Abstract
Amassive unease about markets marks the history of communist Europe. On one hand, orthodox Marxists were trained to view markets with suspicion, as frank instruments of subjugation. In standard Marxian analyses, the market almost inevitably figured as a primary vehicle of capitalist production relations and, in turn, of the oppressive politics that such economics implied. At the same time, however, pragmatism often enough prevailed over doctrinal rectitude, and even many resolute communists came to recognize, once in power, that the mastery of markets had proven essential to the development of better-functioning domestic economies, and therefore to the establishment of socialist legitimacy among a more contented (or at least less discontented) citizenry. Understanding markets—and better still, controlling markets—therefore became, all such misgivings notwithstanding, a primary desideratum of socialist policy makers and business leaders. In many socialist countries, this perceived need led, in turn, to the formation of commercial and academic circles keenly interested in the nature and operation of markets in both their capitalist and noncapitalist manifestations. On the heels of this change in ideas came an institutional shift, seen in the rise of various organizations dedicated to the development of market research. Over time, the many promises of the market even opened the way, at least in some venues, to the importation of the distinctive principles and practices that had come to be embraced and celebrated in the capitalist West as the complex, comprehensive, and allegedly indispensable “marketing concept.”
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Notes
G. Peter Lauter, “The Changing Role of Marketing in the Eastern European Socialist Economies,” The Journal of Marketing 35, no. 4 (October 1971): 16–20, at 16.
Academic treatments of Eastern European socialist-era marketing in Western languages are comparatively rare, and most come from within the field of marketing itself and thus typically address the practice along straightforward, business-oriented lines rather than in the social, political, and cultural terms favored by historical analysis. See, for example, J. Hart Walters, Jr., “Marketing in Poland in the 1970s: Significant Progress,” The Journal of Marketing 39, no. 4 (October 1975): 47–51.
See also Jacob Naor, “Towards A Socialist Marketing Concept: The Case of Romania,” The Journal of Marketing 50, no. 1 (January 1986): 28–39.
Robert L. King, “Enterprise-Level Marketing Research Activity in Poland: The PREDOM/POLAR Experience,” Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science 11, no. 3 (Summer 1983): 292–303, at 292.
Along these lines, see Patrick Hyder Patterson, “Making Markets Marxist? The East European Grocery Store from Rationing to Rationality to Rationalizations,” in Food Chains: From Farmyard to Shopping Cart, ed. Warren Belasco and Roger Horowitz (Philadelphia, PA, 2009), 196–216, with notes at 285–88.
Philip Kotler, Marketing Management: Analysis, Planning, and Control (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1967), 3.
Hartmut Berghoff, “Marketing im 20. Jahrhundert: Absatzinstrument—Managementphilosophie—universelle Sozialtechnik,” Marketinggeschichte: Die Genese einer modernen Sozialtechnik, ed. Berghoff (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2007), 11–58, at 12.
Istvanné Hoffmann, “Előretörő marketing, új reklámfunkciók,” Propaganda, reklám 27, no. (1984): 5–7, at 6.
Doris Cornelsen and Horst Seidler, Konsumgüterversorgung in der DDR und Wechselwirkungen zum innerdeutschen Handel (Berlin, 1985), 21–22. While there are a number of surface similarities between the two concepts, establishing some causal role for marketing theory in the development of Bedarfslenkung would require a careful genealogy of ideas that these authors do not undertake. Also of note here are the East German concepts of Marktbearbeitung, Marktpolitik, and Verbrauchslenkung, which were, according to Cornelsen and Seidler, fairly ill-defined. Ibid., 21.
Horst Kunde, “Zur Bedarfslenkung im Sozialismus,” Neue Werbung 23, no. 2 (March 1976): 6–8.
Philipp Heldmann, Herrschaft, Wirtschaft, Anoraks: Konsumpolitik in der DDR der Sechzigerjahre (Göttingen, 2004), 211.
Jörg Roesler, “Massenkonsum in der DDR: Zwischen egalitärem Anspruch, Herrschaftslegitimation und ‘exquisiter’ Individualisierung,” Prokla: Zeitschrift für kritische Sozialwissenschaft 35, no. 1, issue 138 (2005): 35–52, at 42.
See, for example, Karl-Heinz Uhlig, “Keine Aussichten für ein ‘sozialistisches Marketing’: Zur Theorie und Praxis des kapitalistischen Marketing,” Neue Werbung 22, no. 1 (January 1975): 7–8;
Christine Fiedler, “Politisch-ideologische Funktionen des Marketing im Kapitalismus,” Neue Werbung 22, no. 2 (March 1975): 43–44.
Rolf Gabler and Reinhard Müller, “Konsumerismus—Variante der bürgerlichen Kritik an der Konsumgesellschaft,” Neue Werbung 21, no. 1 (January 1974): 3–4.
