A history of historical research in marketing.

The purpose of this chapter is to review historical research in marketing. Because of space limitations, this review is more a chronicle of what has been published about historical research in marketing than a critical historical analysis, hopefully providing the reader with a roadmap to further reading on historical topics of interest. Scholars in a wide range of disciplines have published historical research about marketing and have done so in various publications, many outside what would be considered the ‘marketing literature’. Except for some overall frequencies of publication reported in this introduction, this review has focused mostly on historical research published in marketing periodicals and in books. The discipline of marketing emerged early in the twentieth century as a branch of applied economics strongly influenced by the German Historical School and its offspring, the American Institutional School (Jones and Monieson, 1990). Thus, from its beginnings the academic study of marketing was influenced by an historical perspective. However, for economists studying marketing at the turn of the twentieth century, history was a means to an end rather than an end in itself. Marketing economists during that era studied the histories of marketing practices carried out in industries and by firms in order to discover marketing functions and principles. The earliest university courses in marketing in North America were taught in 1902/03 when the Universities of Illinois, Michigan and California offered the 3