Teaching and studying marketing history: a personal journey

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to provide insights into the challenges and rewards of engaging in the inextricably intertwined activities of studying and teaching marketing history. The secondary purpose is to encourage marketing scholars to expand work in this area. Design/methodology/approach - The approach invokes the memoir and that format traces the author personal development in the field of marketing history over 30 years. It discusses what the author learned, how he learned, and how these lessons can be applied. Findings - The paper offers several findings: marketing history can be part of every marketing course; students should be engaged in the development and application of historical findings; marketing scholars must develop an understanding of historical methods as a means of supporting research and teaching; and marketing history should eventually be seen in marketing as economic history is seen in economics. Practical implications - The paper puts forth an approach for undertaking historical research in marketing and suggests how to use those findings in teaching marketing history. The emphasis focuses on engaging students with the caveat that history is not predictive. The goal is to put marketing events in their proper context, to understand how they develop and how they play out. Marketing history has its own intrinsic value but also provides a new dimension for decision making. Originality/value - The paper uses a first person narrative of working in developing a field, a historic device not frequently found in marketing. It also represents a historiography of marketing history.