A History of Marketing / Episode 14
If you listened to my first podcast with Philip Kotler, you heard Phil discuss marketing emerging in the early 1900s as a form of “applied economics.”
This week, my guest Mark Tadajewski shares research that casts doubt on that version of events, revealing a narrative of early marketing history that is much more complex than the traditional story and veers into surprising, supernatural territory.
Listen to the podcast: Spotify / Apple Podcasts / YouTube Podcasts
Mark Tadajewski is Professor of Marketing at The Open University and Editor-In-Chief of the Journal of Marketing Management. He’s a marketing historian that I admire for two reasons:
First, there’s his dedication to his research. For the past two decades he’s pored over seemingly every artifact related to marketing history. When you listen to this conversation you can hear how he has an encyclopedic knowledge of the evolution of marketing. I’m only a few months into exploring marketing history on this podcast, so speaking with Mark Tadajewski was a humbling experience.
Second, there’s his bravery. Tadajewski’s research pokes holes in a narrative that’s endorsed by giants in the field of marketing. There’s considerable professional risk in second-guessing the likes of Philip Kotler. But Tadajewski is unafraid of surfacing what his research reveals, even when it links marketing’s development to fringe topics like telepathy, hypnosis, spiritualism, and other forms of psychical thinking.
This podcast is called, “A History of Marketing” not “The History of Marketing.” There isn’t one single definitive story of history, so I enjoy presenting multiple perspectives of marketing’s development alongside each other through conversation.
Listen to the podcast: Spotify / Apple Podcasts / YouTube Podcasts
Myth Busting Conventional Marketing History
Andrew Mitrak: Mark Tadajewski, welcome to A History of Marketing.
Mark Tadajewski: Andrew, it's nice to be here. Thank you for asking me.
Andrew Mitrak: Yes, it's so great to meet with you. When I started this podcast, you were the exact type of scholar I was hoping to meet with, so I'm so glad we had this opportunity to connect. You've thought deeply about marketing's history and evolution and early beginnings and you published a great deal of research around this.
Your LinkedIn profile states quote, "I challenge conventional perspectives to encourage a critical examination of marketing thought in the broader political economic environment.” And you've also been described as quote, "the foremost myth buster of marketing thought."
What are some of the top myths you've busted or the non-consensus ideas you put forth? How have you sort of earned this reputation for challenging conventional perspectives?
Mark Tadajewski: The myth busting thing, I think it's a result of somebody else's paper; [D.G. Brian Jones] a colleague that I worked with a lot actually in the last 20 years wrote a paper called "The Myth of the Marketing Revolution." And you see lots of similar titles to that. And so what I've done basically, whether it's the marketing concept, relationship marketing, service dominant logic, the history of motivation research, the history of marketing education generally, with all of those, I've generally looked at the literature and gone, okay, this is great.
But I know from being a bit of a sad character who sat in offices at midnight, looking through the Harvard Business Review from the very first issue and going through everything, this doesn't seem quite correct. And so if I get a sense that there's an argument that I think is problematic, then I tend to start digging a little bit more.
Rethinking "The Marketing Revolution": Did the Marketing Concept really start in the 1950s?
There's a paper by a guy called Robert J. Keith, published in 1960 in the Journal of Marketing. It's called "The Marketing Revolution." Now Keith's core argument basically is that throughout the history of marketing, what we see is a progression. We've gone from—he's talking about the Pillsbury Company in particular, but he's generalizing his argument to business generally—So he says we've moved through a number of stages. He talks about a production era, which is roughly 1869 to about 1930. Then it's a sales era, 1930 to 1950. Then the marketing era in 1950. And that's where people usually stop. But he also mentions a couple more. He talks about marketing control, about 1958, and he talks about something later called “change.”
Now, a lot of people, you know, if you open an introduction to marketing textbook, any of them pretty much, they'll say the marketing concept—this idea that the organizations should be orienting all their activities around the consumer—appears about 1950. I was like, really? You really survived in business, if you're a production-oriented company, just by producing whatever you could and hoping everybody buys it? Or through hard selling? You just sell people as many things as possible. You don't worry about overloading them? You don't worry about telling them fibs because you're never gonna see them again? It's a transactional orientation. You don't expect to see them again in the future, so you can get away with it now.
And so what? In the 1950s people suddenly saw this light and went, "Oh, you know what we should be doing? Actually, we should be making things people want." And I thought that just doesn't sound really true.
I started reading again some of the other historical papers that have been written in that area and people were contesting it; the textbooks were never picking it up. It was like, okay, this is really interesting.
John Wanamaker: A 19th Century Relationship Marketer
So I started writing my own papers on how you should think about this differently. I found earlier examples like, you look at the merchant princes from the 1850s onwards basically.
John Wanamaker for example, a really famous retailer, would walk around his store with customers and he would be offering them, you know, whatever sweets or nuts or whatever he was eating and chatting to them really nicely and kindly. And he was really smart because he would give gifts to the children. You know, so immediately you're impressing the parents, the kid loves it massively. And the kid goes away with a really positive impression and when it comes their turn to buy, they come back to you. And Wanamaker's there selling them the things that they actually want.
Andrew Mitrak: Wanamaker also has one of the most famous quotes in marketing, which is something along the lines of, "I know that half my advertising is wasted, the problem is I just don't know which half."
I gotta do a full episode on Wanamaker because he seems like a really fascinating guy.
Mark Tadajewski: His stores are fantastic. But I used Wanamaker to say... I'm dipping about a little bit, but you get the marketing concept, and then you get later developments called relationship marketing that people say appear in 1970. That's complete fiction as well. You know, people have always been interested in long-term relationships.
You read Henry Sidgwick, who was somebody that Harlow Gale used to read. He would talk about how people like to find organizations, you know, even in like 1850, that they actually like to deal with because if you could deal with them once and they sold you something great, you could go back and it meant you didn't have to think or worry about who you're buying from. So, again, none of this was new.
But when I was looking at the Robert J. Keith paper, I was like, okay, he says Pillsbury are orienting themselves all around the consumer, that's great, but I know that argument also appears in Percival White's work from 1927, where—and this is a pretty much near verbatim quote—it says, "the thesis of this book is that the beginning and end of all marketing is the consumer." Okay, that sounds very much like Robert J. Keith. So okay, we can critique it on simple grounds. People have mentioned this before.
When you look at some of the citations of people mentioning Keith's work, they usually cite a guy called [JB] McKitterick, who actually says in one of his papers—and it's a really interesting thing that should have been the giveaway—you know, [paraphrasing], “People that take their time to read earlier business periodicals will usually find out that most of the ideas that we think are original to us have usually been articulated way before.”
Not So “Customer-Centric”: Pillsbury’s Price Fixing Cartel
Mark Tadajewski: So I go and read this material and I knew the history was really flawed. We're trusting Robert J. Keith quite a lot here. His narrative sounds a little bit self-serving. Pillsbury's gone from ignoring the consumer in 1870 to orienting everything that they do around them.
I said, well, how can I find out what they were really doing? So I read the histories, that didn't tell me much more.
