Organizations and Markets

| Peter Klein |

History has been defined as “one damn thing after another.” What, then, would you call the history of marketing — one damn advertising campaign after another?

If you want to know, come to this symposium at the University of Glasgow, “The Value of the Past: A Symposium on Marketing and History.” The event, 19 January 2007, examines “both the history of marketing and the marketing of company histories.”

We will emphasise the ways in which historical artefacts of trade (such as advertisements and illustrations in a variety of media, trade cards and catalogues, pamphlets, consumer education campaigns, testimonials and endorsements) are useful both in crafting business history and also as contemporary marketing tools. As marketing materials often reflect the relationship between firms and consumers, they are also sites to learn more about consumer response to products and services over time. We will explore the value of documents originally intended to be ephemeral, and discuss conservation of and access to these materials in corporate and other archives or in other forms such as the internet.

Sounds interesting. I believe it was Santayana who said: “Those who cannot remember their past marketing campaigns are condemned to repeat them.”