12/05/2022
The Journey of Marketing
The concept of marketing that we now see has more to do with developments during the industrial revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries. This was a period of rapid social change driven by technological and scientific innovation (see BBC history website). One result was that for the first time the production of goods was separated from their consumption. Mass production, developing transport infrastructure and growing mass media meant that producers needed to, and could develop more sophisticated ways of managing the distribution of goods.
The marketing orientation era
From the 1960s onwards, most markets have become saturated (the size of the market remains the same). This means that there is now intense competition for customers. The sophistication of marketing management has therefore developed into what we now see in a modern marketing department. Marketers are involved at a strategic level within the organization and therefore inform an organization about what should be produced, where it should be sold, how much should be charged for it and how it should be communicated to consumers. Modern marketers research markets and consumers. They attempt to understand consumer needs (and potential needs) and allocate organizational resources appropriately to meet these needs. Modern marketers are particularly interested in brands. They are also increasingly interested in ensuring that employees understand marketing, i.e. that everyone within the organization involves themselves with marketing activities.
The Digital Marketing orientation era
The mass adoption of the internet into everyday life is the single biggest event that has affected marketing over the last three decades in the civilized countries. Although early desktop publishing software in the first PCs caused a surge in print marketing in the 1980s, the computers were little more than a glorified typewriter. Launched by Tim Berners-Lee and his team in 1991, the World Wide Web project didn’t really take off until the first successful mass-market browser, Netscape, was released in 1994. In the following two years, the number of people using the web soared from 16 million to 70.
As users increased, the landscape evolved, from email to search engines like Yahoo! (1994) and Google (1997) and e-commerce sites like Amazon (1994) and eBay (1995). For marketing, this was a goldmine. Email became a new outbound marketing tool, joining the traditional arsenal of TV, radio and print advertisements and telephone sales. While search engines cataloged the new websites that were being created and allowed users to find the information, products and services they desired from the comfort of their own home.
Marketers used early SEO techniques like keyword stuffing, excessive tagging and backlinks to generate high rankings.