The Myth of the Marketing Revolution

during the 1950s. He described the company in 1960 as moving from having a marketing concept to being a marketing company. Although Keith relied exclusively on his knowledge of Pillsbury's history, he claimed that the " pattern was typical of American business in general " (1960, 35), that it was a " classic pattern of development in the marketing revolution " (p. 36). No evidence was offered for this generalization. Indeed, the article was only four pages long! This study critically examines Keith's (1960) historical theory of a marketing revolution using source material from the 1890s to determine whether or not there is evidence of sales-era and/or marketing-era ideas during the time period Keith referred to as the production era. Whereas Fullerton (1988) examined a wide range of evidence about institutions and methods in Britain, Germany, and the United States covering the period from 1870 to 1930 and Hollander (1986) studied economic conditions and marketing practices in the United States mostly during the first half of the twentieth century, this study focuses on Canadian marketing practices in the dry-goods industry during the 1890s. It is an attempt to triangulate the countries and industries studied as well as data sources with the Fullerton (1988) and Hollander (1986) studies. In that way, this research adds reliability and validity to those earlier works. It also differs somewhat in method-ological approach. The studies by Fullerton and Hollander both used a methodology characteristic of mainstream historical research based on the systematic, critical interpretation of small numbers of rich, complex events and ideas. They used what Witkowski and Jones (forthcoming) have termed the traditional approach to historiography as compared with a scientific approach. By contrast, this research follows the examples of Pollay (1985) and Gross and Sheth (1989) in using content analysis, a research method based on a set of procedures to categorize, quantify, and make valid inferences from a large amount of text. However, as Weber (1990) points out, the best content-analytic studies use both qualitative and quantitative interpretations of text. Thus, the discussion section of this article includes more qualitative analysis as well. This study used content analysis of source material from the 1890s to examine the enduring historical theory of a marketing revolution first proposed in 1960 by Robert Keith and still popular in introductory marketing textbooks today. The results are consistent with earlier studies. Strong evidence exists of sales and marketing orientations …