I thought, oh, I know what I can do. I wasn't sure whether this would work, but I knew that the Freedom of Information Act in the United States—there are loads of reasons why you might not want to do this, but I did it anyway. So you basically write to the FBI. And you say, can you send me any information you have on this company, these people? And as long as they're dead or it's a company, they'll generally, depending on whether the information needs to be redacted or kept back, they'll send it to you. And they sent me the file on the Pillsbury Company.
And so I was reading this. And as I'm reading this one Saturday morning, I'm sitting there and I've got bits of an idea for this paper and I'm reading it going, wait a minute. The period when he's saying we're now revolving everything we do around the consumer? Pillsbury was involved with a price fixing cartel, which is about the least customer friendly thing you could be doing, and the FBI were investigating them. And so it traces how they were doing this. Basically they were flying into, I think it was the Twin Cities. They were flying in there.
The FBI were monitoring who was traveling, what they were—you know, they were finding out from hotels who had stayed where, what people had talked about. And it seems like they had people that were feeding them information, informants, saying there's price fixing going on amongst these 12 companies. And interestingly, when they confronted senior executives at Pillsbury with this information, they went, "No, no, no, no, no, no. We haven't done this," you know.
I probably wouldn't do that with the FBI. Because they're going to find out. And so the FBI keep digging and they do find out substantial evidence that price fixing—basically people have been meeting. You can technically talk about past prices, yeah, that doesn't violate the Sherman Act, which is basically an act that deals with restraint of trade. But what you can't do is talk about even speculatively what prices might look like in 12 months. And that's where they really landed in a horrible bind.
Andrew Mitrak: By the way, this is Pillsbury, the company that in America is best known for the Pillsbury Doughboy that goes "tee hee." Behind it are these people who are engaged in a price fixing cartel to undermine consumers.
And what year are we in by the way? What year are these meetings happening?
Mark Tadajewski: The FBI seem to think it was happening before the period that they managed to investigate it, but they say at least since 1958 and up to the mid-1960s. And the company actually did say, well, this won't have impacted the consumer because even though we control this massive market for—it was flour, the product they were controlling the price of—they said, well, we're only dealing with business buyers basically, flour millers that will buy from us. So we're not actually dealing with the consumer. Which is hugely disingenuous because companies don't often go, "Oh, I'm paying more for this, we'll just deal with that and not pass it to the consumer." Prices, you know, get passed on to the consumer.
So eventually, after the evidence was passed to them, in this period that would effectively be where Robert J. Keith is talking about marketing control. Now marketing control in Keith's article, or in later speeches, was basically the idea that the whole of the organization will revolve around marketing and marketing is in charge of all decision making effectively. At this point when Keith's talking about marketing control, they're actually engaged in trying to control the market in a far more nefarious and insidious way that has negative consequences for the consumer.
So not only can you contest the history of the marketing concept by saying, well, it appears much earlier than lots of people think it does, and here are all the examples... but also, when Pillsbury were mentally orienting all their activities around the consumer—and they put it like this, "the consumer should be the center of the business universe"—they were actually doing what they could in this particular case to ensure that they maximize their profits rather than delivering more competitive prices to consumers. And again, you know, you can only study this using methods like asking for information from the federal government.
Beyond “Applied Economics”: Psychology's Forgotten Role in Early Marketing
Andrew Mitrak: There's an amazing use of the Freedom of Information Act. So I'm starting thinking about all the historical characters I'd like to do a FOIA request on.
My first interview on this podcast was with Philip Kotler. I asked him about the origins of marketing and Kotler described it as emerging as a field of applied economics.
Mark Tadajewski: Yeah.
Andrew Mitrak: And this framing of marketing as applied economics, this is one of those conventional perspectives that you challenge. So what's your take on this description of marketing's origins?
Mark Tadajewski: You see, it sounds really plausible. I mean really, really plausible. And again, when you've got people like Philip Kotler or Jag Sheth or Professor Kumar as well actually, in a paper in the Journal of Marketing, saying—Kumar said something like, "until 1945, it was generally accepted that marketing was developing out of economics," and I was like, okay, this is really good.
So I started to look and see, well what are the connections here? And people didn't really explain it. And so that was where I was going, well this doesn't—right, so people assert it but they don't really tell me what happened. And when you start to look at what might have been the case, you read Bartels's History of Marketing Thought. And the chapter where Bartels is talking about marketing's connections to economics—something that was explored by a guy called Don Dixon in much more detail—Bartels actually goes, here's what marketing theorists and thinkers could have taken from economics, not what they did, what they could have taken. So it's speculative. And there's about three references at the end of the chapter, so it's like he's guessing a little bit, it seems.
Now that some people have looked at what marketing has taken, Dixon does it really well, and it's been a long time since I've read it. But so I was looking at that and going, okay, the links seem to be a lot weaker. So, okay, maybe we need to be a bit more tempered. You know, we can't just assert marketing developed out of economics. Perhaps there are lots of different intellectual trajectories there. And so that's where I was thinking.
And what Bartels actually does seem to suggest more clearly is that if anything, marketing was basically springboarding off economics. In the sense that, here's this fairly abstract science, yeah? Okay, but the marketplace is much more complex.
So when you read a lot of the papers around the subject in the early history, what you find are early people that were trained in economics going out to the marketplace because they were aware that their abstractions didn't map onto what people were doing in the marketplace very well. So they do stuff like going into the shops, literally following goods as they were moving from production through to the ultimate consumer to see which intermediaries were adding value, who was important, who was not, where was cost being wasted.
So the picture was more complicated. And as I started to dip into this a lot more, it was like, well, okay Bartels suggests economics could have been important, but he also suggests that economics certainly wasn't the only major strand of thought that was influencing marketing thought.
And he says psychology clearly is really important because if you're trying to understand the consumer, then you need to be getting into their mind in some way shape or form through appropriate research, even through introspection.
But what I found really interesting about Bartels the more I looked at it, I was sitting there just trying to make sense of this. And he says, what's really, really, really important that psychology's told us a lot about? It's about the power of thought.
I was like, okay, that's an interesting angle. And Bartels seems to imply that, you know, there's something there to be looked at.
I started exploring, “Well, how's psychology influenced marketing thought generally?” And so that led me to people like Arthur Frederick Sheldon, Katherine Blackford who was a psychologist character analyst, and people at Harlow Gale. A lot of these figures aren't really written about very much in marketing, or if they are, it's very partially explored.
And so I started exploring the different connections between psychology and marketing and that took me along, yeah, some really interesting pathways.
Arthur Frederick Sheldon: The Correspondence School
Mark Tadajewski: The more I looked at people like Arthur Frederick Sheldon and his correspondence course for example, which I wanted to explore particularly the early parts of marketing thought, how psychology and economics were vying for engagement there. And Sheldon in his textbooks basically that he would give to students, was talking about again the importance of studying the consumer and providing them with goods and services that they really want. And he made the really important point that people don't really buy products. They buy the services that the products provide, and people buy services that are useful. But to understand what useful actually means, you need to study the consumer and you need to understand how they might be thinking about a product, what types of goods might be really applicable to them.