See also Fred Tamme, “Ideologie und Werbung: Die Rolle der Werbemittelgestaltung bei der Herausbildung sozialistischer Lebensweise,” Neue Werbung 21, no. 1 (January 1974): 45–46.
Karl-Heinz Uhlig, “Irrführend, grotesk verallgemeinert und praktisch unbewiesen: Kapitalistische Verkaufsreklame als Teil der Strategie des ‘totalen’ Marketing,” Neue Werbung 23, no. 6 (November 1976): 2–3.
Juraj Prachár, “Hozzaszólás a marketing terminológiájához,” Kereskedelmi szemle 9, no. 5 (1968): 22–23, at 23. Prachár’s remarks appear here in translation in a major Hungarian business review.
Jaromir Balák, “V nových podmínkách,” Propagace 11 (1965): 1–2, at 2.
Oldřich Hofman, “Funkce propagace v nových podmínkách,” Propagace 11 (1965): 146–47, at 147.
Zdeněk Červený, “Koncepce práce propagačního útvaru v novém systému řízení,” Propagace 14 (1968): 157–58, 181–83, at 182.
See Juraj Prachár, Marketing: Obchodná a odbytová politika (Bratislava, 1971).
Ján Šaling, Spotrebitel’ a reklama (Bratislava, 1970), 46. While critical of what he described as exploitative aspects of capitalist advertising, Šaling was emphatic about the importance of “marketing management” in propelling Western practice to its sophisticated level of development. Ibid., 57. In this approach, there are strong echoes of Philip Kotler’s elaboration of “marketing management” as a total system of enterprise policy and direction; see Kotler’s seminal Marketing Management: Analysis, Planning, and Control, which had appeared just a few years earlier, in 1967.
See, for example, Juraj Prachár, Princípy a technika reklamy (Bratislava, 1982);
Dušan Pavlů, Propagace, specifická forma sociální komunikace (Prague, 1984).
Pavel Horňák, Teória propagácie: K základným otázkam teórie socialistickej propagácie (Bratislava, 1984), 17.
The window of opportunity in various market-centered domains of commercial activity appears to have been further closed with the government’s restrictive decrees of 1979, a legal and administrative shift that one specialist noted was “most often characterized as the entry into a period of marked restriction of advertising.” Zdeněk Červený, “Vztah k propagaci,” Propagace 28, no. 12 (1982): 1. With commercial promotion now treated as a more unwanted and even suspect pursuit, marketing ideas, too, could come under more scrutiny and pressure.
József Kandikó, “Marketing és vagy reklám,” Propaganda, reklám 27, no. 2 (1984): 7–11, at 7. The author explores the marketing practices of several Hungarian manufacturing enterprises.
On the rise of advertising and marketing in Yugoslavia, and on the broader political and cultural significance of the remarkable consumerist transformation of Yugoslav society, see Patrick Hyder Patterson, Bought and Sold: Living and Losing the Good Life in Socialist Yugoslavia (Ithaca, NY, 2011).
See Dušan P. Mrvoš, untitled article in Naš publicitet 4, no. 2 (1957): 14–15.
Mrvoš, Propaganda reklama publicitet: Teorija i praksa (Belgrade, 1959), 444–45 (emphasis in original). For further evidence of the writer’s market orientation and his favorable views of Western practice, see, for example, ibid., 92–104 (on public opinion and market research).
Among Rocco’s many publications in the field, see, for example, Rudolf Bičanić, Fedor Rocco, and Roman Obraz, Tržište i marketing (Zagreb, 1968).
Novica Ranđelović, “Neke specifičnosti socijalističkog modela marketinga,” Marketing 12, no. 2 (1981): 3–6, at 6.
With regard to marketing, Yugoslav usage in both Serbo-Croatian and Slovenian usually simply adopted the English term—not surprisingly, given that the “marketing concept” itself is a fundamentally Western device and there was no extant native term to fall back on. Slovenian usage sometimes preferred the term “trženje.” Unlike with the term “advertising,” however, the preference for one rendering or another typically was not meant to raise any significant question of connotations. See Stane Možina, Psihologija in sociologija trženja (Maribor, 1975), 6.
Rikard Štajner, “Plan i tržište,” Marketing 1, no. 2 (1970): 5–7, at 7.
See, for example, Antun Kobašić, “Od (ne)prihvaćanja do afirmacije marketinga u teoriji i praksi kod nas,” Marketing 10, no. 4 (1979): 3–10, at 4.
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Patterson, P.H. (2012). The Bad Science and the Black Arts: The Reception of Marketing in Socialist Europe. In: Berghoff, H., Scranton, P., Spiekermann, U. (eds) The Rise of Marketing and Market Research. Worlds of Consumption. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137071286_12
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