketing discipline since the early twentieth century.

Sojourns to the Management Development Institute at IMEDE in Lau-sanne, Switzerland in 1974/75 and to the Harvard Business School in 1978/79 led to his fi rst serious writing and publication in years. He had become interested in distributive justice, and while at IMEDE wrote and published two short articles about the right to consume (1975a, 1975b). Drawing from critical economists such as John Kenneth Galbraith and Paul Baran, Monieson called for a more eff ective working of the market economy. Marketers stimulate demand, he wrote, not only from affl uent consumers, but also from the poor who are unable to satisfy their wants in our market economy. Marketers manipulate the expectations of all of us, affl uent as well as poor. By virtue of their actions, Monieson continued, marketers have forced the poor into the market and they too have “the right to consume at levels that closely approximate [their] acquired consump-tion patterns” (1975a, 40). It was sobering advice coming from a market-ing professor in a business school in the mid-1970s. That early writing by Monieson on distributive justice brought into focus for him the inescap-able need for values and value judgments in marketing. Distributive justice became Monieson’s preferred example of why science could never lead to a complete or satisfactory knowledge of marketing. There was an ethical, moral core to his thinking and teaching. He argued that if marketing had ‘prowess and control’ then it also had responsibility. In re-reading my own notes taken in Monieson’s 1991 doctoral seminar, I was struck by his fore-shadowing of criticisms of the marketing discipline that “ordained” certain values like materialism. Monieson was an early critic who noted that while there has been considerable study of how society aff ects marketing, there had been far less work on how marketing has aff ected society.2

As a visiting scholar at Harvard in 1978/79, he made good use of the resources of the Baker Library to investigate the origins of the market-ing discipline which he traced to the German Historical School of Eco-nomics, although those ideas were not published until much later (Jones and Monieson 1990b). Monieson’s purpose in that historical study was to




demonstrate that, in its beginning, the marketing discipline had developed a need for academic respectability and had adopted a scientifi c ideal as the means of achieving academic legitimacy. The technical rationality and empirical investigations to inductively develop law-like generalizations that characterized the study of marketing by German-trained American econo-mists beginning in the late nineteenth century laid the foundation for the logical positivism that dominated marketing scholarship throughout the twentieth century.

Shortly after returning to Queen’s from Harvard, Monieson was invited to write a paper about Alderson’s contributions to marketing theory for the 1980 American Marketing Association Winter Educators’ Conference. He was fascinated with the sociology of knowledge and loved to trace intel-lectual “family trees” and the lines of infl uence among scholars. In “Bio-logical and Evolutionary Dimensions of Aldersonian Thought: What He Borrowed Then and What He Might Have Borrowed Now”, Monieson3 (1980) focused on Alderson’s functionalism and demonstrated convinc-ingly how Alderson built upon the work of the sociologist, Talcott Parsons. Alderson died in 1965 just before his seminal work on marketing theory was published. Parsons’s subsequent writings integrated evolutionary biol-ogy with his ideas about social systems and, Monieson speculated, would surely have infl uenced Alderson’s thinking. Those remarks were nonethe-less just a segue for Monieson to speculate about the potential infl uence of E. O. Wilson’s sociobiology on Alderson. Had Alderson lived another fi fteen years, surely ideas such as ecological competition, population biol-ogy, adaptive demography, behavior scaling, and social drift, would have formed part of Alderson’s theory of marketing. Monieson also believed that any theory of marketing must move beyond the old social sciences and systems theory to incorporate the ideas of Lindblom and Cohen (1979) about usable knowledge and practical judgment, as well as ideas about the new biology or sociobiology being proposed by E. O. Wilson. Wilson’s (1975) Sociobiology: The New Synthesis was a revelation to Monieson.

In an unpublished, undated manuscript (probably written ca. 1980), Monieson clearly and concisely summarized Wilson’s Sociobiology and his subsequent Pulitzer-Prize-winning (1978) On Human Nature. He focused on Wilson’s criticisms of other social sciences (sociology, psychology, cul-tural anthropology, and economics) for wholly inappropriate approaches to theory building. As the “new biology” was replacing outdated notions of ‘old’ biological ideas, the implications for marketing were clear to Monieson.

Some very simplistic, often erroneous, and sometimes dangerous notions are lifted from biology and taken up with similar eff ect on marketing studies in particular and business studies in general. . . . A major problem arises when we borrow and try to apply evolution-ary theory to marketing and business modeling; we have to develop a




proper understanding of the borrowed theory, we have to appreciate which variant of theory we are using, and we have to be logically faith-ful to that which we borrow. (ca. 1980, 16–18)

Interestingly, while he believed that there were important potential concep-tual applications of sociobiology to marketing, in that unpublished paper Monieson focused on the epistemological implications of Wilson’s work.

In 1980, Monieson was invited to write a paper about usable knowledge for the upcoming Macromarketing Conference. The following year, when the Journal of Macromarketing was founded, Monieson’s revised paper about “What Constitutes Usable Knowledge in Macromarketing?” (1981a) was the lead article in the new journal. It was the fi rst full, published state-ment of his beliefs about usable knowledge.

WHAT CONSTITUTES USABLE KNOWLEDGE IN MARKETING?

The essence of Monieson’s ideas about epistemology was captured in three important articles. In “What Constitutes Usable Knowledge in Macromar-keting?” (1981a), he described the dichotomy between practitioner knowl-edge and marketing science, traced the origins of marketing science to the very beginnings of the discipline, and argued for what he called usable knowledge which he described as a combination of practitioner knowledge and marketing science. Several years later, he refi ned his case for usable knowledge, largely through a detailed critique of marketing science in “Intellectualization in Macromarketing: A World Disenchanted” (1988a, 1989). Motivated by his concerns for distributive justice, Monieson was clearly identifi ed with the macromarketing school of thought (Tamilia 1992). However, it is important to note that while the titles of these articles and some of the examples discussed in them focused on macromarketing, Monieson’s ideas about usable knowledge were targeted at the marketing discipline in general.

Monieson agreed with Polanyi (1958) who wrote that practitioner knowl-edge includes a tacit dimension that permits them to know more than they can tell, a knowledge based on experience. To Monieson’s way of thinking, there is an art or craft to knowing in that way that is phenomenological. Monieson also saw a parallel between tacit knowledge and Lindblom and Cohen’s (1979) concept of ordinary knowledge, a personal type of knowing based on the common sense that is used in practical problem-solving. Mon-ieson was sometimes misunderstood to be dismissing marketing science altogether. However he was careful to note that “if we want to know and to understand the marketing practitioner then it appears that we will have to employ a mode of thinking that transcends but somehow does not exclude scientism” (1981a, 17; emphasis added). Anyone who thinks otherwise need only read what Monieson wrote about the cognitive sciences and marketing




in “Artifi cial Intelligence and the Human Mind: A Review Essay of Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid” (1983a). In fact, his concept of usable knowledge combined ordinary, refl ective, practitioner knowledge with scientifi c knowledge. He later refi ned this defi nition of usable knowl-edge to include three basic elements: information, interpretation, and criti-cism (1988a). Marketing science generates information, whereas marketing practice leads to interpretation. Criticism allows us to introduce values and value judgments to our knowledge of marketing. Using distributive justice as an example, Monieson argued that marketing problem-solving (practi-tioner knowledge) must include values and value judgments. And so, criti-cism must be part of usable knowledge.

Immediately following the publication of “What Constitutes Usable Knowledge in Macromarketing?”, Monieson was challenged by a colleague at Queen’s4 whose attack prompted a passionate defense that adds some clarity and depth to the arguments published in 1981.

This paper is not a cri de coeur; I am not at all unhappy, unduly pessi-mistic, or gloomy. . . . There was no baleful cry straining to be emitted from my throat. I am quite at home with [quantitative] research meth-odology, and use that which is usable in business consultation. It would not have been possible to have spent so many years with so many large, sophisticated business fi rms if I were doing otherwise. My own obser-vations and experiences in consulting anticipated the research results of the [AMA’s] Massy-Greyser report: much of what marketing academ-ics do is, to be most charitable, useless to businessmen. My reference is the Commission’s evidence–not mine. The Commission maintains enough faith to exact a belief that more than the given twenty-fi ve-year scope of their study is required to prove out to the businessman what we academics have been and are presently producing. I say that they [the Massy-Greyser Commission] should stick with their results and not profess to an article of faith that goes contrary to their derived results. Further, I say that so long as the academic pursues the path that he is on, his work will be usable to the practitioner only by chance. This is because we have made the fi eld a narrowly focused discipline. We may use the businessman and his fi rm as the object for our inves-tigation, but we do so really for our own selfi sh purposes. Given our present course, we may someday exalt our discipline to a level higher than it presently is; but the results of our work will continue to be use-less to the practitioner–probably even more so. Given the politics and the sociology of knowledge of our fi eld, I do not see much change in our present direction. I, for one, think as Alfred Marshall, that we are the “handmaidens to businessmen”. If many more of my colleagues feel as I do, then perhaps the direction could be changed. But this will require a new way of thinking in and about our fi eld. I suspect that it would have to be a “science plus” mental construct. I went out of my




way to reference very successful and famous scientists on this matter, and I could have referenced even more, to demonstrate that there are others who think like me, and feel as I do. I do not want to destroy our science; I want to improve it, and bring into it in a systematic manner, the poetics, the ‘art’ of the fi eld. (Monieson, ca. 1981)

Monieson had a vision of marketing academics working together with mar-keting practitioners to combine practitioner knowledge with scientifi cally-derived knowledge. He hoped that this “science plus” model might produce knowledge that was usable to practitioners and if the knowledge marketing academics produce isn’t usable to marketing practitioners, then what is the point of it?

By 1988, Monieson had refi ned his concept of usable knowledge to include values, writing that “human values have to be incorporated so that the science of macromarketing is conducted by humans in the service of humans” (1988a, 4). His “Intellectualization in Macromarketing: A World Disenchanted” was fi rst presented at the 1988 AMA Winter Educators’ Conference, where it was described by the editor as “one of the more excit-ing presentations” of the conference (Shapiro 1988, 523). Dholakia (1988) hailed the paper as “one which will achieve landmark status” and hoped that it would “shake up and loosen . . . the moridbund knowledge struc-tures of micromarketing” (1988, 11). Monieson’s paper was subsequently published in the Journal of Macromarketing, where it provoked a response from Shelby Hunt (1989) which led to a rejoinder by Monieson (1989) and a later commentary by Levin (1991).

The exchange between Hunt and Monieson was but one of many chap-ters in a debate that began in the early 1980s about the philosophical foun-dations of the marketing discipline and continued into the twenty-fi rst century. It was a debate in which Hunt must have sometimes felt he was the only marketing scholar arguing in favor of empiricism (Hunt 2001). While Hunt found much in Monieson’s intellectualization thesis with which to disagree, he also credited Monieson for advancing the philosophical debate. To begin with, Hunt claimed that Monieson’s argument was ahistorical and that there was no “hard evidence” for Monieson’s “attack” on the motiva-tion of marketing science claimed by the latter to be a quest for academic respectability. Some of that “hard evidence” was published the following year by Jones and Monieson (1990b) in a rigorous examination of the late nineteenth-century philosophical origins of marketing science. Hunt also pointed to the irony and logical fl aw in Monieson’s universal rejection of law-like generalizations in marketing. Monieson wrote in a dramatic style that sometimes may have overstated his true beliefs. However he always left room for some level of generalization in his “science plus” model that included “information”. In that connection, I am quite certain that Mon-ieson would have accepted Hunt’s version of law-like generalizations he described as “tendency” relations (1989, 6). Did Monieson “abuse” the




term positivism by oversimplifying its research design as Hunt suggested? Perhaps. But that seems to be a common misunderstanding (Hunt 2001) and it may partially explain their ontological disagreement.

