Brief History of Marketing

Marketing has been thought by some to be as old as civilization itself. Culture since Ancient Greece to modern days has been based on trading and selling upon communication to move goods. Many marketing techniques started during the industrial revolution. Mass production along with advancements in transportation and technology called for promotion of products. With nations applying laws against monopolies, competitors needed to figure out how to sell the similar goods. Marketers were created to do just that. They became professionals who could study market and consumer behaviors to determine what products to create, where they would be sold and how they would be properly promoted.

Wikipedia provides the following timeline and periodization of marketing history:

Timeline of Innovation

• 1450: Gutenberg’s metal movable type, leading eventually to mass-production of flyers and brochures
• 1730s: emergence of magazines (a future vector of niche marketing)
• 1836: first paid advertising in a newspaper (in France)
• 1839: posters on private property banned in London
• 1864: earliest recorded use of the telegraph for mass unsolicited spam
• 1867: earliest recorded billboard rentals
• 1880s: early examples of trademarks as branding
• 1905: the University of Pennsylvania offered a course in “The Marketing of Products”[4]
• 1908: Harvard Business School opens
• 1922: radio advertising commences
• 1940s: electronic computers developed
• 1941: first recorded use of television advertising
• 1950s: systematization of telemarketing
• 1970s: E-commerce invented
• 1980s: development of database marketing as precursor to CRM[5]
• 1980s: emergence of relationship marketing
• 1980s: emergence of computer-oriented spam
• 1984: introduction of guerrilla marketing
• 1985: desktop publishing democratizes the production of print-advertising
• 1991: IMC gains academic status [6]
• 1990s CRM and IMC (in various guises and names) gain dominance in promotions and marketing planning,[7][8]
• 1995-2001: the Dot-com bubble temporarily re-defines[citation needed] the future of marketing
• 1996: identification of viral marketing
• 2000s: Integrated marketing gains acceptance and in 2002 its first dedicated academic research centre[9][10]

Periodization

One marketing standard chronology (Bartels, 1974; Dawson, 1969; Keith, 1960; Kotler and Keller, 2006) subdivides marketing history as follows:

• Production orientation era
• Product orientation era
• Sales orientation era
• Market orientation era
• Customer orientation
• Relationship orientation
• Social/mobile marketing orientation

Resources:
Wikipedia and More Than Branding