Knowledge that Transforms

Morris B. Holbrook, Closely Read Books. Marketing Literature, Consumption as Text, and the Leaves from Our Lives: Slow, Slower, and Slowest, Journal of Marketing, Vol. 62, No. 3 (Jul., 1998), pp. 141-145

Books play a central role in the quality of my professional life. Good books enrich my teaching, stimulate my creativity, provoke my imagination. Reading good books drives my ambition to write good books. On a plane coming home from Europe in 1997, I read Value Migration by Adrian Slywotzky (1996). It is a terrific book, documenting and explaining capital migration in companies and markets and among industries. Deeply immersed in the field research for my own book project, I challenged myself to write a book as thorough, captivating, and persuasive as Slywotzky's. What a gift from this author. Books like Value Migration are valuable not only for readers but also for writers. They raise the bar. I grew up in a house full of books. My mother especially was always reading, and I have never lived in a house whose shelves were not filled with books. As a boy, I read all the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys detective books. I was fascinated by how these teenagers, not much older than I, used clues to unravel mysteries and then risked life and limb to bring evildoers to justice. Although I cannot honestly say that these teenage novels inspired me to be a researcher, they did instill a love of reading in me.

s International is recommended for many literature searches. The Periodical Reading Room Two delightful sets of Saturday Evening Post fiction came closer to the marketing target than most of the books I read in my youth. The Alexander Botts stories by William H. Upson dealt with an incredibly inept salesman for the Earthworm (pun on Caterpillar?) tractor company, whose egregious blunders always had remarkably fortunate unforeseen consequences. These stories were couched in the form of memoranda and telegrams (the e-mail of the period) between Botts and his sales manager. Many of these stories have been collected in the book Botts in War, Botts in Peace; Earthworms Can Take Anything. In a typical story, Botts would demonstrate Earthworm's most powerful machine by attempting to straighten a tilted pillar on the front porch of a prosperous farmer's home. Of course, the powerful tractor would pull the porch, house, and foundation off the subsoil, and Botts would be fired by the sales manager, who had arrived late and missed the opportunity to stop the episode. The seeming havoc, however, would uncover a previously unknown mineral, petroleum, or buried treasure. Botts would sell several machines to the farmer and the county road commission that the farmer happened to chair. The other, more tangential Tugboat Annie series, written by Norman R. Raine, involved a weather-beaten widow who operated her late husband's vessel and used her superior knowledge of Puget Sound tides and currents to outwit the nefarious schemes of a rival fleet owner. These stories were enshrined in at least one movie that featured Marie Dressler and Wallace Berry. Those series exhibited nostalgia for oldfashioned rock-ribbed independence and suspicion of big business monopolization. They were appropriate to a magazine that put Norman Rockwell Americana paintings on its covers while serving as a major promotional engine for the growth of a mass production/mass marketing/mass consumption/mass culture society. More serious literature included the leading marketing trade paper of the time, Printers' Ink, which I started reading as about the only adult-oriented publication in a surprisingly inadequate high school library. Some of it was not understandable at first, but it provided a good background for marketing studies. I now ask marketing history students to select and analyze a volume from the long run of this journal, dating back to the turn of the century, that we have in our library. They seem to find this a very stimulating assignment. Incidentally, given the students' diverse backgrounds and the highly technical and consumer behaviororiented nature of some graduate marketing education today, this sometimes becomes the students' first exposure to a trade magazine. In any future iteration of the course, I would ask them also to look at a 1930s volume of a luxury consumer journal. They might focus on Esquire, which began during that decade as a men's fashion magazine to be distributed in upscale clothing stores. That might help them appreciate the more complex and perhaps twoor three-tier nature of the Great Depression economy that often is depicted in current accounts as a time of utter desolation. Trade journals also are very useful historical research tools, as Hermann Levy pointed out in the forward to his Retail Trade Associations (1944). The trade journals have their limitations. They normally are written from an industry point of view, which may induce a certain bias. Their contents may be influenced strongly by press releases, which are, for example, more likely to emphasize venture launches than terminations. Time and financial restrictions may inhibit journalistic rigor. But they demonstrate what editors believe is of contemporary interest to the trade. Some journals do thorough investigative reporting, and