Australian Marketing History (PDF)

Marketing has historically received a cool reception in Australia. In a small market with limited competition, there had initially been little need to invest in marketing. Moreover, marketing's salesmanship practices sat uneasily with Australian cultural mores. Marketing's early struggle for recognition in Australia is reflected in the relative paucity of scholarly work on the history of Australian marketing industries and practice. This special edition seeks to address this gap. The papers are loosely divided into three sections: product, place, and promotion. Under product and branding, contributors cover Vegemite's entry into the US market over the 1960s-80s, Bushells' marketing strategies in the 1980s, and the 'It's Time' political campaigns of the 1970s and 1990s. Contributions on place explore the David Jones department store in the late 19th/early 20th centuries, and K mart and Target in the 1960s and 1970s. The final section on promotion includes studies of the Women's Budget Bureau over the 1900s-1930s, a comparison of J. Walter Thompson and McCann Erickson's respective entries into the Australian advertising market in the 1930s and 1960s, and personal reflection on the experiences of studying the relationship between Australian and American advertising industries from United States. In addition to addressing a gap in marketing historiography, these papers also reveal the active connections between the national and the global and illustrate the degree to which marketing ideas and practices respond to and are informed by national and international forces.