And you see multiple strands of psychological thought appearing at this time. Now, one of the most problematic, but she published with Sheldon in his correspondence course, was Katherine Blackford, and she was one of the earlier writers on psychology and marketing basically. And she called him—you know, she had a very high opinion of Sheldon and she called him like the equivalent of Shakespeare and he was called the philosopher of selling. He was a really prominent figure.
But she was using something called character analysis, and this is never written about in textbooks for a very, very, very obvious reason. It was basically based on physiognomy—so the way people look, making judgments about their intellect by virtue of the slope of their forehead and how far back it goes, that thing—but also phrenology.
Now that might be a little bit familiar. It was basically this idea that the brain is this cluster of localized organs effectively. And the more active they are, the more you can feel them, you know, through somebody's scalp basically. Really, really quasi scientific, but it was really powerful at that time. So this whole idea of making judgments about people and their psychology on the basis of the way that they look or the bumps on their head was being explored.
Andrew Mitrak: You've talked about Arthur Frederick Sheldon and let's just ground listeners into it. Where are we in history? So who was Arthur Frederick Sheldon? I'm just looking him up here. He was born in 1868, lived through 1935 and within that period, when did he make most of his contributions to marketing thought or why consumers buy things?
Mark Tadajewski: Right. Well, he started correspondence school in 1902.
Andrew Mitrak: What exactly is a correspondence school?
Mark Tadajewski: It's basically like distance learning, but 100 years ago, 100 plus years ago. So people would write to him, they'd subscribe to his school and he would offer discounts for cash, all this stuff to get people to subscribe. And you'd get a course basically, and you get all of these little manuals. In fact I might have one. So yeah, this is what you would get.
Andrew Mitrak: So yeah, you're holding up a pamphlet. I see you have your post-it notes in it. How many pages is that?
Mark Tadajewski: So the pamphlets, it's quite a small pamphlet, but this is 112 pages. They would be up to like 32 in each curriculum, okay? Again, these are nightmarish to get hold of now.
But students would write to him. He would send them these booklets. And they'd have exercises in for people to do. But his whole philosophy of selling as I'd mentioned, it links very much with what Vargo and Lusch have more recently called service dominant logic, and it's this idea that people don't buy the goods, they buy the service that the good provides. And he said to his students, the people that employ you, that you work for, the people that you serve, they're interested in buying the service that you can provide. All everybody ever does is provide service, which is usefulness. So the more you train, the more useful you can be to an employer.
Andrew Mitrak: So the students in this school, what are they hoping to get at the end of this program? I've signed up. Am I looking to have a career in sales, am I looking to have a career in advertising, am I hoping to become an early type of marketer? Like what is it that they hope to get out of it?
Mark Tadajewski: All of the above. So the people taking these courses are the people that couldn't afford to go to university because obviously universities, you know, it's still the preserve of pretty affluent people or people that are willing to get into a lot of debt to get through it.
Now, at this point, you've got universities full of relatively wealthy people and you've got a vast amount of people that are moving into sales oriented trades, working in shops, that thing. So this was like, okay, how can I improve my prospects going forward? Oh, I can take these and I can read them at night, I can upskill that way.
And Sheldon would issue a certificate. I think it was—this was really intelligent—it was valid for three years or thereabouts. And every three years if you came back and did the course again, you would be regiven the certificate.
It covered salesmanship basically, but it would give all the students basically all the cutting edge buzzwords that they needed. It would give them insights into some of the most advanced thinking of the time, and character analysis and stuff like that was pretty advanced at that point.
But he was, Sheldon was a very, very, very savvy marketer and this is something that we can all take from these people. Sheldon was connected to the Rotary Club. You know, these huge amounts of business people that start forming service clubs in the early 1900s or thereabouts, 1908, 1910 onwards. And so his students basically would do these courses, they would generally then get their certificate, they could then say to their employer "this is what I've done," and for a lot of people at that time, that would demonstrate the progression their employers wanted to see. They wanted to see students that were actually engaged and were willing to go home at the end of a day, read these booklets.
Now, what was good about the booklets, I mean this is really smart. They not only gave you all the business, sales, marketing knowledge that you needed in a really succinct form and they're really clearly written by and large, but they also gave people advice about health, wellbeing, the types of exercise they should be doing. You know, encourage people to drink a lot more water, avoid alcohol, avoid cigarettes. You know, recommendations like, before a job interview, maybe don't stop at a saloon for a glass of whiskey because that's not gonna look great. You know that thing. But it was basically like a university course in miniature.
But universities were incredibly jealous of this material when it started to appear because these courses were selling for relatively limited amounts of money to lots of people. And I mean Sheldon's school went pretty quickly from, you know, a couple of thousand students to 15,000, and then by the time Sheldon dies, it's estimated that he's taught at least 250,000 students across the world.
So he was an influential guy.
Andrew Mitrak: It's this early distance learning, hundreds of thousands of students have purchased and signed up for these pamphlets, they've read about that and this is years before the MBA program emerges. This is the certificate you can get if you want to be in sales and show to your employer that you have the knowledge, that you're eager, that you're learning about it in your own time and this can help you stand out from other candidates. Was the word marketing used in these books or is it more that it had a lot of the fingerprints of marketing? It just wasn't sort of rolled up into marketing. Or how did marketing sort of fit into the Sheldon school?
Mark Tadajewski: A lot of the time they're talking about salesmanship rather than marketing. But marketing as a word has been around since like the 16th century, 17th century maybe, but it's been around for a long time. At this point they're talking a lot about salesmanship, but in a lot of ways that have contemporary resonance.
Sheldon's Ideas: Business Building, Relationship Marketing, and Customer Lifetime Value
Mark Tadajewski: I mentioned relationship marketing. That's shorthand basically for forming relationships with consumers. Sheldon's whole business philosophy was oriented around what he called business building, which is this idea that once you've got a customer, you want to hold onto them. And so he talks about the permanency of patronage.
Now there's a really cool example and this is all information that he's giving to students, you know, who haven't maybe got mentors or anything like this. So this is all really valuable. He talks about basically every interaction that you have with a customer can build and build and build and you can sell them more and more. And so he talks about a young couple who come into a store and they're after a parasol for their baby carrier basically. And he goes, you may or may not make the sale at that moment, but what you've got is information. You've got information that at this house live a young couple who are relatively affluent, who have a young child. And the child's going to grow through these years and you can probably every couple of years sell them something different that's right for their child at that point of development. And the ideal he said—and again this is pretty heavily gendered—is you want to keep the customer until the point when the mother of the family is buying a tombstone for the father. So, you know, when people talk about customer lifetime value, this is...
Andrew Mitrak: That's literally customer lifetime value.
Mark Tadajewski: Yeah, you've got them from the beginning till the end.
Andrew Mitrak: The other thing that you bring up with these Sheldon books is that it's not just about salesmanship, but it's about lifestyle. It's about how you present yourself, how you're healthy.
