This dissertation examines the evolution of marketing thought and practice during the first forty years of the twentieth century. During this period marketing scholars and consultants, particularly the J. Walter Thompson Advertising Company, worked to understand marketing's scope and created marketing guidelines for others to follow. For early scholars and consultants marketing consisted of coordinating the internal business functions of production, distribution, and exchange with the external realities of a growing consumer-oriented American society. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many American firms had adopted a strategy of internal and external coordination, but had no incentive to transmit their strategies to other businesses.
Scholars have viewed the rise of big business in America as a process in which managers inside the corporation generated the policy of integration. Marketing consultants, with their focus on coordinating production, distribution, and exchange, often taught American firms how to survive in the twentieth-century economy and enriches our understanding of how many American firms acquired integrated marketing policies from outside agents.
Marketing has often been at the heart of discussions concerning the rise of consumer values in twentieth-century America. Much of the scholarly work on consumerism in America insists that Americans adopted consumer values because businessmen used new media and new techniques of suggestion to create desire, and hence consumption. Studying the work of marketing scholars, consultants, and business people offers a much more subtle picture of the relationship between business and American values. Business people and scholars continually experimented, through trial and error, to understand and take advantage of both changes in the structure of American business and changing American values. The picture left behind by early marketing consultants, scholars, and business people is not one in which they directed consumer values at an American public, but instead, shows American businesses employing new marketing methods to take advantage of an increasingly consumer-oriented public, but not initially convincing or directing Americans to adopt new values.