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Introduction
In 1796, George Packwood, an English razor strop marketer and “master of advertising” (McKendrick et al., 1982, p. 147), published his entertaining series of newspaper ads as a book, titled Packwood’s Whim: The Goldfinch’s Nest; or the Way to Get Money and Be Happy. From 1816 to 1853, Englishman Alexander Rowland promoted his “Macassar Oil” with pamphlets about human hair. Following Packwood’s lead, he repurposed this promotional content in 1853 for a book: The Human Hair, Popularly and Physiologically Considered with Special Reference to Its Preservation, Improvement and Adornment, and the Various Modes of Its Decoration in All Countries. In the late 1800s, advertising pioneer P.T. Barnum distributed the Illustrated News, a geographically targeted, free newspaper designed to generate awareness and excitement for his “greatest show.” Many 21st century marketing practitioners would likely call these marketing communications (marcom) tactics “content marketing” (CM).
Although some suggest Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack could be the earliest example of CM (Neff, 2015; Pulizzi, 2016), most point to Deere and Company’s magazine The Furrow, originally published in 1895, as holding that distinction (Claesson and Jonsson, 2017; Gardiner, 2013; Pulizzi, 2012a). Enabled by the implementation of the Rural Free Delivery postal system in the same year, The Furrow was intended to indirectly boost sales and profitability for the company’s John Deere brand by delivering valuable information to farmers on the latest agricultural technologies and business methods. The magazine reached more than four million readers in 1912 and still reaches around two million globally (Gardiner, 2013). Tire company Michelin’s turn-of-the-century Michelin Guides, free recipe books supporting the JELL-O brand in the early 1900s, and the launch of the World’s Largest Store (WLS) radio show by Sears, Roebuck and Company in the 1920s are other frequently mentioned examples of early CM (Pulizzi, 2012a).
One explanation for the belief CM has a short history in the practice of marketing may be its coalescence toward the end of the 20th century into a field generating much interest and investment but lacking a uniform definition (Holliman and Rowley, 2014). Referring to the term reportedly first used by newspaper editor John F. Oppedahl in 1996, Wall and Spinuzzi (2018, p. 137) write that CM remains “a fuzzy label for...