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Special Issue: “History of Marketing Channels Thought: Theory Formation and Identity Confirmation”

The historical roots of marketing stretch back over 100 years to the early conceptualizations of distribution grounded in economics. These core distribution functions still need to be performed today by firms evolving continually to meet the needs of our present and future markets. The technologies themselves have changed from horse and wagon, to motor vehicles, to e-marketing with perhaps future autonomous aircraft “drone”delivery, as each technology has been replaced in turn with a more efficient, more “modern” technology to meet the needs of customers of the time. However, these new technologies must still be focused on the key marketing goal of facilitating exchange. This goal has not changed over the marketing century and is not likely to do so in the future. Throughout this long history, marketing-related organizations and marketing functions (or flows) have been central to theory development. Perhaps one reason for this focus is that it is these organizations executing the marketing functions within marketing channels that service the needs of their customers domestically and internationally. The discipline appears to continue to believe that eliminating a function cripples the channel. But the modern-day marketing “identity crisis” recognized by some scholars does not appear to fully consider the historical development of the discipline. Debates about the nature and scope of marketing, disciplinary boundaries and theoretical bases, and the synergistic relationship between theory and practice seem to lack a foundation in institutional historical memory. Perhaps this is in part the result of a decline in the attention paid to the study of the historical development of the discipline, such as the early—but still important—work of Wroe Alderson and Robert Bartels, who so greatly shaped mainstream modern marketing thought. The purpose of this Special Issue is to consider the history of marketing channels as a lens to focus on where we have been, where we are, and where we might be headed both theoretically and managerially. In this age of e-commerce transforming social media (or perhaps vice versa?), it would seem helpful to reflect on the past and consider the implications for how theory and practicemay evolve: we are thinking of the past and present as prologue. We see, for instance, how the “old” tools of direct marketing are being applied in fresh new ways to online marketing. Some examples of the research that would be welcomed include the following: