Michael the Mighty: Merry memories of marketing’s major-general

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Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. I was the talk of the staff room, apparently, and not in a good way. The former pupils’ hall of fame doesn’t include me, nor am I invited to prizegiving ceremonies. When it comes to class reunions and the like, I’m still persona non grata. You can hardly blame them, really.

2. A hard-working welder at Harland & Wolff shipyard, my father wasn’t much of a reader. There were no books in our council house. My only regular reading material was the ‘Fun Section’ of The Sunday Post. I was brought up by The Broons. No relation.

3. Rest assured, I didn’t reread it for the purposes of this tribute. I’ve no doubt it reflects the times it was written in, and for, with imperialist ideology much to the fore. We didn’t know any better back then. That’s no excuse, I agree, but it’s true.

4. Meany Heaney, now that I think back on those ‘happy days’ in his geography classes, had a thing about meandering rivers and oxbow lakes. A Freudian would have had a field day, surely, with his incessant twisting of my earlobes. All I know is that my ears remain cauliflowered to this day, though they look like artichokes under certain lighting conditions.

5. For those of you too young to remember, MEG stood for the Marketing Education Group. Its annual conferences, the forerunners of AM, weren’t so much bacchanalian as orgiastic. Academically speaking, of course.

6. I have a vague memory – maybe it’s a misattributed rumour, but I want to believe it – that Michael was behind the plan to build a wall around Strathclyde’s city centre campus. There may or may not be a wall; I haven’t checked, though I do hope it’s true. If there is, Michael should go down in history as the Emperor Hadrian of higher education. If there isn’t, they should build one as a monumental memorial to Michael the Mighty. He turned its B-school into a shining scholarly citadel, that’s for sure.

7. When I was in the ATC (Air Training Corps), ‘the Troubles’ were in full spate. As a result, we were forbidden from wearing our uniforms. This was a relief in one sense, since they were terribly scratchy things, woven from sackcloth and ashes and itching powder, but it meant we paraded in mufti, which looked to the casual observer like the junior wing of the Ulster Freedom Fighters. Flighters, I should say. Dad’s Army were stormtroopers by comparison.

8. I’m reliably informed that, although Michael was an officer in the Royal Artillery, he was also a would-be Jolly Jack Tar. He applied for the post of Ship-to-Shore Gunnery Officer, Mediterranean Fleet, but by a stroke of good fortune – the Suez Crisis of 1956 – somehow ended up as an educator. Whence he shot to fame as one of the ‘big guns’ of marketing thought.

9. Professor Baker wrote many, many books, more than a few of which went to multiple editions. One of his best, if least well known, is a little text on research methods. In a world where literature reviews grow ever longer, discussions of methodology are unnecessarily interminable, and theoretical justifications lurch from incomprehensible to incoherent, MJB believed that selectivity is necessary, less is more. I believe it too, as JCB under my curatorship will show.

10. I should perhaps add that marketing’s major-general made a point of attending my conference presentations. And, polite to a fault, he always said nice things afterwards. Until, that is, I was keynote speaker at the AM held in Northumbria University. Sitting front and centre, directly in my eyeline, I could tell by the look on his face that he thought I’d gone too far and had finally lost the run of myself. And that I was basically a well-read ned with a doctorate. He had my number, as usual. Suitably chastened, I’ve since quit the conference circuit. The ned is dead, no tears were shed.