From Cattle and Coke to Charlie: Meeting the Challenge of Self Marketing and Personal Branding

Since the late 1990s, self marketing and personal branding have become increasingly popular as subjects of self-improvement books, Web sites and consultancy services, especially in the USA. To date, little of this interest appears to have permeated the discipline of marketing, either in terms of formal research, textbook contents or academic curricula. This paper examines the theoretical basis of self marketing and personal branding, identifies some of the conceptual, practical and ethical problems it poses for the discipline, and points to some of the challenges facing higher education in attempting to create a curricular framework within which marketing professionals can learn how to market and brand themselves effectively.     

Marketing and Conflicting Dates for its Emergence: Hotchkiss,Bartels, the 'Fifties School' and Alternative Accounts

This paper initially examines three lines of argument on the emergence of the marketing construct: the works of Hotchkiss and of Bartels and the textual monographs that proliferated during the second half of the last century. Each puts forward a different commencement date for marketing and different subsequent periodisations. The paper then considers observations on the marketing construct from postmodernists, critical theorists, anthropologists and historians. These accounts do not share a common definition of the term 'marketing'. Scholarship both within and beyond the marketing domain may be providing deeper and more relevant insights into its origins.