The history of marketing Formation of marketing and its main stages

THE HISTORY OF MARKETING

A business that sells products or services must have a way of attracting customers. The process of promoting a company's products or services to gain customers is known as marketing. Successful marketing also goes one step further because a business should also pursue ways to retain customers for future sales. The size of a company determines marketing strategy. Some companies may have a department dedicated to performing this work. Other companies may need to pursue these tasks while performing other work, too.

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 and have very different roots. The history of marketing practice is grounded in the management and marketing disciplines, while the history of marketing thought is grounded in economic and cultural history. This means that the two branches 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 practice, 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.