Mark Tadajewski: Well you've got to remember that, you know, it's an early professionalization move because you've got traveling salesmen at that point who are quite well known for living, you know, fairly alcohol infused lives and socializing with people to get them to buy. And Sheldon's point is, no, no, no, no, no. If you want to have a long career and if you want to be the professional individual that you are, this is how you should live your life. You know, you shouldn't tell rude jokes. You should drink in moderation if at all. And he provides exercises that people should be doing as well. And he says, you know, if you do all of the things that I recommend—now, this is a bit dark—you could live till you're 100 years old. Now Sheldon didn't. He lived till he was like 67. So, you know, there's a mixed message there.
This has been happening for a long time. And you can understand why because it's great for employers. If you've got somebody that's been through this course, you're going to get employees that know how to take care of themselves. They know about relevant business practices, and you're probably going to get quite a lot of mileage out of them because if they're young and they're healthy and they're engaged and they're not drinking heavily, they're going to stay in your employment for a lot longer. It's not coercive. You know, it's power relations in a really positive way. In other words, I become a great employee by doing all of these things. I live a long, happy, fruitful life that works well for my employer, it works well for the banks that fund my employer's expansion of his business. Everybody benefits effectively. So it's a really seductive discourse.
Weird “Science”: Phrenology, Hypnosis, Telepathy, and Psychic Influences
Andrew Mitrak: There's that seductive discourse that is, you know, overall towards health if you're encouraging people to exercise, not drink or reduce smoking and things like that. But there is also sort of this thread of the weird ideas of psychology. Phrenology you mentioned. What was his relationship to Katherine Blackford? Do they collaborate with each other?
Mark Tadajewski: Yeah, it's a complex one. Sheldon basically sought out people that were at the cutting edge of whatever discipline they were at or involved with. And he saw Katherine Blackford—she was apparently a trained medical doctor, there's some uncertainty on this front. But whatever she was, she was extremely well versed in then popular-ish ways of looking and understanding people: phrenology, physiognomy. These were not massively obscure at this point and marketing did a lot to try and beat it out of its early practices.
But so he's looking at people like that. But when you read his books, you get a lot of very up to date perspectives, you know, business building, service, all these kinds of things, the importance of market research in different ways. But then there's also really what strikes the contemporary reader as a bit of a shocker, because he's there going, "Oh, and now I'm going to talk about hypnosis and its role in sales." You're like, okay, that's unusual. And then it moves on fairly quickly to telepathy, which in case people aren't familiar with it, it's mind-to-mind communication without the mediation of the ordinary senses. So thought transfer effectively.
Andrew Mitrak: Telepathy is having a comeback. There's a very popular podcast right now...
Mark Tadajewski: The Telepathy Tapes. Yeah, yeah.
And again, what people need to always remember when you look at this material and even in the contemporary present—because there's telepathy being brought back into business through materialist telepathy and you've got brain-to-computer interfaces and a whole bunch of things—it's not dismissing these things outright, but looking at this literature and going, well what were they really talking about?
Now Sheldon in terms of hypnotism, he's dead against it, because he's very much of the mind that marketing and sales education or engagement basically with the customer should always be about educating them. It's not about deadening their will, which is how he viewed hypnosis. You know, imagine let's go a bit extreme, the people on the stage that you've seen being hypnotized where they're suddenly, you know, dancing like a duck or quacking or all this stuff.
So that's what he's reacting to. It's like the hypnotist is seen to be somebody, like Demare's work, you know, somebody that's got immense power over the person that they're hypnotizing and it deadens the will entirely. Now Sheldon was very savvy because he realized that wasn't a good look, you know, then you don't want to be doing that. So he's very critical of hypnosis, but very positive about telepathy. Right?
And so this makes a lot of sense when you start looking at the intellectual foundations underpinning it. So he's using a lot of the material from a guy called Prentice Mulford, who talks about mind-to-mind communication in his own way. And also a guy called Thompson J. Hudson who wrote a book where it was all about psychic development basically, but he talked about the self as divided into the objective self and the subjective self. Now what this should be telling a lot of people is the idea that the conception of how Sheldon and people at that period were understanding who we are and how we act and how we think is way more complicated than a lot of the early literature tells you. It just tells you if you read EK Strong's work from the 1920s, it just talks about consciousness. It doesn't talk about the strata of the mind or anything like this.
And Sheldon's drawing upon this literature. He says actually there's effectively a subconscious and a superliminal consciousness. And that material feeds into the discussion on telepathy in the sense that the subjective self that Sheldon's actually referring to were seen to be the conduit for where our memories are stored, is the facility that enables telepathy effectively. And it will eventually become—you know, the subjective self is also defined as like the most suggestible part of who we are. They often split the self into two brothers. The objective self being the smart logical one who doesn't take other people's opinions without extensive critique, the rational part of our mind. And the subjective self is the brother that's been left in charge of the business that's not really that skilled at it and is ripped off by sales and other people who can tell them basically whatever they want.
So Sheldon's there using all of this material and he says, well, the literature on telepathy suggests that this is actually very productive. So he explains how you can think about using it in your own business practice and he basically encourages the neophyte salesman to be as sensitive as possible, so that you can sense when the psychological moment in terms of making the sale is there before the consumer themselves is actually aware of the moment. And he says, and you can do this through telepathy. And this is going to, you know, 250,000 students.
"Telepathy" in Sales: Literal Mind Control or Enhanced Sensitivity?
Andrew Mitrak: And if I was to steelman telepathy or try to take it as seriously as I could. Obviously there's reasons to be skeptical of telepathy, but if I also think of all of the sort of unconscious communications and there's what's spoken but then there's—if I'm a salesperson, there's how I present myself, how I dress, how I greet you, all of the things that are like non-verbal communication that can influence somebody. How products are packaged, how they're presented, the idea of desires and keeping up with your neighbors and all of the irrational thoughts that we have.
All of that to an early thinker who's trying to find new words for it could think of that as telepathy in a way? Or it's something that's magical that's hard to quantify. Was that what was influencing this word of telepathy or do they literally mean like, I'm going to use brain to brain transmission of thoughts and stuff? Was it sort of that first sense or more of like that literal sense of how we think of it today?
Mark Tadajewski: Both. Yeah, so in other words, all the things that you mentioned about appearance, your knowledge of the products, your ability to engage with people, a lot of that was associated with being personally magnetic. You know, having some charisma that would engage people, being interested in their interests and trying to discern what would most appeal to them.
But they go beyond this, quite considerably beyond it in some cases where it's very much not only do you need to know about the consumer, but in an ideal sense, the person interested in telepathy should—or the salesman that's thinking about using it—you know, wants to find themselves a nice quiet location where they can visualize the consumer they're trying to target and try to imagine them in their life and what they're doing at that moment and send, you know, whatever messages you're trying to convey, literally project them. One of the examples is, try and imagine the person that you're seeing like they're at the end of a long tube and that will help you funnel your thoughts towards this person. I know, I know how this sounds. But they took it deadly seriously.
Now, when you read William Walker Atkinson's work, who's similar in orientation to Sheldon. Atkinson's there going, well, you know, we might not be successful the first few times we try telepathy, but you've got to practice this and there are lots of ways you can practice it. And he basically gives people exercises to do. So you know, there's a phenomenon called the sense of being stared at basically, and you may or may not have experienced it yourself.
