History of Marketing

Marketing is relatively a new discipline (came out the economics field in the early 1900's) and has many different (albeit painful) stages:

1. Production Concept - consumers favouring products that are available and highly affordable. The "Model T Ford" assembly line comes to mind here. WalMart has taken this to a totally new level with a distribution centre that has a conveyor belt that never shuts off!

2. Product Concept - consumers favouring continuous product improvements. This bred the cliche "new and improved" labels that have lingered like a bad stink. Personal goods that the mass marketers at P&G and Johnson & Johnson are all over this. How many different brands of Tide do you really need to clean your clothes? Really.

3. Selling Concept - people won't come near you until you've done the slick sales offering complete with snake oil, and plaid suited salespeople. Extra points if it's a cheap Italian suit. You don't have to look far for used cars sales or the need to be bubble wrapped in insurance before you set foot out the doors. Marketers who have lots (unlimited?) product to sell, will love you like no one else.

4. Marketing Concept - what modern marketing is known for: achieving organizational goals by understanding the needs and wants of their target market. Delivery this offering better than their competitors helps too. Unless your Microsoft, where you'll just buy out your competition! Most marketing consultants, experts, ganja, and ivory tower academics subscribe to this inward thinking.

5. Societal Marketing Concept - welcome to the new frontier of new marketing. Where companies make remarkably marketing by considering customer's wants (their needs are already fulfilled), their long run interests (being treated like a human being), and society's long run interests (no more spam, clutter, or interrupting ads). Inward thinking has been shown the door, and marketing now revolves around outward thinking (who's my customer, and where do they hang out?), and how best to create relationships (loyalty) in a low trust world.

You can probably guess which category I fall in so I'll spare the obvious. Speaking of categories, while they may be useful for organizing your information, your target audience really doesn't care about being put in a box. They rather just be treated special, in a permissive, interactive, way.