However the issue argued most strongly by Hunt was Monieson’s claim of reifi cation by marketing science. In his original article, Monieson used the term “reifi cation” only a few times and off ered only the following pass-ing defi nition: to give a human face to reality (1988a, 5). Hunt’s rebuttal (1989) argued that reifi cation meant “to treat as real”, to treat unobservable concepts such as love as having a real existence, and argued that positivism does not reify unobservable concepts, rather that the philosophy of realism does. In his rejoinder (1989), Monieson disagreed with Hunt’s defi nition of reifi cation arguing that it meant not “to treat as real” but rather to mimic or present a distorted image of the real. Pursuing Hunt’s example of love, Mon-ieson agreed with Hunt that love is real but that it is part of our subjective world with all of its complexities, mysteries, wonders, fears, and hopes; it has ontological meaning that cannot be reduced and calculated in the objective world that marketing science presents to us. That aspect of the Monieson-Hunt debate was later pursued by Zinkhan and Hirschheim (1992) who agreed with Monieson’s interpretation of reifi cation and its methodological implications, a point they suggest was missed by Hunt. That is, “researchers reify those abstractions so they can research them by using orthodox (tradi-tional) [Monieson would add ‘scientifi c’] methods (e.g., hypothetic-deductive method). In so doing, they cause the inquiry to become contrived, artifi cial, and illusory” (Zinkhan and Hirschheim 1992, 82).

In a bizzare postscript to the Monieson-Hunt debate, Levin (1991) read into Monieson’s use of the terms “dialectical” and “critique” a neo-Marx-ist concern with commoditization that led Hunt to conclude that Monieson “was arguing from a Marxist view . . . and I [Hunt] from a philosophy of science perspective” (1992, 92). As a macromarketer, Monieson certainly believed that our marketing system could and should work more fairly, but he was no Marxist. As Tadajewski (2010) explained, Monieson was a pluralist thinker who happened to cite some neo-Marxist ideas from time to time; he was a “humanist in the Frommian vein”.

Monieson would surely have agreed with Levin’s (1991) conclusion that, from a philosophy of science perspective, reifi cation means “to postulate as an entity fallaciously”, that it is “thus a mistake by defi nition just as miscal-culation is” (quoted in Hunt 1992, 91). Hunt concluded that “if reifi cation is marketing’s problem, positivism is not the cause” (1992, 91). There may in fact have been much common ontological ground for Hunt and Monieson; they diff ered in opinion as to the appropriate methodology for studying real-ity. More positively (no pun intended), Hunt also credited Monieson with (1) advancing the debate by pointing out that the normative requirements of managerial relevance inhibit the usefulness of positive science, (2) arguing for the development of authentic knowledge about marketing, and (3) emphasiz-ing the importance of ethics, social responsibility, and distributive justice.




Years later, Hunt (2001) made an observation about the philosophy debates in marketing that seems relevant to his exchange with Monieson. He wrote that as a doctoral student he had noticed that classmates often seemed to talk past one another and that discussions, especially about philosophical issues, were often unproductive because substantive disagreements were con-fused with semantic misunderstandings. In retrospect, that seems true of his debate with Monieson, indeed, with others since. He also argued that while critical discussion was essential to the development of knowledge, civility in critical discussion was a virtue. In the philosophy debate between Monieson and Hunt, both sides were guilty of lapses in civility using language such as “unintelligible”, “tone of umbrage”, “unreasoned”, and “prisoners” (Hunt 1989); and “diatribe”, “crisis literature gang”, “chortles”, “outrageous”, “nonsense”, and “concoctions hurled at me” (Monieson 1989).

Whatever the misunderstandings, “Intellectualization in Macromarket-ing: A World Disenchanted” was a provocative contribution to the debate about the philosophy of marketing science and won for Monieson the Charles C. Slater Memorial Award for best article published in 1988 in the Journal of Macromarketing. Interestingly enough, Hunt won that same award in 1989 for his response. And Monieson never again wrote about the philosophy of marketing science, although he co-authored work about its history (Jones and Monieson 1990a, 1990b).

HISTORY OF CONTEMPORARY MARKETING AND DEVELOPMENT OF MARKETING THOUGHT

That was the original title used by Monieson in his 1983 proposal for a doctoral seminar in Marketing at Queen’s (Monieson 1983b). Monieson fi rst taught the course in the Fall semester of 1983 and it was the last course he taught before retiring in 1991. That seminar tied together much of his thinking about the history of the epistemology of the fi eld and the aca-demic and practical consequences thereof5. However, from the topic out-line (course topics in italics below) alone one can readily see Monieson’s overall thesis.

Marketing was a handmaiden to technology (Chandler 1977; Boorstin 1974). That is, the technology of an era dictates the framing of problems and the problem solving techniques. Contemporary marketing technique followed important technological developments of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. At the same time, contemporary marketing technique preceded the origins of any science of marketing. The intellec-tualization of marketing practice thus began in the late nineteenth century (Monieson 1988a; Jones and Monieson 1990b) and continues today. One of the consequences of that intellectualization was a defi nition of market-ing that promised the creation and delivery of a standard of living. It was a promise and responsibility unfulfi lled and that performance has not




gone uncriticized, although the reaction is found in a literature read by few students of marketing (e.g., Baran 1973; Galbraith 1967). Emerging ideas from sociobiology about human nature (Wilson 1975) and from the study of the mind (Hofstadter 1979; Monieson 1983a) required a complete rethinking of our notions about the human factor in marketing, about mar-kets and marketing. Monieson believed that such ideas also required new thinking about teaching. He noted that the teaching of marketing lagged behind practice. Much of what appeared in marketing textbooks and in the classroom was based on a Newtonian world view which is linear and involves the breaking down of phenomenon into parts so that it is teach-able. Quantum physics, on the other hand, requires a process of synthesis which is largely unteachable, although it is knowable. Recent studies of the human mind acknowledge that there are approaches to knowing that go beyond analytical thought, including personal knowledge (Polanyi 1958), tacit knowledge, and refl ective knowledge (Schon 1983)–all of which are essential parts of usable knowledge (Lindblom and Cohen 1979; Monieson 1981a). All of this leads to, and indeed is part of, Complexity Theory–an approach toward a unity of the sciences that examines how relationships among elements of a system create collective behavior and impact the sys-tem’s interactions with its environment. Marketing can no longer be under-stood in terms of the quantum world, but must be understood from the post-quantum world of the Complexity sciences. Marketing in a quantum world must give way to a theory of marketing based on Complexity Theory (Gleick 1987; Monieson 1981b; Warsh 1984).

Well into retirement, Monieson continued to read about Complexity and to think about its application to marketing. To this day, only a handful of marketing scholars have attempted to apply Complexity Theory to market-ing (e.g., Hibbert and Wilkinson 1994; Wollin and Perry 2004). For years, Monieson planned to write a book about marketing and Complexity but, unfortunately, never did so. During my 1998 interview with him, he admit-ted that it was unfi nished business.

***

David D. Monieson was once described as a philosopher and pragmatist (Inquiry Magazine 1976). Despite a family background in business, he had little personal experience in business when he began his academic career. Consulting provided an essential link between practice and teaching. Theo-dore Beckman and, later, Wroe Alderson were role models in that regard. Monieson’s pragmatism grew out of his consulting work and was trans-ferred into the classroom. It also signifi cantly infl uenced his writing about the philosophy of marketing thought. As a marketing philosopher, he was primarily interested in epistemology and, to a lesser extent, in history. He spent his life and career in the pursuit of what he called usable knowledge. His published work on that topic is undoubtedly his most important.




If not for a chance meeting with Harold Maynard in 1950, Monieson might have never attended Ohio State’s doctoral program or developed an interest in the history of the marketing discipline. Ironically, Monieson pursued that interest, not for its own sake, but in order to document the process of intellectualization in marketing. Ultimately, it may be his work on the history of marketing thought that has had the greatest infl uence on others. A small but continuous stream of Monieson’s students and col-leagues have pursued historical research (see for example, Beckman 2007; Bourassa and Cunningham 2005; Bussiere 1999; Cunningham and Jones 1995; Cunningham, Taylor, and Reeder 1993; Cunningham and Wetsch 1999; Harris 2007; Jones and Richardson 2007; Neilson 2001, 2003) and the best student paper presented at the biennial Conference on Historical Analysis and Research in Marketing (CHARM) is awarded the David D. Monieson Prize. Monieson’s own published work on the history of market-ing thought grew out of dissertation work he supervised (see in Appendix 8.1, Jones and Monieson 1987, 1988b, 1990a, 1990b, 1992).

Wroe Alderson’s work had a tremendous infl uence on Monieson’s think-ing. Like Alderson (Halbert 2006), Monieson was a voracious reader and had a tremendous breadth of knowledge. Perhaps in part as a result of that, both Alderson and Monieson were diffi cult to read and that may con-tribute to why both are underappreciated. Both held strong beliefs against reductionism and followed a multidisciplinary approach to the study of marketing. In sociobiology and Complexity Theory, Monieson believed he had found the basis to further develop Alderson’s sociological approach to marketing theory. Except for some tentative ideas about sociobiology (Monieson and Shapiro 1980; Monieson, ca. 1980), his thoughts in that connection were never written down. Monieson admitted that he found writing “torturous”. He never felt any great compulsion to write and would have published less if not pushed to do so by his friend and colleague, Stan-ley Shapiro. He wrote in pencil, with an eraser, started with an expression, and his fi rst draft was usually his fi nal one.

In spite of the fact that he published less than many of his colleagues, he left a huge legacy at Queen’s. His devotion to the School was manifest in later years when he worked tirelessly to raise funds for a new School of Busi-ness building. Fitting for a scholar of usable knowledge, a research center at Queen’s bears his name and its purpose is to better understand knowl-edge-based enterprises. The Centre’s mission was chosen because Monieson wanted a Centre that would benefi t all faculty and students, no matter what their functional discipline. He believed the need to understand how knowl-edge was created and applied was universal to all business disciplines.

Monieson was a rebel and innovator. Working outside the mainstream of marketing science, indeed swimming against it for much of his career, his ideas have not received the understanding or appreciation they per-haps deserve. However, as Fisk (1988) noted in his commentary on Mon-ieson’s intellectualization thesis, there are interpretive studies of subjective




phenomena and studies that explicitly incorporate researchers’ values being published in the mainstream marketing journals. Perhaps, as Fisk suggested, the revolution in marketing thought and thinking called for by Monieson is well under way.

APPENDIX 8.1. SELECTED PUBLICATIONS BY DAVID D. MONIESON

1955. On Measuring Value Added by Marketing. In Frontiers in Market-ing Thought: Proceedings of the 1954 AMA Convention, ed. S. H. Rewoldt, 111–36. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

1956. Value Added by Distribution (with T. N. Beckman and R. D. Buz-zell). Washington, DC: US Chamber of Commerce.

1958a. The Changing Pattern in Distribution. Paper presented at the National Convention of The Canadian Retail Hardware Associa-tion, Toronto, ON.

1958b. Editor. Credits and Collections in Canada. Toronto, ON: Ryerson Press.

1959. Contributing author. Report of the Royal Commission on Price Spreads of Food Products, Royal Commission on Price Spreads of Food Products, Ottawa, ON.

1960. Commentary on ‘Courses in Retailing should not be Continued in the Curriculums of Schools of Business’. In Marketing Concepts in Changing Times, ed. R. M. Hill, 112–14. Chicago: AMA.

1975a. The Right to Consume. Size Up (IMEDE Journal) 41 (May): 39–43.

1975b. Marketing in a Post-industrial Society. Size Up 42 (October): 2–7.1978a. Cool Ray Sunglasses. Case in Strategic Marketing Problems: Cases

and Comments, ed. R. Kerin and R. A. Peterson. Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon.

1978b. Other cases published in: Canadian Marketing Cases and Con-cepts, ed. K. G. Hardy, M. R. Pearce, T. C. Kinnear, and A. B. Ryans. Toronto, ON: Allyn & Bacon.

1980. Biological and Evolutionary Dimensions of Aldersonian Thought: What He Borrowed Then and What He Might Have Borrowed Now (with S. Shapiro). In Theoretical Developments in Market-ing, ed. C. W. Lamb and P. M. Dunne, 7–12. Chicago: AMA.

1981a. What Constitutes Usable Knowledge in Macromarketing? Journal of Macromarketing 1 (1): 14–22.

1981b. Marketing and the Theory of Dissipative Structures. In The Chang-ing Marketing Environment–New Theories and Applications: AMA Educators’ Proceedings, ed. K. Bernhardt, 441–44. Chicago: AMA.

1983. Artifi cial Intelligence and the Human Mind: A Review Essay of Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. Journal of Macro-marketing 3 (2): 61–65.




1987. Origins of the Institutional Approach in Marketing (with D. G. B. Jones). In Marketing in Three Eras: Proceedings of the 3rd Mar-keting History Conference, ed. S. C. Hollander and T. Nevett, 149–68. Lansing, MI: Michigan State University.

1988a. Intellectualization in Macromarketing: A World Disenchanted. Journal of Macromarketing 8 (2): 4–10. Awarded the Charles C. Slater Memorial Award for Best Article in the Journal of Macromarketing.

1988b. The Origin and Early Development of the Case Method in Market-ing Pedagogy (with D. G. B. Jones). In Developments in Market-ing Science, ed. K. D. Bahn, 156–61. Blacksburg, VA: Academy of Marketing Science.

1989. Intellectualization in Macromarketing Revisited: A Reply to Hunt. Journal of Macromarketing 9 (2): 11–16.

1990a. Historical Research in Marketing: Retrospect and Prospect (with D. G. B. Jones). Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science 18 (Fall): 269–78. Reprinted in Marketing, Vol. 1, 1993, ed. S. C. Hol-lander and K. Rassuli, 63–72. London: Edward Elgar Publishing.

1990b. Early Development of the Philosophy of Marketing Thought (with D. G. B. Jones). Journal of Marketing 54 (January):102–13. Reprinted in Marketing, Vol. 1, 1993, ed. S. C. Hollander and K. Rassuli, 44–55. London: Edward Elgar Publishing.

1992. The Germination of Marketing Thought in USA (with D. G. B. Jones). Review of Economics and Business 33 (July): 1–29.

2010. A Historical Survey Concerning Marketing Middlemen as Produc-ers of Value. Journal of Historical Research in Marketing 2 (2): 218–26.



9 William R. Davidson (1919–)Mr. Retailing

William R. (Bill) Davidson’s career in retailing management includes over a half-century of signifi cant achievements both in the academy and in indus-try. He was a member of the faculty at Ohio State University (OSU) for twenty-fi ve years (1947–1972), during three of which he served as Chair-man of the Marketing Department. He was elected President of the Ameri-can Marketing Association in 1963; and in 1964, he was elected to the “Hall of Fame in Distribution” at the Boston Conference for Distribution. In 1968, he co-founded Management Horizons which he then guided for more than twenty years as it became the largest retail consulting fi rm in the world. In 1970, he was named “Marketing Man of the Year” by the maga-zine, Hardlines Wholesaling. He is also listed in Who’s Who in America. A doctoral fellowship in his name was established at OSU in 1993; and since 1995, the Journal of Retailing has annually presented the William R. Davidson Award to authors of the best article in that journal.

Chronologically, Davidson’s career can be divided into two phases: the fi rst as a teacher-consultant in the academic world, the second as a consul-tant-teacher in industry. Throughout that time, Davidson contributed to the marketing literature, writing and publishing over forty articles, three mono-graphs, and three books including best-sellers on marketing and retailing. A selection of his major publications is included in Appendix 9.1. Among his most signifi cant contributions to marketing thought is his book titled Retailing Management, the fi rst edition of which was written while he was a faculty member at OSU (1953), the sixth and fi nal edition published some twenty-fi ve years later (1988) near the end of his tenure as Chairman of Management Horizons. In fact, that book evolved over time in a synergistic relationship with his consulting. The latter achievement refl ected Davidson’s unique approach to marketing education. Whether working in the academy or in industry, Davidson always saw himself as both a learner and a teacher.

THE FIVE AND DIME–BEGINNINGS OF A CAREER IN RETAILING

Bill Davidson’s grandfather was a wheat farmer whose four sons, including Bill’s dad, also became farmers. That chain was broken, however, shortly




after Bill was born on July 19, 1919. His parents’ concern about ensuring a quality education for Bill and his three sisters led to the family’s move to Emporia, Kansas. There they operated a retail store known simply as “Davidson’s”. It was a full service grocery store and provided Bill with what he described as a “signifi cant exposure to retailing” at an early age (Davidson 1998). Working in the family store, he learned lessons about managing supply sources, credit management, customer service, pricing, and merchandise display. During high school, he added to that experience

Figure 9.1 William R. Davidson.Photo Courtesy William R. Davidson.


William R. Davidson (1919–) 145


with a part-time job at the Emporia Market, a grocery store that was not in competition with his own family’s business.

Davidson earned his way through a BA degree at the College of Empo-ria with part-time jobs at the Rainbow Bakery and as a stock person at F. W. Woolworth. At the bakery, he packaged bread and loaded delivery trucks. That taught him about the diffi culties of matching supply with demand. He also found the scheduling and logistics of bread production and distribution fascinating. On weekends, he also occasionally rode in the delivery trucks with the bread salesmen to see what their jobs entailed. Graduating in 1940, he was off ered a position in Woolworth’s Emporia store as Assistant Manager. In retrospect, it wasn’t so much that Davidson had chosen a career in retailing. Rather, jobs were diffi cult to fi nd in 1940 and he was thankful just to have one. Perhaps retailing chose him.

He was amazed at Woolworth’s ability to systematize thousands of stock keeping units across diff erent seasons from suppliers all over the world and recalled performance expectations by the company and a dis-cipline that are uncommon today (Davidson 1998). Later, that discipline became an often cited lesson for his Management Horizons clients. Ironi-cally, Woolworth later became one of those clients for Davidson’s success-ful consulting fi rm.

After nine months at the Emporia store, Woolworth transferred David-son to a much larger store in McPherson, Kansas. His store managers were mentors to him. Indeed, Woolworth had an offi cial position for entry-level management trainees known as “learners”. And even though Davidson offi -cially joined the company above that rank, he still considered himself a learner and his managers as teachers. After a year, however, the budding career in retailing was put on hold. On December 7, 1941, Davidson heard on the radio about Pearl Harbor and as he later refl ected, “that was the end of my Woolworth career” (Davidson 1998).

Davidson had actually enlisted while still in Emporia. He wanted to choose his branch of service rather than be drafted and had reasoned that becoming a US Navy carrier pilot was a reasonably high level way to join the war eff ort. It promised adventure, good training, and most importantly to Davidson–control, since ultimately he would be fl ying his own plane. He piloted F6Fs (Grumman fi ghters) and SBDs (Douglas dive bombers) off carriers during the war in the Pacifi c and was awarded a Presidential Citation, the Purple Heart, and the Distinguished Flying Cross. His war experience raised a lot of questions about life choices for Davidson. On refl ection he speculated that, had it not been for the war, he probably would have stayed at Woolworth and within three years would have had his own store (1998). Nevertheless, he did not return to “the fi ve and dime”. By the time the war was over, he had saved some money and under the GI Bill had earned four years of education benefi ts. The “learner” decided to return to school.




AN OFFICE AND SALARY LIKE MR. WHITESIDE’S

During the war, Davidson met and later married his Navy payroll disburse-ment offi cer, Anne Anderson. Upon returning to the United States, the newly-weds stayed temporarily with Davidson’s in-laws who suggested that he look into the MBA program at Washington University (St. Louis). Davidson’s fi rst choice was Harvard. However, while he had been accepted at Harvard, he would have had to wait a year-and-a-half for the backlog of war-interrupted students to clear. So, in 1946, he enrolled at Washington University.

The next year was a pivotal one for Davidson. As a graduate student at Washington University, he came under the mentorship of Professor Joseph Klamon, who taught marketing but who also did considerable consult-ing, including as an expert witness. This became a powerful career model for Davidson. Through Klamon, Davidson became involved with market research work for a St. Louis advertising fi rm where he met Henry White-side, an executive in charge of market research. With Whiteside as a role model, Davidson was drawn to a career in market research which was then a rapidly growing fi eld. For his MBA thesis, he chose to study newspa-per consumer market research programs. Both Klamon and Whiteside told Davidson that to get anywhere in this fi eld he should get his PhD and Kla-mon was particularly infl uential in Davidson’s eventual selection of Ohio State University’s doctoral program in marketing.

Klamon’s advice was typical of the graduate school selection process at that time. He suggested that Davidson choose a university where he might work under one of the “big guns” in marketing. In Klamon’s opinion, dur-ing the late 1940s, there were still relatively few such schools, one of which was OSU. Ohio State had two big guns–Harold Maynard and Theodore Beckman; and in the Fall of 1947, Davidson began his doctoral program under their supervision. Just fi ve years later, Davidson’s name would appear along with the big guns on the cover of the fi fth edition of their Principles of Marketing textbook.

The decision to do a PhD was intended as a step towards a career in market research. In 1947, Davidson was more interested in an offi ce and salary like Henry Whiteside’s than in the cubicle and stipend he earned as a teaching assistant. However the War had created a huge demand for college education and universities were anticipating the coming fl ood of business undergraduates. Davidson’s doctoral courses in marketing included over thirty students, half of whom (including Davidson) were already teaching. Without realizing it, he was soon immersed in an academic career. During his second year in the doctoral program, largely because of his experience at Woolworth, Davidson was asked by the Department Chairman, Harold Maynard, to teach a course in Retailing.

His MBA had directed Davidson away from retailing towards market research as a fi eld of interest. But that decision, in turn, led him to fur-ther graduate work, away from a career in industry towards an academic




career. Eventually, these seemingly diff erent roads would become paved over in a career that blended scholarship with practice, and retailing with market research.

BIG GUNS AND BILLY THE (JUNIOR COLLEAGUE) KID

Of course, Davidson’s major in the doctoral program was in Marketing; he also minored in Finance. Several of his professors were infl uential, includ-ing Edward Smart in Statistics, Charles Dice in Finance, Robert Patton in Economics, and Harold Maynard whose course on the history of market-ing thought had a signifi cant infl uence on Davidson. Maynard’s personal familiarity with many of the pioneer scholars in marketing was fascinating to Davidson. The teacher developed in his student an appreciation of his-tory which continued throughout the latter’s career, most recently leading to his writing of The History of Management Horizons (Davidson 1996).

The required reading for the course on the History of Economic Thought was Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, which Davidson feels even to this day is one of the most important books he has ever read.

It had both a substantive impact on me but also had a literary fl a-vor that is something else again. . . . There was a lot that I learned from that book. It was pleasurable reading . . . in a class by itself. The Wealth of Nations didn’t deal with marketing in the sense of a modern day textbook, but dealt with marketing in a sense of the mar-ket, how the market is served, particularly with the price mechanism. (Davidson 1998)

Along with Daniel Dafoe’s The Complete English Tradesman, it put mar-keting into a historical perspective and showed the young doctoral student how diff erently marketing was viewed during Adam Smith’s time as com-pared with the twentieth century.

The most signifi cant infl uence on Davidson early in his academic career, however, was wielded by Professor Theodore Beckman whose career and contributions to the marketing discipline in general, and to the OSU Mar-keting Department in particular, are described in Chapter 7 herein. May-nard may have been a “big gun”, but Beckman was, in Davidson’s words, a “titan”. Davidson described Beckman as a “formidable” and “ferocious” teacher who would lock the door to his classroom at the start of class. . . .”You didn’t want to be caught unprepared” for Beckman’s course (David-son 1992, 1998). In writing a term paper for Beckman’s course, Davidson prepared so thoroughly that he discovered an error in the titan’s Principles of Marketing textbook. That work resulted in an invitation for Davidson to help revise the fi fth edition of Principles of Marketing (1952), the best-selling textbook fi rst authored by Maynard and Beckman in 1927.




Davidson worked diligently on that revision. At that time, there were few marketing principles texts that had been through multiple editions. He saw the assignment as a wonderful opportunity and was very pleased to be asked to work on the book even though his credit for that fi fth edition wasn’t as a co-author. Rather, the title page reads “With the Assistance of William R. Davidson”. He had been asked by Beckman to add consid-erable material, with the result that the book would have been over one thousand pages in length. However, the publisher demanded it be reduced to eight hundred pages, so Davidson then had to make the necessary cuts. He admitted that he learned much about editing from Beckman during that assignment and was promoted to co-author on the sixth edition of Principles of Marketing in 1957.

