History of marketing

The study of the history of marketing, as a discipline, is meaningful because it helps to define the baselines upon which change can be recognized and understand how the discipline evolves in response to those changes. The practice of marketing has been known for millennia, but the term "marketing" used to describe commercial activities buying and selling a products or services came into popular use in the late nineteenth century. The study of the history of marketing as an academic field emerged in the early twentieth century.

Marketers tend to distinguish between the history of marketing practice and the history of marketing thought:

Although the history of marketing thought and the history of marketing practice are distinct fields of study, they intersect at different junctures. Marketing practitioners engage in innovative practices that capture the attention of marketing scholars while marketing academics develop new research methods that are adopted by practitioners. Thus developments in marketing theory inform marketing practice and vice versa. The history of marketing will remain incomplete if one disassociates academia from practitioners.

The publication, in 1960, of Robert Keith's article, "The Marketing Revolution", was a pioneering work in the study of the history of marketing practice. And, in 1976, the publication of Robert Bartel's book, The History of Marketing Thought, marked a turning-point in the understanding of how marketing theory evolved since it first emerged as a separate discipline around the turn of last century.

According to etymologists, the term 'marketing' first appeared in dictionaries in the sixteenth century where it referred to the process of buying and selling at a market. The contemporary definition of 'marketing' as a process of moving goods from producer to consumer with an emphasis on sales and advertising first appeared in dictionaries in 1897. The term, marketing, is a derivation of the Latin word, mercatus meaning market or merchant.

Historians of marketing tend to fall into two distinct branches of marketing history - the history of marketing practice and the history of marketing thought. These branches are often deeply divided. These branches have very different roots. The history of marketing practice is based in management and marketing studies, while the history of marketing thought is based in economic and cultural history. This means that they ask very different types of research questions and employ different research tools and frameworks.

Historians of marketing have undertaken considerable investigation into the emergence of marketing, yet there is little agreement about when marketing first began. Some researchers argue that marketing practices can be found in antiquity while others suggest that marketing, in its modern form, emerged in conjunction with the rise of consumer culture in seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe while yet other researchers suggest that modern marketing was only fully realised in the decades following the industrial revolution in Britain from where it subsequently spread to Europe and North America. Hollander and others have suggested that the different dates for the emergence of marketing can be explained by problems surrounding the way that marketing has been defined - whether reference to 'modern marketing' as a planned, programmed repertoire of professional practice including activities such as segmentation, product differentiation, positioning and marketing communications versus 'marketing' as a simple form distribution and exchange.

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