Andrew Mitrak: So this is the idea of if I'm at a restaurant and somebody across the restaurant is looking at me – or if I'm observing somebody else, there's some sense that you know you're being watched. Is that sort of the idea?
Mark Tadajewski: Yeah, and that was one of the exercises that he recommended to try and enhance your psychic sensitivity. You know, to see whether you can make people turn around when you stare at them from the back. And there's a lot of this. You know, like trying to justify telepathy by going, it's a bit like wireless telegraphy. So you see people like Mark Twain talking about this, Samuel Clemens. So they give them lots of examples about how to do it.
But what you seem to find is that there's a date often given for when there's a shift away from these arguments. And it's 1912, it seems to be. And so William Walker Atkinson in particular, who's similar in orientation to Sheldon, in his work in particular, in the early literature you see him very occult oriented. You know, "Here's hidden knowledge that I'm imparting to you as a student," that thing. But later on he suddenly reverses. He suddenly says, actually no, people aren't taking psychology seriously because we've tied it too closely to the occult, to telepathy, to all of these kinds of unusually esoteric knowledge that people, particularly business people aren't seen to take too seriously. So he reverses and moves away from those perspectives. But, you know, irrespective of where you look, again, I got tons of this stuff lying around.
[Holds up booklet] So for people that can't see that, that's a booklet on Practical Mind Reading by William Walker Atkinson.
Mind Reading and Sales Management: The Impact of “New Thought”
Andrew Mitrak: What year was Practical Mind Reading published?
Mark Tadajewski: This was… 1906.
Andrew Mitrak: And so what's the relationship between this and early marketing? Practical mind reading and early marketing? What is the connection between the two?
Mark Tadajewski: Well William Walker Atkinson, who was a very astute promoter of this literature, so he would write on really occult subjects and also really sales managerial stuff, because his background—he worked in his dad's retail store at a greengrocer as a child and then later became a lawyer, when that career didn't flourish in the way that it was intended, turned to a lot of this material.
And they're all—all of these people basically at this time, they're all very much immersed in a literature that's called New Thought, okay? This is not sales or psychology that's necessarily underwriting a lot of what they're thinking, it's New Thought, which is the idea that thought, the way we think generally, has an ontologically powerful role in the world. In other words, our thoughts can shape reality. That to some people may sound a bit like, you know, the book The Secret or the Netflix film.
Where it's like, "Oh, you know, if I treat the universe like it's a vending machine, I can manifest whatever I want." You hear this stuff everywhere. Now they cite a lot of the New Thought literature, but what they do not tell you in The Secret in other places, which William Walker Atkinson and Sheldon do is, yeah, you know, have your subjective dreams, have your wishes, mobilize them to actually get out and do something in the world. It's basically a way of encouraging people to be optimistic and, you know, people that didn't have the financial backing that other people had to go, "Well I can do something with my life," and it was meant to encourage them.
But they said, okay, your practice as a marketer or a salesperson or whatever hinges on subjective realization—having those dreams, having those wishes and mobilizing them—but then objective realization. In other words, your subjective wishes will come to absolutely nothing if you don't go out into the marketplace and work really, really, really hard. The “work really hard” stuff's forgotten from The Secret. Everything just appears for people in The Secret, money and parking spots and all this stuff.
But so that's what they're all working with. And so that literature gets very occult. They start talking about how the unseen world—and by the unseen world, I mean dead people—can help you and can give you energy and can help you generate your ideas and get them out into the marketplace. And it seems very, very occult, but it's—and a lot of it is quite esoteric, but it has a really optimistic undertone, which is, okay, life may have dealt you a really nasty deck of cards, but let's go into the world with our best foot forward and here's how we can make a success of ourselves. Positive thinking, being enthusiastic, being engaged with people, reading this literature that was meant to improve you, enhance your sales presentations and skills and engagement and healthy living. In other words how you can actually do something really successful with your life. So that's where a lot of them are coming from. And they'll take any scientific perspective that they think will advance their interests to do so and it was, you know, hence the number of students, very successful.
Harlow Gale and Psychical Advertising Experiments
Andrew Mitrak: So continuing down this sort of unusual branch of marketing, one name that you brought up earlier is Harlow Gale. He's a relatively little known person today, but he lived from 1862 to 1945 and you wrote about him in a paper called "Rethinking Harlow Gale: the psychical influences on his contributions to advertising and their enduring reverberations." So can you share with listeners who was Harlow Gale and what were his contributions?
Mark Tadajewski: Gale, really challenging figure. I mean really challenging in the sense that he was supremely smart and also very forthright in terms of pursuing views that he felt were correct. So he had a very short academic career effectively. He was basically forced out of his institution. I think it was a really short span of time; people can find it in the article. But Gale's an interesting character because he was a member of the Society for Psychical Research. Now the Society for Psychical Research study things like telepathy, clairvoyance, apparitions of the dead, all of these kinds of things.
Now Gale becomes interesting in the sense that he's known as an experimentalist in advertising, one of the earliest. What people don't get from previous studies on Harlow Gale is the fact that before he becomes the experimentalist in advertising, he was actually going to seances and all these kinds of things where he's looking at people that are trying to make other groups think in certain ways and he's very interested in what they're saying, what they're understanding.
But when somebody's there saying "I can see, you know, God or Jesus or the saints in front of me," Gale was noticing how these dynamics operated in the seance context. And Gale goes, "What's the unifying thread here?" It's suggestion. These people are all being encouraged to see the saint, to see—in one case it was a floating vegetable above somebody's head—you know, all of these kinds of things. And so Gale's there going, okay, this tells me something about human nature effectively, that people can be very suggestible.
Gale's immersed in the Society for Psychical Research, their literature, especially F.W.H. Myers's work on the subliminal consciousness, and what Gale will call the multiplex self. Now that just basically means as intelligent human beings, we're both intelligent, we're also suggestible, but we also have a superliminal consciousness and a subliminal consciousness. Note the term. I'm not saying unconscious because even your subliminal consciousness was believed to be processing data constantly, okay?
So it's a really sophisticated view. Think: if I go to sleep and I dream about a work task, the dream can sometimes provide the solution if your brain's relaxed and it's thinking in different ways.
Now Gale's bringing all those ideas to his advertising work as well. So he's studying his students. And he goes, okay, I'm going to mail practitioners, see what advertising media they use, how they promote their goods. And I'm also going to get my students to look at some of these adverts as well because I'm interested in, you know, what gets their attention effectively when they look at an advert. Is it the text, is it the imagery?
Now, what he's trying to identify there is, right, not everybody will be affected by advertising in the same way. Some people will be much more critical and uninfluenced than others. There will be some people that can't articulate why an advert or why a particular brand or why a product influences them at all.
That was his cleavage point for trying to theorize how the subconscious plays a role in advertising interpretation. His argument—and this is where we have to give him loads of credit because it's really early on—was if somebody can't really explain why they bought a product, maybe they've been influenced at a subliminal level, and that's the influence that's going on there. Now subliminal and subliminal self, this isn't framed as a negative thing. It's not Hidden Persuaders. Gale's just going, there are other ways for us to be absorbing information and making sense of it.