The similarities between the careers of Theodore Beckman and Wil-liam Davidson are surely more than just coincidence. Both served with distinction in the military, albeit in diff erent World Wars. Both focused their intellectual curiosity on channels of distribution–Beckman with an emphasis on wholesaling, Davidson on retailing. Both had a deep appre-ciation of history–Beckman’s stimulated by a course on the history of economic thought taught by M. B. Hammond at OSU, Davidson’s from Maynard’s course on the history of marketing thought. Both began teach-ing executive development early in their careers–Beckman at the request of his dean (James Hagerty) to teach at the NACM Institute on Credit, Davidson at the request of his department chair (Harold Maynard) to teach executive training sessions on retailing for the National Association of Retail Dealers (NARDA). Both scholars went on to do extensive con-sulting and worked as expert witnesses, in part motivated by their execu-tive development teaching. However, therein lay a signifi cant diff erence in their two careers as Davidson eventually left academic life for a full time career in the business world.

Shortly after Davidson’s assistance with the fi fth edition of the Prin-ciples text, Maynard approached him to work with another OSU faculty member, Paul Brown, in writing a retailing textbook. Retailing Principles and Practices was completed and published in 1953, but Davidson knew it was not a good fi t of co-authors and was dissatisfi ed with the fi nished product. A reviewer writing for the Journal of Marketing readily noticed the diff erent approaches and styles of the two authors, commenting that “the opening chapter is a pedantic beginning for an otherwise commenda-tory and thoroughly practical work” (Faville 1953, 100). Davidson under-took the second edition alone giving the book a more managerial focus and the result was more gratifying. Again, the Journal of Marketing reviewer agreed. In comparing it with the fi rst edition, Retailing Management (as it was re-titled) included “signifi cant changes, not so much in organization as in content and viewpoint . . . [including] the very best of recent practice . . . by incorporating considerable analytical and managerial material in the text, the authors have improved the off ering” (Halper 1960, 123). The




book was hailed as the fi rst text-case book available in Retailing and ulti-mately became the best-selling retailing text in four-year colleges.

Davidson continued to revise Retailing Management through six edi-tions, well after he had left OSU to run Management Horizons, with some of his most interesting and important conceptual innovations appearing in those later editions. Ideas such as the “Geometry of Envi-ronmental Opportunity model”, the “Institutional Life Cycle in Retail-ing”, and the concept of “Core Versus Fringe Customers” were just a few that combined Davidson’s earlier scholarship with his Management Horizons consulting work and were disseminated through the Retailing Management textbook. The continued revision and publication of that book for almost twenty years after he left the academic world was, per-haps, the best example of Davidson’s view of the relationship between consulting and teaching. Consulting was a form of teaching and made one a better teacher.

When it came time for his doctoral dissertation, Davidson chose to study the “Use, Productivity, and Allocation of Space Resources in Department Stores” (1951). In those days, the usual process for arriving at a topic was for your supervisor to simply assign one, especially if your supervisor was Theodore Beckman. That didn’t happen in Davidson’s case, however. In the course of his dissertation work, he learned a great deal about department stores and met some of the most important executives at some of the biggest stores in America. It opened doors and established contacts which were to play a signifi cant role throughout the rest of Davidson’s career. He later observed that his entire career could be traced either directly or indirectly to the work for his dissertation.

HIS CAREER AT OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY

Davidson liked teaching. Yet, like most of us, when he taught for the fi rst time he was “scared silly” and “way over prepared” (1998). When he fi rst taught Retailing, a friend of his signed up for the course, sat at the back of the room, and gave Davidson signals as to how he was doing. Over time, his enjoyment of teaching grew and that led directly to his change in ambi-tion from working in market research to becoming a university professor. He was also very good at writing. That was evident from his work on the fi fth edition of the Principles textbook and from his revision of the Retail-ing Management text. So what began as a means of becoming an executive in marketing research quickly became an end in itself.

During the 1950s, Davidson established his reputation as a scholar and diversifi ed his teaching skills. With his dissertation completed and gradua-tion in 1951, he was off ered and accepted a position as Assistant Professor at OSU. The next year was his fi rst on the Principles book and the year after saw the publication of the fi rst edition of the Retailing text. A run of




articles, published mainly in trade journals throughout the 1950s, broadly explored the topic of retail store profi tability.

During the late 1950s, Marketing Department Chair, Harold Maynard, gave Davidson two major assignments that ultimately had a profound infl u-ence on the direction of the young faculty member’s career. As mentioned previously, the National Association of Retail Dealers (NARDA) had approached Maynard to off er through the University a one-week training program on retailing for NARDA members. Maynard turned their request over to Davidson who thereby began a long involvement with executive training. At about the same time, the Ohio Manufacturers Association also contacted Maynard about a similar program. Those requests led the School to establish one of the earliest university executive development programs in America, under Davidson’s leadership. The newly-promoted Associate Professor served as the program’s fi rst director from 1955 to 1958. That provided him with administrative experience which he would draw upon repeatedly throughout his career; and it diversifi ed his teaching since increasingly his students were managers and executives rather than twenty-year-old undergraduates.

Davidson enjoyed 1958–59 as a Visiting Professor at Stanford University, where his reduced teaching responsibilities aff orded much time for revising the Retailing book. It was a time for refl ection and seemed to redirect his career somewhat. When he returned from Stanford to OSU in 1960, the completed manuscript for the second edition of Retailing Management was published. His articles began to appear in more scholarly journals. A highly productive relationship was struck with a new member of the marketing faculty, Alton Doody, who would eventually become Davidson’s founding partner at Management Horizons.

During the next decade, Davidson added signifi cant administrative ser-vice to his academic portfolio. Since 1954, he had been active in the execu-tive of the American Marketing Association (AMA), serving as Chairman of the Committee on the Teaching of Marketing, later as Vice President of the Education Division, and in 1963, as President of the AMA. As a leader in the marketing academic community, Davidson seemed to become more refl ective and critical of the discipline.

The early 1960s saw fundamental and signifi cant changes occurring in collegiate business education including marketing. In 1959, two land-mark studies of business education were published by the Ford and Carn-egie Foundations (Gordon and Howell 1959; Pierson 1959). Both reports included harsh criticisms of the descriptive, vocational character of colle-giate business education at that time and advocated an emphasis on behav-ioral sciences, quantitative methods, and managerial economics. Their impact on business school curricula was swift and enduring. It led to a period in the development of marketing education later described by Lazer and Shaw as one of “diff erentiation and legitimization” (1988). Davidson called it a marketing renaissance (1963b).




He used the term ‘renaissance’ in the sense of a rebirth which called for a re-examination of the nature and purpose of marketing (1963b). His own answer to that challenge (together with input from colleagues at OSU), was a philosophy of marketing education that went beyond the typical micro-management dimension and stressed the macro-social process of marketing (Beckman et al. 1964). Davidson was concerned that the aggregate social impact of marketing activity was commonly underestimated, that marketing was more of a formative factor and less of an adaptive factor in society than was then suggested by many marketing professors and textbooks. He called for recognition of the roles played by infl uencers and interests other than consumers and of the formative, as well as the adaptive, aspects of market-ing in society (1963b). This broader perspective on marketing was certainly consistent with some aspects of the Foundation reports cited above. And it added the quality of a senior statesman to Davidson’s image.

The fi rst collaboration between Davidson and Doody also appeared in 1963, a paper in the Journal of Marketing about the future of discounting. That was followed by two articles in the Harvard Business Review (HBR) on small-scale retailing (1964), and on a revolution in retailing that the authors predicted would be driven by computers (1967). The latter was a fascinating prophecy that bore an uncanny resemblance to the internet commerce of today. Some readers were shocked; some laughed. Whatever the reaction, there was lots of it, as their paper sold the most reprints of any HBR article in 1967. Doody and Davidson also joined forces for the third edition of Retailing Management (1966) and the two partners rapidly became big guns in the fi eld of retailing. By 1968, they had formalized their consulting activities under the corporate name of Management Horizons.

It was curious then, in light of his growing reputation as an author and consultant that Davidson agreed in 1967 to serve as Chairman of the Mar-keting Department at Ohio State, a position he held for three years. That seemed to bring him to another crossroad in his career. At the conclusion of his term as Department Chair, he was being considered for the Dean’s position at OSU as well as at other institutions. Did he want to take that next step up the academic ladder? One of the primary expectations of a dean was fund raising, which did not appeal to Davidson. And teaching undergraduates was becoming routine and losing its appeal. It was also becoming increasingly diffi cult to blend his consulting activities with his university responsibilities, not just because of the workload, but because of the changing attitude of academics towards consulting.

During the 1950s, consulting had been regarded as a “matter of high esteem”, “something you put on your CV with pride” (Davidson 1998). It was highly regarded by many in the academic community, considered as something that enhanced a professor’s teaching and brought prestige to the university. While there had always been limits on how much one should do, there were many opportunities for consulting and to be well paid for that work. Perhaps because of that, some faculty members abused the situation.




Whatever the reasons were, by the late 1960s, the attitude towards profes-sor-consultants had predominantly changed to one of envy and resentment. With the growing success of Management Horizons, Davidson was faced with a choice.

In 1972, he decided to leave Ohio State University and devote his full energy to making Management Horizons a success. However that did not mean an end to teaching or scholarship. The teaching and the learning never stopped. It did, however, mean that Davidson would fi nally get that offi ce and salary like Mr. Whiteside’s!

ADVANCING THE FRONTIER OF KNOWLEDGE–ON A NEW HORIZON

Before 1968, Management Horizons (MH) operated as an informal joint venture between Davidson and Alton Doody for consulting projects in which the two OSU colleagues were involved. Management Horizons was offi cially incorporated in 1968 with Davidson as Chairman and Doody as President of the rapidly growing consulting fi rm. By then, they had several large, important projects under way including the retraining of the entire National Cash Register Company’s (NCR) sales organization to deal with new point-of-sale information technology and the opportunities it pre-sented. Much of the material for that program came from Davidson and Doody’s 1966 revision of Retailing Management.

During this period, Davidson recruited several other academics to join the MH staff . Most were recognized experts in their fi elds and two later became Chairmen of MH. When MH was incorporated in 1969, its shares were issued equally to Davidson, Doody, Bert C. McCammon, and NCR Vice-President Byron Carter. The most signifi cant asset the company ‘owned’ at that time was intellectual property–and it was considerable. In addition to Davidson and Doody, McCammon was a faculty member at Indiana Univer-sity and a nationally recognized expert on retailing and distribution. Other notable academics were soon added to the MH staff including John Pfahl (Chair of the Finance Department at OSU and author of a textbook on Cor-porate Finance), Cyrus Wilson (PhD graduate of OSU; he became the second Chairman of MH after Davidson), David Kollat (OSU faculty member and author of a seminal textbook on Consumer Behavior), and Daniel Sweeney (PhD graduate of OSU, faculty member at the University of Tennessee, Direc-tor of Research at Dayton’s Department Store; he later succeeded Wilson as Chairman of MH). Their combined conceptual knowledge and experience permeated MH’s early consulting work, including the application of the mar-keting concept to retailing, competition among vertical marketing systems, the total profi tability model, information technology in retailing, and non-store retailing, all of which were relatively new concepts or applications of concepts in 1968 (Davidson 1993).




Unlike most businesses of that era, especially consulting fi rms, Manage-ment Horizons was founded with a clear mission statement. Its purpose was “to improve the market and fi nancial performance of retail clients and to advance the frontier of knowledge in the distribution industries” (David-son 1996, 1). The latter part of their mission was almost certainly unique among consulting companies and it was just as certainly due to the distin-guished academic careers of the company’s founders. They recognized a responsibility to develop new knowledge if they were to be thoroughly suc-cessful in giving advice as consultants. It was a responsibility that Davidson took seriously throughout his involvement with the fi rm.

