Tom H. C. Anderson - More Than Market Research

I was recently elected to the Board of Directors at the Stamford Historical Society where I have been asked to chair the membership committee. This has made me think more about the history in general and also of marketing and marketing research history.

Obviously most marketers, including and especially Anderson Analytics, want to stress our awareness of current trends and technological savvy. However, as many of my colleagues and I have graduate degrees in business it strikes me as odd how little we know collectively about where our field of discipline comes from. Some would even call this lack of interest or knowledge of marketing history an “a-historical” tendency.

Once in a while I’ll hear a cute example about how marketing or market research was started, but it seems no one really is certain. There seems to be very little written in this area. To start satisfying my curiosity today I did some desk research and actually found a few small societies dedicated to marketing history:

• CHARM (Conference on Historical Analysis & Research in Marketing)
  
• CHORD (The Committee for the History of Retailing and Distribution)      

This organization while slightly off topic also looks interesting: 

• The Ephemera Society of America

I plan to look into this further and will keep you posted if I find anything of interest.

Is marketing history of interest to you? If you know any interesting stories from the history of marketing or market research I would love to hear from you?