Now, Gale's work really can only be understood if you combine the background in the Society for Psychical Research with his studies in advertising. That in short is what he did. But when you read earlier studies, they would just mention, "Here's Harlow Gale, published on advertising, did this, did this," and published in a journal called the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research.
But nobody decided for whatever reason—and I'm not judging anybody—nobody went, "Well, that's an interesting journal." And when you do start to dig into the background you go, okay, he's making sense of human suggestibility in these contexts and he's studying people in seances, he's studying people that are claiming clairvoyance, seeing distant sights way beyond what you can see literally in front of you. And so he's trying to explore whether some of these things exist or whether there are other dynamics in play. And the dynamics that they come together on is some degree of suggestibility that gets in below our conscious analysis basically.
Walter Dill Scott vs. Harlow Gale: Reframing Subconscious Influence as “Suggestion”
Now, the difference between him and Walter Dill Scott: Walter Dill Scott really doesn't like psychical research at all. He thinks it's something that is making psychology look ludicrous, in other words. Now Scott was publishing a lot on psychology and was well connected to the business community. And so he was explicitly trying to demarket psychology as he understands it away from earlier psychical perspectives. Now the turning point for him seems to be, he goes home to visit his family and a friend of his goes, "Wait a minute, why are you studying psychology? Why would you be interested in all these occult weirdnesses?" And he seems to take that really to heart because when you read his books, he's there going, "You know, this is all medieval superstition." Doesn't engage with the literature like Harlow Gale who has been a member of the Society for Psychical Research, read all of the literature, undertaken experiments himself, been really involved with all the key figures in it.
And so this seems very odd. And my point when I was looking at Walter Dill Scott's work was, okay, this is interesting. What you get here is you go from a multiplex interpretation of the consumer—this consumer who is stratified, so you've got subliminal, subconscious, it's a multifaceted consumer—to Walter Dill Scott who just goes, no, the consumer's not—he doesn't say multiplex, he just goes they're duplex. In other words, they can be rational and they can be suggestible. But most people are—and this is where we're problematizing the notion of economic man in a really big way—most people aren't rational at all. We like to think we are, but most of us are really the creature of suggestion, he argues. Now that's a perspective that's really common at the time.
But Scott is there, so Scott's there going, psychology is not psychical research. People are influenced by suggestion much more. And he dismisses psychical research as superstition, doesn't engage with the work. And for me, my point in looking at the transition between the two was, Scott's there claiming he's a scientist and yet he completely voids any engagement with the scientific method. He doesn't read the literature, he doesn't make a rational reasoned interpretation of it and critique of it.
He just goes "this is medieval superstition" and dismisses it. So the idea is that psychology as it's imported and incorporated into marketing isn't necessarily stretching our critical faculties, in other words. When it's introduced at that point, it's introduced in a really, really unscientific, uncritical way. That's why I wasn't a big fan of Walter Dill Scott's work. He had a huge impact, but Gale was more interesting.
Andrew Mitrak: On Walter Dill Scott's biography—so born 1869, lived until 1955. He was the president of Northwestern University, wrote a book called The Psychology of Advertising in Theory and Practice in 1903, and continued to write about the psychology of advertising. He was a professor of advertising and psychology. So an academic clearly held in high regard as president of Northwestern, early thinker in psychology and advertising.
But the quibble with him is not so much whether telepathy and other sort of weird parts of advertising were wrong or not, it's more that he dismissed them just because of all of the baggage that they carry, or that there wasn't a critical analysis of it. He was more, "Hey, just call all that stuff suggestion instead." Is that sort of the right way to think about it?
Mark Tadajewski: That's pretty much it. But you know what the really hilarious thing was? Walter Dill Scott—remember I already said to you that Sheldon was very critical of hypnosis because he saw it as deadening the will—Walter Dill Scott taught suggestion by hypnotizing his students because he was a trained hypnotist, who was really highly skilled. So the way that he would teach them would be to say, "What do you think of this product?" and it would be like, you know, some soap or something. And it would smell horrible, or perfume. And he would say "It smells—you think it smells really sweet," and they would say it smells really sweet. And he would say to their students, "You see, this is what suggestion is. Of course, of course though, business people don't hypnotize like this, but they do engage in suggestion," which of course is meant to limit the way the consumer's critical of your offerings.
But you know, he's an interesting character but he's full of contradictions. But he was really smart in the sense that he went, spoke to practitioners, wrote really easy accessible books for them. And then every time he rewrote material he would introduce case studies where people had applied his ideas from his earlier books and he would summarize them. So in other words, you got theory, you got people that have used the ideas and here's how they benefited from it. So he was super astute. And again, I'm not dismissing his contributions, I'm just saying if you're going to claim to be scientific, then it would be nice to see you actually apply the scientific method when you critique something.
Fom AIDA to the AIDAS Model: Sheldon's Lasting Impact on Advertising
Andrew Mitrak: Just to recap. We've talked about A.F. Sheldon who had a massive influence on marketing especially because of the sheer volume of people that he educated through his correspondence schools in the first half of the 20th century.
Mark Tadajewski: His impact was huge in the sense people that you've spoken to have mentioned the AIDA framework: Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action. Well Sheldon said, yeah, that's great, but remember we're trying to create the permanency of patronage. You don't just get people to buy your product, they've got to be satisfied because if they're satisfied they then become confident in your offerings and come back. So the AIDA model was transformed into the AIDAS model with Satisfaction being on the end. So he actually impacted advertising theory in a really substantive way as well.
Why Was This History Lost? An Accidental Omission or a Deliberate Burial?
Andrew Mitrak: That's right. So Sheldon is impacting advertising theory. Gale has this sort of unusual strand of thinking where his work has touched on clairvoyance, telepathy, spiritualism, and he's also one of the first experimenters in marketing and advertising. There's this whole body of work in the early 1900s that is these weirder things that are sort of lost to history. The question is, why was all of this lost to history? How did it sort of get buried in the history of marketing?
Mark Tadajewski: You know, history's written by the winners by and large. And people like to tell really progressive narratives about themselves. You know, when I refer to the Pillsbury narrative earlier, it's a really progressive narrative that suggests marketers have gone from this point to now being much more enlightened. And it doesn't look great to be looking back on your history and go, okay, we talked about phrenology, we talked about telepathy, we talked about hypnosis, and there's a lot of occult material embedded in all of this. That's not a great look in an introductory textbook.
So I think a lot of this material disappears because one, the material's really fragile, that disappears. It's not saved, it's not scanned by a lot of people. And then, you know, as these narratives like "marketing's applied economics" get repeated, they just become a—you know, I don't mean this in a rude way—but they become a shortcut to thinking. You know, so it's like, well that's that history and that's what I've got to teach. I don't need to think about it anymore than that. And it can become, you know, it smothers critical thinking effectively. But we're all guilty of it, you know, in lots of areas of our lives. We have to just assume that what we're being told is correct.
And that's really it. History's written by the winners and a lot of this stuff is written by people who have been written out of history in lots of different ways.