During the late 1960s, there were dramatic changes aff ecting retailing, changes that created tremendous opportunities for MH and laid the foun-dation for its success as a consulting fi rm. Two of the earliest and most important projects involved the National Cash Register Company (NCR) and the Associated Merchandising Corporation (AMC). NCR was well-known for its sales force and their ability to sell cash registers to retailers for the control of money in stores. However changes in technology had created the opportunity, indeed the need, to capture data at the point of sale and the NCR sales force was on the verge of becoming obsolete. Man-agement Horizons was hired by NCR to retrain their entire sales force of over one thousand representatives. They developed a two-week educational program on retail marketing and fi nancial strategy that incorporated the role of point-of-sale information. Much of the content of that program was actually based on content in the recently-published second edition of Retail-ing Management co-authored by Davidson and Doody. Over the course of a year, NCR’s sales force was divided into relatively large groups, each attending a two-week training program in Dayton, Ohio. The MH ‘teach-ers’ included Davidson, Doody, McCammon, and Cyrus Wilson, who was then in the doctoral program at OSU and who later wrote his dissertation on retailers’ use of point-of-sale information technology. That NCR train-ing program led MH to develop an expertise in information technology and to the formation of a subsidiary, Computer Horizons, later renamed Management Horizons Data Systems. Thus, the NCR training program provided an entry for MH into the growing fi eld of retail management information systems.

A common theme throughout their consulting projects during the late 1960s was the application of information technology to retail and whole-sale distribution. It was, as suggested in the title of Doody and David-son’s 1967 Harvard Business Review article, the “Next Revolution in Retailing”, except that the revolution was already underway and most retailing executives were unprepared to defend themselves. Thus, one of the most important client services during the late 1960s and into the early 1970s was what Davidson called executive briefi ng programs. They were typically sponsored by a cooperative group, trade association, or some loosely organized group of fi rms, in order to fund the background




research that provided much of the content for the programs and to make the programs aff ordable for individual companies. Such programs were developed for a variety of industries, none more important to MH than department stores. The Associated Merchandising Corporation (AMC) was a cooperative organization of twenty-fi ve leading single-outlet department stores in North America; and during the late 1960s, MH developed a series of conferences and executive development programs for the AMC.

Department store principals and executives were unprepared, in education or in career experience, for the changes occurring in retailing at that time.

Store principals were usually the Chairman and the President of the company. Typically they were about sixty or so years of age with a pre-World War II education and work experience. Often they had spent their entire career with their company, and not unusually they were direct descendents of the founder who started the business a century or so ago. Daily they walked the multiple fl oors of their per-ceived to be unassailable citadels of general merchandise operations and knew by name hundreds of the associates employed there under usual circumstances of long tenure. They were wealthy and had strong community leadership roles and esteemed social position. (Davidson 1996, 11)

The AMC programs were based on what Davidson called the “Geometry of Environmental Opportunity Model” that suggested department stores were in the maturity stage of their institutional life cycle and would decline if they didn’t adapt to changes in consumer markets, in retail competition, and in supplier or resource markets. Davidson told them that single-unit department stores, such as those in the AMC, were becoming obsolete. Not surprisingly, those ideas were considered radical to store owners, including one prominent Columbus retailer who told Davidson he was “full of shit” (Davidson 1998). That department store was later swallowed up by the Federated Department Stores group.

Executive development was the fl agship product of Management Hori-zon’s client services during its early days, again illustrating that Davidson never stopped teaching. As he later observed,

my consulting work [at Management Horizons] was teaching business people, enhancing the knowledge of whole industries. At Management Horizons, for the most part, the people in the audience were there because it related to what they did and they were interested in improv-ing it . . . [and] the interest level was much higher than the average undergraduate class in a business school, particularly in dealing with required basic courses where the student would rather be doing some-thing else. (Davidson 1998)




As a result of that emphasis on teaching, MH added to its reputation as an intellectual leader in retail consulting.

As an extension of their executive briefi ng programs, in 1974, MH launched a syndicated client service known as the Retail Intelligence Sys-tem (RIS). It consisted of various publications and annual conferences designed to provide retailers with information resources about company and industry performance. The RIS publications included the Retail Year-book of industry sector baseline studies, Retail Preview addressing plan-ning issues for soft goods, home goods, and consumables, Intelligence Update focusing on industry and company fi nancial performance, and the Retail Economist providing a macro perspective on economic and political trends likely to aff ect retailers. A complete set of these publica-tions from the inception of the RIS is archived as part of the Bass Business History Collection at the University of Oklahoma and was continually updated following a six-month lag from the time clients received the information. The RIS was considered a signifi cant part of MH’s intellec-tual property and goodwill to Price Waterhouse when it purchased MH in 1985 (Davidson 1996, 6).

As the RIS was being developed, Davidson became more active in litiga-tion consulting. It’s tempting to speculate that Joseph Klamon and Theo-dore Beckman, both of whom were Davidson’s teachers and both of whom were very active as expert witnesses, had some infl uence in that regard. More likely, however, Davidson was in demand as an expert witness because of his consulting experience. Davidson worked in that capacity during the 1970s on a series of cases dealing with the concept of “rel-evant market” for department stores. Not surprisingly, most of his litiga-tion consulting work was for department stores and much of it included testifying in cases involving charges of antitrust and unfair competition practices. That work also continued well after Davidson had left full-time employment with MH in 1990.

By the time it was merged into Price Waterhouse in 1985, Management Horizons had become the largest retail consulting fi rm in the world with offi ces in London, Paris, Frankfurt, Milan, and Madrid. Davidson contin-ued for fi ve years as Chairman of the MH ‘division’ and retired from full time work there in 1990. In refl ecting on the tremendous growth and suc-cess of MH over those twenty-plus years, Davidson remarked, “We were in a time of rapidly changing conditions which we understood and most [retail] practitioners did not” (1998).

***

William R. Davidson’s life in retailing management began during the 1930s with his family’s grocery store in Emporia, Kansas and continued through a distinguished academic career and as a retailing management consultant well into the twenty-fi rst century. Through one of his MBA instructors,




Joseph Klamon, he was attracted to the growing fi eld of market research and to consulting, both of which later blended with his interest and exper-tise in retailing management. Klamon also steered Davidson to doctoral studies at Ohio State University where he was strongly infl uenced by Theo-dore Beckman and Harold Maynard. Beckman nurtured Davidson’s inter-est in retailing, supervised his dissertation on that topic, and was another role model for integrating consulting with teaching and research. As a teacher, Maynard stimulated Davidson’s appreciation for history. As the Department Chair of Marketing at OSU, he opened the door for Davidson to become involved in executive development and to write what became the leading textbook on retailing management. Davidson felt that the second edition of that book (1960), which lists Brown as co-author but was sole-authored by Davidson, was his most signifi cant contribution to the market-ing literature. His HBR article, “Next Revolution in Retailing” (1967) was prophetic and a shocker to many industry observers. Another HBR article, “The Retail Life Cycle” (1976), refl ected his strong belief in the life cycle metaphor and was used extensively in his consulting.

Davidson entered academic life at a unique time in the history of busi-ness education–a time when there was exploding demand for education, knowledge and expertise, and little supply of the same. Those conditions presented tremendous opportunities and Davidson capitalized on them. Similarly, he entered the retail consulting business at a time when there were enormous changes in retail markets and retailing practice driven by technology. It was a revolution and he was one of the leaders in the devel-opment of new ideas about retailing management. His contributions to our conceptual understanding of marketing became, perhaps, even more signifi cant during his tenure at Management Horizons through his leader-ship in the development of models such as the Geometry of Environmental Opportunity model, the model of Institutional Life Cycle in Retailing, and the concept of Core and Fringe Customers. Even then, however, he was more concerned with learning and teaching how institutions adapted to changing conditions than he was with principles or models.

Davidson fashioned a distinguished career as a scholar, teacher, and consultant in retailing management. The founding mission statement for Management Horizons included the ambition to “advance the frontier of knowledge in the distribution industries” (Davidson 1996). His tremendous success in that endeavour over a period of half a century earned William R. Davidson recognition as a pioneer in marketing.

APPENDIX 9.1. SELECTED PUBLICATIONS BY WILLIAM R. DAVIDSON

1951a. Use, Productivity, and Allocation of Space Resources in Depart-ment Stores. PhD diss., Ohio State University.




1951b. Yardsticks of Departmental Operating Effi ciency. Retail Control (December): 27–29.

1953. Retailing Principles and Practices (with P. Brown); Retailing Man-agement (with P. Brown), 1960; Retailing Management, 3rd ed. (with A. F. Doody and P. Brown), 1966; Retailing Management, 4th ed. (with A. F. Doody and D. J. Sweeney), 1975. New York: Ronald Press; Retailing Management, 5th ed. (with D. J. Sweeney and R. W. Stampfl ), 1984; 6th ed., 1988. New York: Wiley & Sons.

1954a. Merchandising Responsibilities in the Distribution of Beer. The Brewers Digest (March): 48–49.

1954b. Are You Losing Money on High Stock Turnover? American Paper Merchant (August): 24.

1955a. The Wholesale Wine Trade in Ohio. Columbus, OH: Bureau of Business Research, Ohio State University.

1955b. Retailing to Meet Consumer Demand. American Nurseryman (March 15): 7–8 & 108–15.

1955c. How to Plan the Right Average Markup. Building Supply News (June): 92–94.

1955d. How to Price to Achieve Markup Goals. Building Supply News (September): 99–101.

1955e. How to use Accounting Statements to Keep Score of Your Business. Building Supply News (October): 105–7.

1955f. Using Accounting Statements to Analyze Financial Position. Build-ing Supply News (December): 121–30.

1956a. Budget Your Future Operating Expense. Building Supply News (January): 144–50.

1956b. Retailing–Some Signifi cant Current Developments. Georgia Busi-ness (March): 1–7. Reprinted in The Appraisal Journal (January 1957): 91–98.

1957a. Teacher Attitudes and Opinions of Certain Association Practices and Policies. In Frontiers of Marketing Thought & Science, ed. F. Bass, 261–73. Chicago: AMA.

1957b. Principles of Marketing, 6th ed. (with T. N. Beckman and H. H. Maynard); 7th ed., 1962; 8th ed., 1967; 9th ed. (with T. N. Beckman and W. Talarzyk), 1973. New York: Ronald Press.

1958a. Marketing Management for 1958. Home Appliance Builder (Feb-ruary): 17–24.

1958b. Using Accounting Records to Stop Profi t Leaks. Electrical Mer-chandising (May): 57–59.

1958c. Planned Profi t Control for the Dealer. Electrical Merchandising (June): 54–57.

1958d. Volume-Margin-Break-Even Analysis. Electrical Merchandising (July): 50–53.

1961a. Department Store Organization . . . History and Trends. Depart-ment Store Economist (January): 64–74.




1961b. The End of the Discount House as a Distinctive Type of Retailing Institution. Department Store Economist (December): 24–28.

1961c. Marketing Channels and Institutions. Business Horizons (Febru-ary): 84–90. Reprinted in Marketing: The Firm’s Viewpoint, ed. S. F. Otteson, W. G. Panschar, and J. M. Matterson, 398–406. New York: Macmillan.

1962a. Trends in Fertilizer Marketing. Farm Store Merchandising (August): 10–11.

1962b. The Start and Finish of Discounting. Farm Store Merchandising (November): 12–14.

1963a. The Future of Discounting (with A. F. Doody). Journal of Market-ing 27 (1): 36–39.

1963b. Marketing Renaissance. In Toward Scientifi c Marketing, ed. S. Greyser, 3–14. Chicago: AMA. Reprinted in Managerial Mar-keting: Perspectives and Viewpoints (1967), ed. E. Kelley and W. Lazer, 657–63. Homewood, IL: Richard D. Irwin.

1964a. Growing Strength in Small Retailing (with A. F. Doody). Harvard Business Review (July-August): 69–79.

1964b. Are Retailers Really Delivering What the Consumer Wants? In Challenging Change in Retailing, ed. R. H. Myers, 22–27. Oxford, OH: Bureau of Business Research, Miami University.

1965a. The Shake-Out in Appliance Retailing. Home Appliance Builder (March): 21–29.

1965b. Contributing editor, The Marketing Handbook. New York: Ronald Press.

1967a. Distribution Breakthroughs. In Plotting Marketing Strategy, ed. L. Adler, 260–84. New York: Simon & Shuster.

1967b. Next Revolution in Retailing (with A. F. Doody). Harvard Business Review (May–June): 4–21.

