ABSTRACT
Market-based trading, selling, buying and consuming existed for thousands of years before such phenomena became a subject of academic enquiry and instruction. Only as production, communication, sales and consumption became mass processes involving large institutions did behavioural investigations of these activities begin. The genealogy of the body of research to be reviewed in this chapter may be simply sketched: economics begat marketing which begat consumer behaviour research which begat ‘the new consumer behaviour research’. Marketing courses were first taught in American universities in 1902 (Bartels 1976). By 1908 the Harvard Business School had been established. But it was not until the late 1920s and early 1930s that the academics who taught these courses began to regard themselves chiefly as marketing scholars rather than as economists. During the 1930s the creation of the American Marketing Association and the Journal of Marketing signalled marketing academics’ formal separation from economics, but, as will be seen, not necessarily from its ideological influence.
