Editorial

When this special issue goes to print exactly 22 years will have passed since the first post-war non-communist government was formed in Central and Eastern Europe. Many things have changed during that time, more changes are happening even as this editorial is being written, and inevitably even more changes will take place over the coming years. Poland has been a member of the European Community for some time now and there is little discernible difference between Warsaw, Kraków or Gdańsk and any other European cities. Yet despite the initial increased interest in researching marketing and customer behaviour in Central Europe very little research has yet been published in international journals by marketing academics from Poland. The strong unification processes in the economic, political and cultural arenas have so far not been paralleled by a critical discussion between marketing researchers from the so-called 'old' and 'new' Europes.

We are now at a critical time in the development of marketing as an academic discipline in Poland. After what must be seen as a formative period in the 1990s, and with journal publishing dominating the discussions amongst our colleagues in Poland in the last 10 years, we still haven't witnessed a strong and unified voice of what must now be a mature marketing discipline in Poland. A brand new breed of marketing academics is entering the scene – this special issue gives them a voice and provides them with the opportunity to disseminate their research to a wider international audience of scholars and practitioners.