1967c. Leased Departments in Discount Merchandising (with J. R. Lowry). Monograph no. 132. Columbus, OH: Bureau of Business Research, Ohio State University.

1969. Retailing: Small Business Administration–Bibliography No. 10 (with A. F. Doody and D. Sweeney). Washington, DC: US Govern-ment Printing Offi ce.

1970a. Changes in Distributive Institutions. Journal of Marketing 34 (1): 7–10.

1970b. Leased Departments as a Major Force in the Growth of Discount Store Retailing (with A. F. Doody and J. R. Lowry). Journal of Marketing 34 (1): 39–46.

1975. Changes in Distributive Institutions–A Re-examination. The Cana-dian Marketer (Winter): 7–13.

1976. The Retail Life Cycle (with A. D. Bates and S. J. Bass). Harvard Busi-ness Review (November–December): 89–96.

1978. Retailers (with J. E. Smallwood). Mart Magazine, September 15.




1980a. Changes in Distributive Trades in the United States in the 1980s. Translated to Japanese in The Nikkei Ryutsu (Nikkei Marketing Journal) (January): 9.

1980b. An Overview of Management of the Retail Life Cycle (with J. E. Smallwood). In Competitive Structure in Retail Markets: The Department Store Perspective, ed. R. Stampfl and E. Hirschman, 53–62. Chicago: AMA.

1980c. To Understand Retailing in the 1980s, Analyze Firms’ Responses to Trends. Marketing News, March 7.

1981a. Changes & Challenges in Retailing (with A. Rodgers). Business Horizons (January/February): 82–87.

1981b. Portfolio Theory and the Retailing Life Cycle (with N. E. Johnson). Chicago: AMA.

1982. Retailing Challenges and Opportunities for the 1980s (with J. L. Sheppard). Business Horizons (Fall): 21–24.

1992. Multiple Channels of Distribution and Their Impact on Retailing–Remarks. In The Future of US Retailing, ed. R. A. Peterson. New York: Quorum Press.

1996. The History of Management Horizons. Columbus, OH: Manage-ment Horizons.



10 Lessons from Pioneers in Marketing

The history of marketing thought examines ideas, concepts, theories, and schools of thought, including the lives and times of marketing thinkers. It explores the evolution of marketing as an academic discipline includ-ing the institutions and associations involved in that evolution. Where does this collection of biographical essays fi t into that fi eld of study? How does it contribute to the history of marketing thought? What is its value? What lessons can we draw from the experiences of these pioneers in marketing?

There is a long tradition of biographical work in marketing, most of it focusing on the history of thought (e.g., Bartels 1941, 1988; Converse 1959; Wright and Dimsdale 1974; the Journal of Marketing’s “Pioneers in Marketing” and “Leaders in Marketing” series), and almost all of it published as short sketches that off er few insights into the subjects’ philoso-phies, ambitions, motivations, or the infl uences that molded their thinking. The biographical essays included herein provide more detailed portraits drawing from the subjects’ personal, environmental, intellectual, and pro-fessional backgrounds to tell their stories–focusing on their intellectual and professional backgrounds to document their contributions to the marketing discipline. As such, these intellectual biographies are part of a growing body of work that examines in some detail the lives and careers of important marketing scholars (e.g., Bourassa, Cunningham, and Handelman 2007; Brown 2005; Harris 2007; Hollander 2009; Pollay 2011; Shaw, Lazer, and Pirog 2007; Shaw and Tamilia 2001; Tamilia 2011; Wooliscroft 2006).

The eight subjects in this collection span over one hundred years in the history of the marketing discipline. Chronologically their careers range from Edward David Jones and Simon Litman teaching the fi rst univer-sity courses in marketing at the turn of the twentieth century, to William Davidson providing consulting advice to retailers well into the twenty-fi rst century. As a group, their areas of specialization include general marketing, international marketing, agricultural marketing, market research, advertis-ing, wholesaling, the philosophy of marketing, and retailing. Thus, despite the small sample of subjects, this collection covers a broad range of eras and ideas about marketing.


Lessons from Pioneers in Marketing 161


What is distinctive about each of the pioneers in this collection? Edward David Jones taught the fi rst university course in marketing, but perhaps more importantly he taught and wrote about ineffi ciencies in the marketing process and how they could be addressed through the applica-tion of Scientifi c Management. A claim could also be made that Jones was the fi rst to conceptualize the basic marketing functions and to recognize the value of relationship marketing. He also wrote about social ethics and its role in addressing distributive justice and reforming marketing practice. Simon Litman was among the fi rst to teach marketing at an American university. He was also the fi rst to teach and write about inter-national marketing. Henry Charles Taylor was the fi rst American profes-sor to study, teach, and write about agricultural marketing. As a civil servant, his work also aff ected public policy towards agricultural mar-keting. George Burton Hotchkiss was among the vanguard of university advertising teachers and was probably the fi rst to teach and write about marketing history, not necessarily as a means of understanding contem-porary marketing practice but as an end in and of itself. Percival White was an engineer who, like Jones before him, was concerned about market-ing ineffi ciencies and applied the principles of Scientifi c Management to marketing in the belief that there was one best way to practice marketing. His 1921 text on market research was only the second such book pub-lished. And, not withstanding Jones’s earlier suggestion that marketers focus on customers’ needs and not simply on sales, White may have been the fi rst to fully articulate what is known today as the as the marketing concept. Besides those distinctions in scholarship, White also founded one of the fi rst market research fi rms in America during the early 1930s. Theodore N. Beckman made seminal contributions to our understand-ing of marketing productivity, credit, and wholesaling. In the process, he also supervised the fi rst US Census of Distribution in 1929. David D. Monieson’s distinctive contributions to marketing included the concept of usable knowledge, important advances in the philosophical debate in marketing, and his legacy as a great teacher. In some ways, William R. Davidson was to retailing what Beckman was to wholesaling. Among this collection of pioneers, Davidson’s contributions to industry through Management Horizons are rivaled only by Percival White’s through Mar-ket Research Corporation of America.

LESSONS OF DISCOVERY

Some of the distinctions mentioned above have already been recognized by historians of marketing thought. Naturally those distinctions con-tributed to my interest in writing their biographies. I acknowledge the traditional historian’s caveat about claiming to discover the “fi rst” of anything. However in the course of the research for these biographies




there were other important discoveries, some of which invite additional historical study.

Jones’s series of articles published from 1911 through 1914 in Mill Sup-plies is an important discovery fi lled with original ideas about marketing not previously part of the literature about the history of marketing thought. That series deserves more study. We should have a better understanding of Jones’s ideas about marketing ethics and his thoughts on the application of Scientifi c Management to marketing evident in the Mill Supplies series as well as in his later books on business administration.

The synopsis for Simon Litman’s book on “Mechanism and Technique of Commerce” and the version published as Trade and Commerce in 1911 are important, related discoveries for historians of marketing thought. Together, they may off er us the most complete documentation of an early university course in marketing. A more detailed examination than what is included in Litman’s biographical essay here would surely yield additional insights into early twentieth-century marketing ideas. Litman’s (1923) Essentials of International Trade is likely the fi rst textbook to discuss international marketing in detail. This predates by some twelve years what was previously believed to be the “fi rst” in that category (Bartels 1988, 213). While some initial study has been made of early developments in the teaching and writing about international marketing (Jones and Cunning-ham 1997), there is more work to be done and Litman’s contributions in that regard provide an entry point.

While likely not substantial enough on its own to warrant further study, Percival White’s chapter on services marketing in Marketing Practice (1924) has never been cited in historical studies of the services marketing litera-ture (Vargo and Morgan 2005). It is also curious that nothing to date has been written about the history of White’s Market Research Corporation of America (MRCA), given its early and leading position in the history of mar-ket research and its related innovations in market research practice. A full history of that organization is now under way (Jones and Tadajewski 2011). Furthermore, I am not aware of any previous recognition by marketing histo-rians of MRCA’s periodical, Market Research. Although it was published for only fi ve years (1934–1938), it included many well-known marketing authors of that era and ranks third in the chronology of marketing journals.

While Hotchkiss’s (1938) Milestones of Marketing has been duly rec-ognized for its seminal contribution to the marketing history literature, his course at New York University (NYU) during the 1920s on the his-tory of distribution was curiously overlooked in the otherwise encyclopedic study of early marketing courses by Bartels (1962). Hotchkiss (1931) also believed that the Treatise of Commerce was the earliest known example of corporate advertising, yet I am unaware of any reference to it in the adver-tising history literature. That also suggests that Hotchkiss’s (1931) study of Wheeler’s Treatise of Commerce is doubly important as an early example of historical analysis in marketing.




RHYMING LESSONS

It has been written of history that it may not repeat itself, but often rhymes. The collection of essays herein obviously represents a small sample of sub-jects, some selected, as discussed in Chapter 1 for serendipitous reasons. Therefore, generalizations are off ered here with appropriate reservation.

The three fi rst-generation pioneers in this collection (Jones, Litman, and Taylor) all shared an intellectual heritage traced to the German Historical School of Economics. From the German Historical School, the earliest mar-keting scholars drew their epistemology, their methodology for studying marketing, and at least part of their value system. The marketing discipline developed as an applied branch of economics, and more specifi cally, of Ger-man Historical Economics. These are lessons that have been taught by other marketing historians (see, for example, Jones and Monieson 1990b; Jones and Shaw 2002). The subjects included here are examples of that heritage.

All eight of the subjects in this collection demonstrated an interest in marketing history. Jones, Litman, and Taylor all used history as a method of studying marketing in order to inductively develop principles of market-ing. Taylor also wrote a comprehensive history of agricultural economics and marketing in America (Taylor and Taylor 1952). White was the least historically-minded of these pioneers, but as the founding President of the Market Research Council he served as that organization’s fi rst offi cial his-torian co-authoring The Market Research Council, 1927–1957 (White et al. 1957). Hotchkiss’s course on “The History of Distribution” at NYU during the 1920s was the fi rst such university course off ered. Milestones of Marketing (1938) was developed and written for that course, and was likely the fi rst book about marketing history intended as such rather than simply using history to develop generalizations about marketing. His research for that book likely provided the material for three chapters on the history of advertising in An Outline of Advertising (1933) and we know that Mile-stones led to his (1931) Wheeler’s Treatise of Commerce. Beckman often included marketing history as a preamble to his general works on mar-keting and wholesaling. For example, the fi rst chapter of his Principles of Marketing (Maynard and Beckman 1952) included a section titled “Brief History of Marketing and Emergence of a Middleman System”. His Whole-saling (1926) textbook included multiple chapters on the history of that sub-fi eld of marketing. He also wrote a history of gasoline retailing that was published posthumously (Beckman 2011). For many years, Monieson taught a doctoral seminar on the history of marketing thought. He co-authored historical work arising from that seminar (Jones and Monieson 1988b; 1990a; 1990b; 1992) and another study based on his own doc-toral dissertation was published posthumously (Monieson 2010). Through his doctoral seminar he also trained many graduate students who went on to publish work in marketing history. Indeed, this book indirectly draws its inspiration from Monieson’s doctoral seminar. Davidson examined the




history of department stores and trends over time to develop what would best be described as a contingency model of department store organization (1961a). His strong belief in life cycles as a basis for retailing theory was further evidence of a historical point of view. And among his latest writing is the History of Management Horizons (1996).

While none of these pioneers was fi rst and foremost a marketing his-torian, they all demonstrated an interest in history and, perhaps more importantly, a respect for history that is sadly missing in most graduate marketing students today. That gave them a perspective on the marketing discipline not shared by most of today’s marketing scholars. There is a growing interest in marketing history, but unfortunately not among mar-keting students in business schools. Instead, the best recent research on marketing history tends to be written by business historians (Blaszczyk 2009; Cohen 2004; Cross 2000; Friedman 2004; Koehn 2001) and taught in history departments.

