Purpose – The purpose of the paper is to investigate the writing style of Stanley C. Hollander, in order to better understand the power of his prose. Design/methodology/approach – A line‐by‐line literary analysis of Hollander's publications, with a view to detecting his stylistic...

Purpose – Felicitous writing is enormously important. However, the art of writing well is rarely addressed by marketing scholars. This paper seeks to argue that the marketing academy has much to learn from historiography, a sub‐discipline devoted to the explication of historical writing....

Purpose – Simon Cowell, the impresario behind The X Factor , a popular television talent show, has often been compared to P.T. Barnum, the legendary nineteenth century showman. This paper aims to examine the alleged parallels in detail and attempts to assess this “Barnum reborn” argument....

Purpose – In “There's a scholar born every minute”, the author aims to explain the background to Brown and Hackley's co‐authored paper, “The greatest showman on earth”, and respond to the comments of Richardson and Tadajewski. Design/methodology/approach – The major concerns of the...

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to raise the issue of contemporary retromania with marketing historians. Design/methodology/approach – This is a reflective essay combining personal experiences with empirical exemplars. Findings – It is found that retromarketing is a subject...

Purpose The aim of this overview is to reflect on the family resemblances between psychogeography and marketing history. Design/methodology/approach The paper is informally predicated on the perspectives and philosophies of literary theory in general and New Historicism in particular. Findings...

Recent reports on the state of management education are, typically, critical of the relevance of business school offerings to “real world” situations. Furthermore, they stress the need to internationalise the curriculum and develop personal and interpersonal skills through programmes which...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the diversity of property investment in South Africa. Design/methodology/approach – The paper addresses how diversity and such factors as the country's history, government, different cultures, housing needs, vast rural areas, fast...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the factors that have influenced the use of implicit (naïve) techniques in property portfolio diversification evaluation in the Nigeria property market. This is necessitated by the need to look at the ways by which the property portfolio...