Over-promising in its title, this volume reprints six articles from a special issue of Business History (vol. 45, no. 1) along with an introductory essay. Although each individual paper is competently executed and informative, the collection is unlikely to satisfy many readers. Nor could one reasonably expect more, given that it ranges over a wide span of time (1800–1940) and over various countries (the United Kingdom, Germany, and the United States) and a diversity of firms, from the small entrepreneurial and once traveling Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum, to the family controlled nineteenth-century firms such as Lever Bros., to the gigantic and once seemingly omnipotent General Motors. The editors' introduction also points out that a full range of marketing decision dimensions is addressed: advertising, branding, pricing, promotion, market research, retail selling, product planning, and distribution systems. All of this within six articles, four of which report on U.K. firms.

Pamela Pilbeam's work on “Madame Tussaud and the Business of Wax” follows this remarkable woman's career in marketing to the newly emergent middle classes of the early nineteenth century. She built a small traveling wax show into the leading tourist attraction in London. The story will remind American scholars of P. T. Barnum.

Editor Roy Church's piece with Christine Clark looks at the product development and diversification activity within three U.K. consumer goods firms between World War I and World War II: J. & J. Colman, Reckitt & Sons, and Lever Bros, now Unilever. The three provide contrasts in the degree of formality, the nature of the strategies employed, and the success enjoyed in product development efforts. It concludes that both purposive strategy and serendipity are necessary to explain the contingent directions that actual diversification took.

Sally Clarke's “Closing the Deal” studies General Motors relations with a franchised dealer network from 1921 to 1941. Because it deals with the role conflicts inherent in their divided interests, this chapter provides a valuable complement to Alfred Sloan's My Years with General Motors (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1963.) The perspective exposes the nature of corporate power, distrust in market exchanges, and the role of the state in governing transactions.

Editor Andrew Godley's empirical look at foreign direct investment in British retailing finds it a relatively rare and mostly unsuccessful venture, the major exceptions being for small appliances needing control over sales and service, such as sewing machines (Singer) and vacuum cleaners (Hoover, Electrolux). Some others, for instance Woolworth's variety stores, brought in new retailing styles, but these were readily imitated.

Gerben Bakker's paper about market research in the U.S. and U.K. motion picture industry follows the movement of this activity from the distributors to the manufacturers (film companies). Because of the high stakes and short life cycle of cinema products, they were pioneering in adopting modern methods.

Last, and perhaps most intriguing, is Hartmut Berghoff's study of the German advertising industry during the period 1933–1939. The trade institutions readily embraced the Nazi regime policies, seeking to bring order, respectability, and professionalism to the trade. At first the arrangement appeared natural, as the Nazis had themselves been master campaigners and molders of public opinion. But inevitably, the growth of bureaucratic mechanisms and “officialese,” plus often vague standards (e.g., prohibitions against “alien business practices” or “ostentatious” ads) stifled much of the industry, but not, as an aside, the indefatigable cigarette industry.

The editors present these pieces as rich and thick descriptions, hoping to counter “the ambivalence of economists in treating the subject of marketing” (p. 1). Moreover, they challenge the simplistic theories of some economists doing “backward projections,” noting that “without detailed historical and archival research of the kind presented here, a presumption of rationality and/or structural determination runs the risk of mistaking plausible explanations for the constructions of a more complicated—and richer—historical actuality” (pp. 4–5). Overall, the articles are individually excellent but collectively disappointing. Readers may well, however, pursue individual pieces, but most likely will do so from their original publication in the journal.