The effi ciency or ineffi ciency of the marketing system and resulting dis-tributive justice or injustice is a theme running throughout the careers of several of these pioneers. Scientifi c Management is considered by manage-ment historians to be one of the pillars of their discipline (Wren 1987). Very little has been written about the infl uence of Scientifi c Management on marketing (Tadajewski and Jones forthcoming; Lalonde and Morrison 1967; Usui 2008; Wrege and Greenwood 1985), yet there clearly was such an infl uence during the early twentieth century. Both Jones and White incorporated ideas from Scientifi c Management into their writing about marketing by focusing on the ineffi ciencies of the marketing process and arguing that Scientifi c Management principles could be applied to market-ing to make it more effi cient resulting in a more just distribution of wealth and consumption. According to both Jones and White, that application would also yield a true customer orientation as characterized by the now popular marketing concept and relationship marketing. Much has been written recently to correct the myth that the marketing concept and paral-lel notion of relationship marketing are inventions of the last half century. The writings of these pioneers in marketing help dispel that myth. Fol-lowing Jones and White, Taylor also wrote about marketing ineffi ciencies but did not explicitly invoke Scientifi c Management as a cure. Like Jones and later Monieson, Taylor was also deeply concerned about distributive injustice and believed that social ethics must be part of marketing, part of the solution to the distributive injustices characteristic of the marketing system. Beckman’s work on marketing productivity and the value added by intermediaries stands in contrast to the foregoing work. Rather than focus-ing on what was wrong with the marketing system and how to correct it, Beckman spent his career studying what was right about market distribu-tion and developing measures of that value added.

William James and John Dewey would have agreed with the pedagogical beliefs of this group of pioneer marketing teachers. All of them believed in




Pragmatism, that theory must be extracted from practice, that experience was an essential part of learning. Jones, Litman, and Taylor were the only ones in this group not active in consulting. Yet those three followed the German Historical School’s inductive methodology using fi eld trips and observing fi rsthand the marketing practices of actual business fi rms to inform their teaching. Taylor also managed his own farm, in part so that he could stay in touch with agricultural marketing practice. White and David-son were both full time consultants who incorporated those experiences directly into their writing, and in Davidson’s case into his teaching, about marketing. Hotchkiss went so far as to substitute industry experience for a PhD, believing that the former would be more instrumental to his success as a university teacher of advertising. In his many written requests made to the university administration for permission to do consulting, Beckman repeat-edly justifi ed the work as benefi cial to his teaching. Even a cynic would rec-ognize that Beckman followed through by incorporating the results of that lucrative consulting work into his textbooks on marketing and wholesal-ing. Monieson believed so strongly in Pragmatism that, through his schol-arship, he challenged the entire marketing professoriate with his writings about the intellectualization of marketing and the need for usable knowl-edge. Many, if not most, of today’s generation of marketing professors have never worked in industry and devote none of their non-teaching time to consulting or to other involvement in marketing practice. Most of what is written in today’s academic journals and textbooks is derived knowledge. These pioneers in marketing would not have approved.

All but Percival White were, fi rst and foremost, great teachers. Jones, Litman, and Taylor had the courage to teach in a fi eld for which there was no model to follow and all three were resourceful in developing material for their classes in marketing. Hotchkiss, Beckman, and Monieson were recognized by their educational institutions and by professional organi-zations for their outstanding teaching. With his reputation for strictness and discipline, Beckman may not have been loved by all, but he instilled in many the same devotion and loyalty expressed for Hotchkiss and Mon-ieson. Davidson’s teaching through executive development at Management Horizons was essential to the mission and success of his company, and it was very successful. He has always maintained that he was a lifelong learner and teacher.

A fi nal characteristic common to most of these pioneers was their ‘macro’ perspective on marketing. Jones, Litman, and Taylor were all try-ing to understand the role of marketing in the American economy. Jones’s series of articles in Mill Supplies was based on a historical analysis of the “American Domestic Market Since 1840”, thus a market-wide focus and historical perspective informed all of that work. His view of marketing consistently included a role for social ethics. Taylor’s approach and motiva-tions were similar to Jones’s, but focused on the agricultural sector of the economy making him a macromarketer as well. Litman’s specialization in




international marketing also relied heavily on a macro perspective. Trade and Commerce (1911) discussed countries as markets, aggregate consump-tion patterns, and the major industries of countries. Other research by Lit-man addressed the eff ects of World War I on trade, and wage and price controls. Those issues were certainly part of what today would be con-sidered macromarketing. Although Beckman’s work on wholesaling and marketing productivity has never been directly associated with the systems school of thought in marketing (Jones, Shaw, and McLean 2010), it defi -nitely focused on distribution channels as marketing systems and on the value of marketing at an aggregate level. Distributive justice was a constant theme running throughout Monieson’s published work. In fact, distribu-tive justice was a theme that characterized the interests of several of these pioneers in marketing and there is no idea more central to macromarketing than that of distributive justice (Monieson 1981a).

LESSONS ON UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

Two roads diverged for some of these subjects. Each took what they con-sidered to be the grassy one, the one less traveled, and that made all the diff erence (apologies to Robert Frost). If Henry Carter Adams had not already had in mind a course in “American Technics” and off ered Jones a teaching position at the University of Michigan, would Jones have taught the fi rst American university course in marketing? If Adolph Miller hadn’t been interested in establishing courses on “commerce and industry” at the University of California and if Simon Litman had accepted the position in Philosophy he was off ered at Stanford, would he have become a pioneer in international marketing? One of Henry Charles Taylor’s ambitions was to become a farmer. Why did he feel he needed a college degree to practice farming, especially in the late nineteenth century? He might easily have taken over his father’s farm instead of becoming a pioneer scholar-teacher in agricultural marketing. Had war not intervened, Percival White might have become a successful automobile manufacturer instead of an author of marketing books and marketing consultant. If the Dean of the School of Commerce at NYU, Joseph French Johnson, hadn’t encouraged George Burton Hotchkiss to get a job with a newspaper, and if Hotchkiss hadn’t become interested in advertising because of that job, he might easily have continued teaching Business English in the Journalism program instead of teaching Advertising in a new Department of Marketing and Advertising. Monieson and Davidson both enrolled in the PhD program at Ohio State University (OSU) as preparation for employment in the fi eld of market research. Neither of them intended to pursue an academic career in mar-keting. If they hadn’t come under Beckman’s infl uence, would either have become pioneers in marketing? If Maynard hadn’t pursued Davidson to off er executive training at OSU, would Davidson have become a successful




consultant? Beckman alone was destined for the academic career in which he ultimately excelled. There seems to have never been another road for him to travel.

ESTHETIC LESSONS

Biography is life history. It is a form of historical writing. As with history, biography is an end in and of itself, valuable for its own sake, a story worth telling. Biography adds fl esh to the bones of marketing thought–the ideas, concepts, theories, and schools of thought that make up our thinking about marketing today. Every idea, concept, theory, or innovation in practice, is a fragment of some biography. It personifi es our discipline. It adds a human face to the history of ideas because, after all, it is people who teach and think and write about marketing.

More historical scholarship, and more biographical writing in particu-lar, would serve the marketing discipline well. The venerable marketing critic, Stephen Brown, notes that because it is becoming less readable, less accessible, less discerning, less palatable, and more specious, most market-ing scholarship has lost touch with its customers, the “laity”, members of the reading public and society at large. Brown adds that the most striking shortcoming in marketing scholarship today is its absence of character.

The perennial popularity of historical biography likewise attests to humankind’s obsession with famous, infamous and otherwise notewor-thy individuals. . . . Personifi cation, like storytelling, is a primordial human instinct, a way in which people make sense of the world. . . . Real people, characterful people, people who rise from the text alive and kicking, are nowhere to be found. . . . [However] marketing history is noteworthy for its characterful contributions. . . . Marketing history may not save us, but at least it off ers a lifeline. (Brown 2011, 458)

Students of marketing have an obligation to know the history of their dis-cipline. They should be historically informed because history contributes to the heritage of the discipline, provides raw material for the develop-ment of new knowledge, and broadens and deepens our understanding of contemporary marketing ideas (Hunt 2010). Furthermore, “academics who maintain that marketing is (or ought to be) a profession and who favor advancing the marketing discipline toward being a professional dis-cipline incur an obligation to know marketing’s intellectual history and to transmit that knowledge to their students” (Hunt 2010, 443). History, and therefore biography, “allows students to resonate with events, times, and turning points [in the development of the discipline] they had not directly experienced . . . nurturing a closer attachment to the subject [of market-ing]” (Domegan 2010, 461).




ON MORE BIOGRAPHICAL RESIDUE IN MARKETING

There is no shortage of potential marketing subjects worthy of biographi-cal attention. The Sheth Foundation’s series on “Legends in Marketing”, mentioned in Chapter 1, includes the collected works of ten eminent schol-ars in marketing and the Foundation has fi lmed interviews with each of those individuals, but there are as yet no biographies written about them. Wright (1989) compiled lists of the individuals who, up to that point in time, had won the American Marketing Association’s (AMA) Paul D. Con-verse Award, Charles Coolidge Parlin Award, Harold H. Maynard Award, and William F. O’Dell Award, as well as those winning the Robert Ferber Award for best article in the Journal of Consumer Research. He added a lengthy list of marketing practitioners as potential subjects, some of whom (for example, Ray Kroc and Lee Iacocca) have since been the subjects of full-length biographies. In fact, the explosion of interest in biography over the past few decades has resulted in many recent best-sellers about leading business people whose forte was arguably in marketing.

Universities typically collect, or used to collect, the papers of their out-standing faculty members and there is a wealth of such archival material waiting to be culled in the interest of biographical research. Here are just a few examples. Paul T. Cherington’s long and outstanding career in market-ing included a ten-year stint on the faculty of the Harvard Business School. The Baker Library at Harvard holds the Paul T. Cherington Papers includ-ing autobiographical and biographical notes, newspaper clippings, course outlines, reading lists, and lists of publications by Cherington. Long after his pioneering studies in advertising, Walter Dill Scott became President of Northwestern University. While he was the subject of a short biographical sketch in the Journal of Marketing’s “Pioneers in Marketing” series, and the subject of a full-length biography that focused on his administrative role at Northwestern (Jacobson 1951), there is no detailed biographical examination of Scott’s contributions to the study and teaching of adver-tising. The Northwestern University Archives holds forty-three boxes of documents in the Walter Dill Scott Papers including autobiographical and biographical materials, extensive personal correspondence, and consulting reports, in addition to the college records and presidential fi les related to his service to the university. Another fi ne candidate for a biography is E. T. Grether, an eminent marketing scholar who was included in the original “Pioneers in Marketing” series of short sketches, but was never the sub-ject of a more detailed biographical study. There are two relatively unique sources of information for a biography about Grether–the transcript of a lengthy (1,069 pages) oral history interview with Grether held in the Uni-versity of California-Berkley Archives, and another lengthy interview with Grether taped in 1987 as part of an AMA history project. A former student of Grether’s, Ronald Savitt, is currently working on a full-length biography of Grether (Savitt 2011).




One of my current research projects is a biography of Pauline Arnold, the same Pauline Arnold mentioned in Chapter 5 herein about Percival White. Arnold was a pioneer in marketing in her own right and a leader in the development of market research in America. Women are conspicu-ously absent from existing historical and biographical studies of marketing thought, and not because they didn’t contribute to that history. Zuckerman and Carsky (1990) made a convincing case for the residues of Christine Frederick, Hazel Kyrk, Elizabeth Hoyt, Pauline Arnold, Adelaide Benedict-Roche, Lucille Eaves, and Ruth Leigh–all of whom published important work on consumers and consumption during the fi rst half of the twentieth century, and all of whom are neglected in our male-dominated study of the development of marketing ideas. The Journal of Historical Research in Marketing features a special issue on “Remembering Female Contributors to Marketing Theory, Thought, and Practice” in 2013. Hopefully that will begin to fi ll a gap in our understanding of marketing history and give more credit where credit is due.

Of course, there is a similar gap in our understanding of marketing thought as it evolved outside of America. Monieson was Canadian. How-ever his teaching and scholarship were not distinctly Canadian. Even if the United States is where university study and instruction fi rst developed (Bartels 1962), there were similar developments in other countries during the early twentieth century (Jones 1992; Jonsson 2009; Nishizawa 1974; Pederson, Kloppenborg, and Tarbensen 2009) and therefore pioneers in marketing outside America. I would welcome biographical studies of the pioneer marketing scholars in other countries.

