Brafton The Evolution of Marketing (Infographic) October 4, 2021 From single-celled sales sheets all the way up to complex ecosystems that rely on interdependent relationships among products, businesses and customers, the evolution of marketing is quite a tale. It gets even more impressive when you think about the fact that this process of natural selection has only been going on for just a little over a century.

Brafton The Evolution of Marketing (Infographic) October 4, 2021 From single-celled sales sheets all the way up to complex ecosystems that rely on interdependent relationships among products, businesses and customers, the evolution of marketing is quite a tale. It gets even more impressive when you think about the fact that this process of natural selection has only been going on for just a little over a century.

The Evolution of Marketing: A 120-Year History

While there are different schools of marketing thought in terms of the origin of the discipline and its various phases, the dawn of the 20th century is a good starting point for our purposes Over the past 12 decades, marketing has gone from the simple act of informing potential consumers about the existence of a certain product to a complex web of interactions that take place in person, through print, over the airwaves and on social media.

When Did the Marketing Discipline Begin?

The answer to this question is fairly nuanced. To get a rough sense of the origins of marketing, let’s turn to the Online Etymology Dictionary. The authors trace this term back to the 1560s, when it was used to describe “buying and selling, [the] act of transacting business in a market.” That’s a pretty literal definition, but it’s a good reminder that prior to the creation of marketing concepts, “marketing” still existed. It was just a pretty straightforward activity. According to our dictionary, the first cited use of the word “marketing” in its modern business sense — the “process of moving goods from producer to consumer with [an] emphasis on advertising and sales” — comes from 1897. While it took some time for the field to move from a product-centric approach to what we understand as a marketing orientation today, the roots of this discipline go back to the turn of the 20th century.

What Is the Evolution of Marketing?

Marketing evolution refers to the distinct phases that businesses have gone through as they continued to seek new and innovative ways to achieve, maintain and increase revenue through customer sales and partnerships. Since the 1900s, a variety of different strategies have been employed as various industries created and refined their marketing approaches.

What Causes Marketing To Evolve?

Two central factors drive marketing evolution: Marketing technology: When the field began, illustrated print advertising was one of the only feasible communication channels available to marketers besides in-store merchandising and in-person interactions. Today, digital marketing leverages technologies ranging from multimedia text messages to email and more. Customer needs: What do consumers demand today that they didn’t yesterday? What can they afford now that was beyond their reach in the past? If you can’t keep up with your audience, your competitors definitely will.

What Are the Different Stages in the Evolution of Marketing?

For our purposes, we’ll discuss four distinct phases of marketing evolution. While experts are somewhat divided in their interpretations of the various strategies that marketers have used to connect products with consumers and vice versa, we think these are the most important steps to study

The Production Era: Products Develop From the Primordial Soup

The Industrial Revolution set the stage for modern marketing. All of the right ingredients were amassed, resulting in marketing as we now know it: the promotion of mass-produced consumer products. Accordingly, early marketing efforts assumed a production orientation. The working theory was that customers simply needed to be informed about what goods were available to them. After all, you can’t buy something if you don’t know it exists. Henry Ford’s Model T This approach is perhaps best summed up by a quote from Henry Ford: “If you have a really good thing, it will advertise itself.” The company’s approach was heavy on the text and highly informational, emphasizing price, quality and standardization.

In fact, the automaker was so focused on production that national advertising ceased entirely during periods of high demand. Though individual dealers continued to place local ads featuring nominal branding resources supplied by the company, Ford stopped advertising between 1917 and 1923. A different marketing era was starting to take shape.

The Sales Era: Species Diverge and Brands Emerge in Marketing

Leveraging a production orientation is fine if you’re pretty much the only game in town. From the 1930s onward, though, it became increasingly rare that any company would permanently enjoy a competitor-free environment. So, in response to the pressures of natural selection, businesses developed unique adaptations. This resulted in two core innovations of modern marketing: the central importance of brand identities and an emphasis on the selling orientation.