The Evolution of Marketing: From Ancient Times to the Digital Age

Marketing has been around for centuries, but it wasn't until the 1950s that it began to take on its modern form. While there is some debate about when marketing actually began, many historians believe that it started as early as 1500 BC. C. (before the Common Era), when Mesopotamian societies began to mass-produce products that required quality control.

Product producers stamped their products with a distinctive mark (the oldest form of a logo) to indicate to buyers that they had created the product they were buying. This brand served as a reminder to early consumers that a specific product came from a specific seller or retailer and that they could return it to that seller or merchant for other products of equal quality. This importance continued to grow as trade between different countries and societies developed over the next few decades. The Industrial Revolution paved the way for more modern forms of advertising and retailing of goods and services. It was around the 1940s that industries realized that focusing only on their business needs often left customers unsatisfied.

At this stage, companies' marketing tactics include identifying what customers need and effectively customizing activities that address these needs. Sometimes, owning a market means expanding it; other times, reducing it. Apple has managed to do both in an effort to create and own a market. Apple expanded the small computer category for the first time to reach a leadership position. The definition of the market began as a hobby: computers and had a lot of small players.

The next step was the home computer, a market that was also crowded and limiting. To own a market, Apple identified the personal computer, which broadened the concept of the market and made Apple the undisputed market leader. To generate the highest marketing ROI with the money invested in advertising, marketers began to avoid attracting consumers with generic messages and set out to understand the consumer. The concept of social marketing takes the position that sellers have a greater social responsibility than simply satisfying customers and providing them with greater value. In the 1990s, successful companies are moving towards the market and adapting their products to the strategies of their customers.

Thus, the first modern concept of marketing measurement, the “marketing mix”, was introduced into the marketing industry. Following Alderson, marketing began to incorporate other fields of knowledge besides economics, in particular behavioral science and psychology, becoming a multidisciplinary field. The workstation will allow marketers to integrate data on historical sales and cost figures, competitive trends and consumption patterns. Computers would only make marketing less personal; marketing could never learn to appreciate the appearance of computers, databases, and the rest of the high-tech paraphernalia. This allowed marketers to collect long-term aggregated data that could determine the relationship between marketing combinations and their overall impact on sales. From single-cell sales sheets to complex ecosystems that are based on interdependent relationships between products, companies and customers, the evolution of marketing is quite a story.

The history of marketing practice is based on management and marketing disciplines, while the history of marketing thinking is based on economic and cultural history. Marketing also allows a company to test certain products or services to see if they are successful with consumers. By considering the four P's of marketing, marketers could direct their efforts to deliver the right message, to the right consumer, at the right time. First it was digital screens, then social networks, and now mobile marketing has been evolving rapidly. In this effort, the marketing mix model was developed, which continued to be a basic measure that sellers could rely on until digital acquisition.

A subsidiary of market research had “greatly exaggerated” the projected market share of a new detergent that Beecham launched.

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