***

There are many lessons to be learned from the subjects in this collection as well as from other pioneers in marketing. I believe, and hope you will agree, that an understanding of the history of marketing ideas is essential to our understanding of where we are today as a discipline, that getting to know some of the great thinkers who contributed to that history of market-ing ideas adds insights and value to our heritage. I hope that some of the pioneers in this collection inspire you in your own marketing career, per-haps to become a better teacher or scholar. They continue to inspire me.


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Notes

NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

1. Originally conceived by the Academy of Marketing Science, the Sheth Foun-dation funded the production of this video series which is available at http://www.shethfoundation.org/grants/knowledge-dissemination/marketing-legends/.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 4

1. The Grange is a fraternal organization for American farmers, one which sup-ports their common economic and political interests. At that time it served as an eff ective advocacy group for farmers and their needs. Henry Charles Taylor, himself, later became a seventh degree (the highest level) Granger (Taylor 1960).

2. For a relatively complete listing of Taylor’s writings, see Anne Dewees Tay-lor’s (1958) bibliographic guide published in Agricultural History. That list-ing does not include Taylor’s (1990) centennial history of the family farm, Tarpleywick: A Century of Iowa Farming, or his (1992) A Farm Economist in Washington, 1919–1925, both of which were published posthumously.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 5

1. Matilda White married (Riley) in 1931 but continued to use her maiden sur-name on publications, at least through the 1940s. Thus, her publications have been cited and referenced under “White”. The oral history transcript, however, identifi es her by her married name–Matilda White Riley, and is therefore cited and referenced under “Riley”.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 8

1. That history chapter of Monieson’s dissertation was eventually published posthumously in Journal of Historical Research in Marketing (Monieson 2010).

2. For a more detailed discussion of Monieson’s critical ideas about marketing, see Tadajewski (2010).

3. The authorship was credited to Monieson and Stanley Shapiro, however Sha-piro maintains that the ideas and writing were largely Monieson’s.


172 Notes


4. The challenge was communicated verbally to Monieson and, therefore, the only written record I have of the exchange is an undated letter from Mon-ieson responding to his Queen’s colleague, Kristian Palda.

5. The full course syllabus with reading list and assignment sequence is avail-able at the Conference on Historical Analysis & Research in Marketing (CHARM) website, www.charmassociation.org.



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Index

AAdams, Henry Carter, 4, 21, 23–24,

32, 166advertising, 26, 30, 43, 94–108, 161,

162, 166, 168; advertising his-tory, 100–101, 103–4, 162, 163; advertising research, 70, 79

AEA. See American Economic Association

agricultural economics, 12, 54, 56–57, 58, 59, 60–64, 65–66 (Bureau of), 67, 69, 161. See also agricul-tural marketing

agricultural marketing, 6, 24, 25, 54–69, 161

Alderson, Wroe, 2, 16–18, 128–30, 133, 139–41

AMA. See American Marketing Association

American Economic Association, 21, 22American Marketing Association, 8,

11–12, 46, 80, 95, 110, 136, 143, 150

American Marketing Journal, 85, 92American Marketing Society, 80, 95Arnold, Pauline, 70, 80, 84–92 passim,

169Arnold Research Service. See Arnold,

Pauline

BBartels, Robert, 2–3, 4, 16, 18, 19, 34,

38–39, 99, 127Beckman, Theodore N., 4, 7–13

passim, 10, 16, 17, 109–23, 126–30, 139, 146–49, 155–56, 161–67 passim

biographical research: analysis, 14–15; archives, 5, 6, 7–15 passim,

10, 168; basic approaches, 3; historical research methods, 3, 5; interviewing, 11; selecting subjects, 5–8; source materials, 5, 8–14, 10; value of, 1, 15, 167, 168–169; writing, 14–15

Brentano, Lujo, 4, 37, 38, 57

CCensus of Distribution, US, 115–17,

120, 128, 161CHARM. See Conference on His-

torical Analysis and Research in Marketing

Cherington, Paul T., 4, 16–17, 81, 85, 87, 89, 102, 107, 168

Classical School of Economics, 21–22, 38, 127

commodity school (approach) of mar-keting thought, 42, 58, 81, 111

Complexity Theory, 129, 132, 139, 140Conference on Historical Analysis and

Research in Marketing, 140, 172n5

Conrad, Johannes, 4, 22, 57, 59consulting, 1, 14, 29, 87, 91, 94, 129,

165; and Beckman, Theodore N., 7, 10, 12–13, 109, 115, 116–18; and Davidson, William R., 3, 8, 143, 145, 146, 148, 149, 151–52, 152–55, 156, 167; and Monieson, David D., 124, 127, 129, 130–31, 135, 139; and White, Percival, 7, 11, 70, 71, 77, 79, 80, 85, 86, 87–90, 166

consumer orientation. See marketing concept

Converse, Paul D., 2, 4, 16–18, 46, 54, 63, 81

Page numbers in italics refer to fi gures and tables.


190 Index


DDavidson, William R., 4, 7–13 passim,

10, 109, 118, 126, 143–59, 160–66 passim

distributive justice, 26–27, 132, 134–37 passim, 161, 164, 166. See also social ethics

Eearly marketing courses. See university

courses in marketingeconomic history, 25, 58Ely, Richard T., 4, 19–23, 26–27, 31,

43–44, 54, 56–58, 64, 67, 69ethics, social. See social ethics

FFisk, George M., 4, 44, 45foreign trade, 25, 41, 43, 45, 46, 47,

51. See also international mar-keting; international trade

functional school (approach) of mar-keting thought, 28, 42, 54, 63, 81, 111

GGerman Historical School of Econom-

ics: and Adams, Henry Carter, 21, 23; and agricultural eco-nomics, 57, 69; and American Economic Association, 22; and American economics, 20–22, 37, 39, 132–33; and Classical School of Economics, 21, 22; and early marketing education in Germany, 59–60; and Ely, Richard T., 20, 21, 22–23, 31, 57; and Jones, D.G. Brian, dis-sertation, 1–2; and pragmatism, 20–21, 37, 40, 44, 49–51, 165; and research method, 21, 25, 26, 37, 49, 57, 69, 104, 163; and social ethics, 22; and socialism, 37; students of, 4, 20–23, 31, 37, 44, 104, 163

HHagerty, James, 4, 13, 111–16, 148Hammond, M.B., 4, 57, 112, 148Harvard Business School, 4, 6, 84, 107,

126–27, 132–33, 146, 168Historical School. See German Histori-

cal School of Economics

history of marketing thought, 1–18, 50, 104, 127, 133, 138–39, 147, 160–69

Hollander, Stanley C., 2, 7, 16, 18, 92Hotchkiss, George Burton, 4, 7, 10,

12, 17, 94–108, 161–66 passimHunt, Shelby, 16, 136–38

Iinstitutional school (approach) of mar-

keting thought, 41, 42, 81, 111Institutional School of Economics, 20,

21intellectualization, 124, 128, 136, 138,

140. See also usable knowledgeinternational marketing, 6, 34–54,

161, 162, 166. See also foreign trade; international trade

international trade, 35, 41–42, 45, 47–48, 162. See also foreign trade; international marketing

JJohns Hopkins University, 21, 23, 43Johnson, Joseph French, 94, 96, 97, 166Jones, Edward David, 4, 6, 10, 19–33,

34, 40, 41, 58, 68, 104, 160–66 passim

Journal of Historical Research in Mar-keting, 2, 120, 169

Journal of Macromarketing, 124, 134, 136, 138

Journal of Marketing, 84–85, 90, 119; “Leaders in Marketing” series, 2, 17, 109, 160; “Pioneers in Marketing” series, 2, 17, 18, 95, 160, 168

Journal of Retailing, 90, 92, 143

KKinley, David, 4, 43–44, 47, 50

L“Leaders in Marketing” series. See

Journal of Marketing“Legends in Marketing” series. See

Sheth FoundationLitman, Simon, 4, 6, 10, 12, 13, 14,

34–53, 104, 160–66 passim

MManagement Horizons, 8, 143–56

passim


Index 191


Market Research (journal), 86, 89–90, 92, 162

market research (practice), 7, 70, 77–80, 84–92, 126, 146–47, 161, 162

Market Research Corporation of America, 13, 70–71, 76–92 pas-sim, 162

Market Research Council, 70, 85, 163marketing concept, 28, 30, 47, 70,

76–77, 84, 92, 161, 164marketing courses. See university

courses in marketingmarketing engineering, 72–76, 78, 82,

90–92marketing history, 2, 25, 67, 86,

102–3, 104–6, 120marketing theory, 9, 13, 47, 112, 116,

117, 119, 127, 132, 133–34, 139, 164, 165

Maynard, Harold H., 4, 16–17, 113, 116,127, 146–50 passim, 156, 166–67

MH. See Management HorizonsMill Supplies, 25, 26–28, 32–33, 162Monieson, David D., 4, 6–13 passim,

10, 109, 124–42, 161–66 pas-sim, 169, 171n1 (chap. 8)

MRCA. See Market Research Corpo-ration of America

NNATA. See National Association of

Teachers of AdvertisingNational Association of Teachers of

Advertising, 46, 84–85, 95, 99National Marketing Review, 84–85, 90NATMA. See National Association of

Teachers of AdvertisingNew York University, 4, 94–108 pas-

sim, 162, 163, 166Northwestern University, 4, 54, 64,

67, 168Nystrom, Paul H., 4, 16–18, 91

OOhio State University, 4, 7–9, 12–13,

109–20 passim, 124, 126–29 passim, 140, 143, 146–53 pas-sim, 156, 166

Pphilosophy of science, 9, 100–101, 119,

131, 132, 136–38, 139

“Pioneers in Marketing” series. See Journal of Marketing

pragmatism and teaching, 64–65, 95–97, 97–100, 164–65

QQueen’s University, 7–8, 124–42 passim

Rrelationship marketing. See marketing

conceptretailing, 8, 13, 24, 26–28, 31, 33, 41, 42,

45, 51–52, 81, 91, 105, 112–13, 117, 120, 143–59, 163, 164

Riley, Matilda White. See White, Matilda

Sschools of marketing thought. See

commodity school of marketing thought; functional school of marketing thought; institutional school of marketing thought

Scientifi c Management, 164; and Jones, Edward David, 26, 29, 32, 161, 162; and White, Per-cival, 7, 11, 70, 73, 76, 77–78, 81, 82–84, 91, 92. See also Taylor, Frederick W.

Scott, Walter Dill, 168Scott, William A., 4, 58, 69services marketing, 82, 162Shaw, Arch W., 4, 28, 54, 63, 77, 111Sheth Foundation, 2–3, 168, 171n1

(chap. 1)social ethics, 19–32 passim, 84, 132,

137, 161, 162, 164, 165social responsibility, 55–57, 63–64,

100–101, 132, 151. See also social ethics

TTaylor, Frederick W., 73, 76, 77–78,

82–83, 91. See also Scientifi c Management

Taylor, Henry Charles, 4, 6, 10, 12, 54–69, 104, 161–66 passim, 171n2 (chap. 4)

‘Taylorism’. See Taylor, Frederick W.

Uuniversity courses in marketing, 24,

38–40, 41–43, 45, 46, 58–59,


192 Index


60, 99, 102, 111–12, 113–14, 162, 166

University of Berlin, 4, 20, 21, 22, 57, 59, 60

University of California, 6, 34–53 pas-sim, 166

University of Halle, 4, 22, 44, 57, 59, 60University of Illinois, 4, 6, 34, 40, 43–48University of Michigan, 3, 4, 19–25,

30, 31, 32, 34, 166University of Munich, 4, 37–38University of Wisconsin, 4, 6, 19–25,

43, 54–64 passim, 67, 68, 69

usable knowledge, 131–38

WWeidler, Walter, 4, 13, 16, 111–15Wharton School (University of Penn-

sylvania), 44, 96, 124, 128–29, 131

White, Matilda, 11, 70–93 passim, 171n1 (chap. 5)

White, Percival, 4, 7, 10, 11, 13, 15, 16, 70–93, 161–66 passim

wholesaling, 13, 24, 41–42, 52, 109, 112–13, 115–16, 120


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