The Foundations of Marketing Practice ─ A history of book marketing in Germany

Between 1815 and 1890, the German book market experienced phenomenal growth, driven by German publishers’ dynamic entrepreneurial attitude towards developing and distributing books. Embracing aggressive marketing on a large scale, they developed a growing sense of what their markets wanted. This study, based almost entirely upon primary sources including over seventy years of trade newspapers, is an in depth account of how and why this market developed—decades before there was any written theory about marketing.

This book is therefore about both marketing practice and marketing theory. It provides a uniquely well-researched account of how markets were developed in very sophisticated ways long before there was a formal discipline of marketing: for example, German publishers used segmentation at least 150 years before the first US articles on the subject appeared. Much of their experience was also shared by the UK and US book markets through international interactions between booksellers and other businessmen.

All scholars of marketing will find this historical account a fascinating insight into markets and marketing, This will also be of interest to social historians, scholars of German history, book trade and book trade historians.

Ronald A. Fullerton is an independent scholar living in Toronto, Canada, having held academic appointments around the globe including American University in Cairo, University of the South Pacific, Emory University, the University of Massachusetts, Visiting Professor at Quinnipiac University in the USA and most recently at California State University, Northridge, USA. He is editor of two collections of readings on marketing history - Research in Marketing: Explorations in the History of Marketing, and Historical Perspectives in Marketing. He has published over 100 book chapters and articles which have appeared in, among other publications, the Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Journal of Business Research, Journal of Macromarketing, Journal of Advertising, Marketing Theory, Journal of Consumer Behavior, Journal of Social History, and Journal of Historical Research in Marketing. He serves on the Editorial Advisory Boards of the Journal of Historical Research in Marketing, European Business Review, and Journal of Macromarketing. He holds a PhD in History from the University of Wisconsin.