Finding Marketing History Through Foucault and the Cold War
Andrew Mitrak: I want to ask you what initially drew you to marketing as a field?
Mark Tadajewski: The honest answer is, it was really the only first subject, you know, that I really enjoyed. I really didn't like school full stop and then I got to college. Not college in the American sense, college in—I was 16 and I'd failed most of my exams, so I went to the local college where they helped me a lot. And I took a business studies course and it was the first time things seemed to drop into place, you know, and it was just fluid for me. So the minute we got to marketing in that course, I was kind of—it was just really interesting. I really enjoyed it. And of course, the minute you enjoy something, you just immerse yourself in it, so you improve much more rapidly anyway. And it was off the back of that really.
And then I very luckily went to a great university where I did political economy and politics, but then as a master's degree, I went to the University of Leicester and did an MSc in marketing. And there were some amazing scholars there. And again, this probably makes me look really shallow, but I went to see the professor of economics who was the head of the school at that point. And I walked into his room and it was just—it looked like an Amazon depot. It was just crazy books everywhere. And I just thought this is so cool. This guy just sits and reads and thinks and lectures and writes papers. I mean, what an amazing job. And I was like, okay, this is interesting.
And he was really good. He'd recommend readings to us every week and I was that student—I always get to lectures and stuff really early because I always dread walking in late. And I'd be there like an hour or two before the school opened because I'd go on the train. And I used to sit and read all the material he'd recommended, which I didn't think was unusual. I just thought I was doing the right thing. And he used to say, "Oh, what do you think about Coca-Cola's valuation?" or something like that. And I'd have all the figures because I've been reading Kellogg on Marketing that he'd been flashing up the week before. And so, you know, we'd developed a bit of rapport and he said, "Well, we've got, you know, a PhD program." And I went, "Well I'm broke," which has been the story of my life at least up to that point. And he said, "Well we can figure something out," and he got me onto the program and I was surrounded by really, really talented people who basically gave me a lot of freedom to do what I wanted. And that's really unusual. So I was just incredibly fortunate in so many different ways.
And when I got to the PhD program, they said, "Well, what are you interested in doing?" One of the people that supervised me was an organization studies theorist. No, I wasn't supervised by marketing scholars. And they said, "Well, do you like history? What do you like?" you know, thing. I said, yeah, that sounds good. And they recommended certain readings. They told me to go and look at Michel Foucault's work in particular. Really prominent French theorist who writes books that scare everybody to death. My supervisor, he was a really smart guy, his name is Campbell Jones, and he said, "Well here's a book called The Order of Things and it's about all these transitions between different disciplines and how they change. Oh it's the scariest book you'll ever read." And he said, "Could you do something like that?" And I went—because you don't want to say no—I went, "Yeah, yeah, sure, sure. I'll give it a go." And that was my introduction to it. We didn't have any formal training in terms of studying the history of marketing. Didn't know anybody that had really done it. So I just started reading and reading and reading and it started from there basically.
Andrew Mitrak: You found marketing when you were around 16 years old then. Yeah. And it was this Foucault example that sort of led you to dive deeper into marketing history. Yeah. Where did you start? You have this assignment, you have this big ambitious goal. What do you look for first?
Mark Tadajewski: I was really interested in how people come to think in the way that they do. How does our world become taken for granted? And so I knew that there've been lots of studies on the development of marketing, but very few of them had actually really linked them to the political, economical, social changes going on. There'd been a few papers but very, very, very few. And the reason is because it's really hard to do and it requires a lot of leg work. So I went, okay, that's something I could do.
So I started to dip into, you know, looking at the history of the business school, looking at the development of marketing and then going, okay, what important turning points have we maybe not paid much attention to? And one that hadn't at that point really been noticed particularly—because I'm talking about 2002 at this point—was the Cold War. I was like, okay, this clearly had massive ramifications, you know, 1947 to 1990. How did this impact on marketing and the business school?
And so I started reading around it generally and I chanced upon a—it was a book review and it was in the Journal of Marketing and it was a book called Philosophical and Radical Thought in Marketing that was being reviewed. And the person reviewing it was a guy called Hal Kazanjian. Could be pronouncing that very badly wrong. Sorry Hal. And in it he talks about how, you know, philosophical and radical approaches to marketing, this is really cool, this is really different. But he goes, you know, previously we wouldn't have done it. He doesn't really explain in a huge amount of detail why not. So because I've never really had a filter where this stuff is concerned, I just emailed him and said, "Why? What does this mean? Can you tell me?"
And he went, yeah, yeah. He goes, "Well, you know, at this point in time, of course there's a really virulent anti-communist movement." And he said being called liberal was bad enough. But if you so much as looked a little bit, you know, much further left leaning, then it became a real issue. What was scary enough when you started to dive into this in a bit more detail, it was enough for somebody to point at you and say "This is this guy's political economic orientation. He's a fellow traveler or he's interested in reading left leaning newspapers," and it could get you into a world of trouble. And Hal said his doctoral chair, the person on his committee, hadn't been very quick to sign a loyalty oath, you know, basically saying "I'm not a communist, there are no weird views being espoused here," and that was enough to get him basically, I believe, fired, ruined his career, had severe implications for his life.
The Cold War's Chilling Effect: How Politics and Funding Shaped Marketing Academia
Mark Tadajewski: What I started finding the more I dug around this, this wasn't unusual. So you'd see people turn up at lectures that you were doing, you know, at that point and you wouldn't know who they were. There were just two or three people stood at the back. It was external monitors evaluating what people were saying. And did you—in other words, were you being critical of the United States and its stance and its political economic system? Were you mentioning Russia too frequently? Were you mentioning it in a positive way? And if you did, there'd be serious consequences for you.
Now, at an individual level that sounds scary enough, but this was a fairly widespread phenomenon at this point in time as I started to find. And so I was there going, okay, there are lots of individuals that are being affected quite negatively by this. You hear about McCarthyism and you know, everybody gets the image, you know, it's real red scare terror and going after people in Hollywood, but also really badly in the university. And so I was like, okay, here are individuals being affected, but where are the institutional shifts? Are there bigger factors in play?
And I noticed that the business school was being criticized for producing overly descriptive research. The staff were being criticized because they didn't have PhDs generally. The students weren't seen to be very good. And so at this point it's like, okay, they suddenly start to get a lot of funding from the Ford Foundation in particular, which is a big philanthropic organization. That's an interesting link.
And what I noticed was that the Ford Foundation and the Carnegie Foundation and the Rockefeller—the big three they're called—they were focused upon by a number of really prominent government committees, you know, in the mid to late, I think it was the 1950s, but in a big way. And what the committees were focusing upon—so there was a report in 1952 and I think another one in 1953—they said, okay, we're looking at the philanthropic foundations and their funding and they seem to have been supporting social science in quite a big way. And so they'd been looking at racism, inequality, how they can handle some of those issues basically. Now the big problem was that the label social science, for a scary number of people, was conflated with socialism or some form of social philosophy.
And so you've got these foundations who are very powerful, very affluent being targeted by the government effectively. And they're there going, "Oh no, no, no, no. No, we're not. This isn't a social philosophy. In fact, what we've been doing if you look carefully is by studying some of these issues, we've basically been looking for ways to relieve the pressure in the system." You can get a sense of the desperation. And so they thought it very appropriate to suddenly twist their funding a little bit, to start funding something that would be perceived to be ideologically neutral or preferably a big support for the US political economic system. The business school was an ideal candidate.
Ford Foundation's Role in Promoting "Behavioral Science"
Mark Tadajewski: [The Ford Foundation] poured a lot of money into this, into the business school generally in an effort to upgrade it. In other words to make the business school, the research that was being funded, the people that were being trained, as scholarly, scientific, as objective, as neutral, as behavioral scientific as they possibly could. Now you'll hear a lot of people toss about the label behavioral science. That wasn't developed off the back of academics coming together and deciding that that was the label that fit what they did. That was a label that the Ford Foundation actually coined and then said "This is what we're funding. Do you fit into this specialism?"
Now they funded lots of business schools, but lots of individual professors in particular. One name that I'm sure you've heard before, in fact I know you have: Wroe Alderson was given a visiting professorship because his research was very interested in improving marketing management and in improving executive decision making, a lot of his work in that area. But also people like Philip Kotler.
Philip Kotler received money for computer simulation. Again think: computer technology enhancing executives and their decision making ability, very ideologically neutral, very positive in other words. And then, thinking about Jag Sheth. Jag Sheth mentioned in his discussion with you that he'd been connected—well he was obviously connected to John Howard. John Howard was funded in multiple different ways by the Ford Foundation because not only did they fund institutions, training programs, individual scholars, but they wanted to fund textbooks because how do you get this vision of what marketing and business research should look like out to as many people as possible? You produce textbooks.
Now Howard—the first book he did, it was something like, I can't remember the title of it off the top of my head, but the first book that he produced, Marketing and Executive Behavior or something like that, was funded by the Ford Foundation. The second one was a book called Marketing Theory which was a general version of the first book that he produced. And then the third, that material fed into the Howard and Sheth book that Jag was talking about. So the Ford Foundation's fingerprints were on a lot of this material. And a lot of the mathematical specialization that you see growing in the 1960s developed off the back of the Ford Foundation and their training programs in advanced mathematics and statistics.
Now, pretty much any big name from the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s either came in contact with the seminars themselves. Kotler was at one for example. Kotler's a very skilled mathematician, and the first edition of his textbook was much more mathematically oriented but he was told to revise it because it didn't have enough pictures, quote unquote, which I thought was cool.
But so you see then, they funded these really prolific researchers and you had to be, you know, somebody that they thought was super talented, highly likely to be very research productive. And people like Kotler, Perry Bliss, John Howard, they all fit that mold, and they did end up making huge contributions. So Ford's money went a long way to turning marketing into the positivistic, managerial, quantitatively oriented discipline that it is by and large in lots of countries. And that's really a result of the Ford Foundation's funding. And that you can trace back to the Cold War. And so the way the discipline looks isn't just a natural occurrence of scholars coming together. It's tied firmly to political and economic factors and the need for scholars at that point in time to be pledging that they were in the fight against communism effectively, which, you know, it's understandable, isn't it?
Risks of Researching Marketing's Past
Andrew Mitrak: Researching the history of marketing, it requires a lot of legwork. And I think that's for a couple of reasons. One, you're researching the history of ideas and there are certainly physical outputs like advertising or public relations things or textbooks where you have a physical record that's written and captured in some way, but a lot of those things, they can be ephemeral. They sort of disappear. Also you're studying the idea of thought, which is an organizational structure which may not be captured in the same way. So are those the reasons why it requires a lot of legwork to study marketing history or are there other factors at play that make it a particularly difficult or labor intensive field to study?
Mark Tadajewski: Well it's high risk, you know? Because when you've got a lot of people saying, here's the way the discipline developed or here are the core theoretical traditions and this is how they've developed. You've got to go, well, that seems reasonable, but I think there's something more there. And you have to, to some extent trust your gut and then start to go digging around. And you can go down lots of blind alleyways and that kind of, you know, if you're going to do that as a PhD student, you could run up to the time that you're actually allowed to do research for and you could get nowhere, so it's really risky.
But you're right, getting hold of a lot of this material. In fact I've got—I'll show you this—getting hold of stuff like this is really tricky. This is from 1906 I think this one.
Andrew Mitrak: And for listeners who are listening and not viewing, can you describe what you're holding there?
Mark Tadajewski: Yeah this is The Business Philosopher which is the journal that Arthur Frederick Sheldon published. So if you were subscribed to Sheldon's correspondence school you would get a collection of these where you get an annual subscription to The Business Philosopher, you get all of his other books as well. But material like this, you know, you can see it's very flimsy. It's over a hundred and something years old now and to get hold of it's hard enough. But to get even earlier versions of the course is tricky because there are earlier versions.
And again, to find this material you've basically got to go, okay, here is all this received wisdom. I don't think this is correct. I don't think this is correct. I don't think this is correct—which could make you sound extremely egotistical. Right. But it's also incredibly dangerous as a researcher because if I'm saying, "No, I think everything all of these really established professors have said before me is wrong," and you're this newly minted PhD student or new lecturer or new assistant professor. I mean you're on really risky territory. So it's really tough. So you've got to be in an environment that encourages it, which is rare in itself. You've got to be very lucky in terms of actually getting to the end point with this project as well. And you've got to find journals that will publish it, which is really tricky because a lot of the very high profile journals don't tend to engage with a lot of historical research. They'll say things like, "Okay, this is great, but how can we operationalize this to improve management decision making this, this or this?" So there are a lot of factors that can discourage you basically.
Andrew Mitrak: History can be debated, history is political, history's all sorts of things. That's why I used a hedge. I called my podcast A History of Marketing—not The History because I always felt like the definitive article "the" puts a lot of weight on it. I'm like, you know what? “A” history, I have no skin in this game. I just want to hear everybody's ideas, learn everything I can and so this is “A History of Marketing.”
Mark Tadajewski: You know on that point, I think it was my external examiner for my PhD who told me—he was a reviewer on a paper I'd submitted to a journal and I think I'd called the paper at that point, "The Something, Something, Something." And he said you really need to change it to "A" or—because I was running out of how many times you could use "A," I was putting "Towards a History," you know, like everywhere you could.
Learn More from Mark Tadajewski
Andrew Mitrak: Mark, I'm sure a lot of listeners are interested to learn more of your work and dive deeper into these strands of marketing history. Where would you point listeners to? How could they learn more about your work and what of your published articles would you point listeners to?
Mark Tadajewski: I would probably go to LinkedIn and then look at my academia.edu page. That's where I can upload a lot of the material that I've written. Start with whatever grabs your attention. That's the best way to approach any of this material because if you're not interested in it, it's not going to stick or resonate with you. So, yeah, find what you like and I hope you enjoy it.
Andrew Mitrak: I certainly enjoyed it. Well, Mark, thanks so much for your time. I really enjoyed this conversation.
Mark Tadajewski: My pleasure. It's been really, really nice to talk to you.
Share this post