History of Marketing Timeline

Scholars have identified specific marketing practices in England and Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Image source: History of marketing

Braudel reported that in 1600 goods generally traveled relatively short distances: grain about 5–10 miles, cattle 40–70 miles, and wool and woolen cloth 20–40 miles.

Image source: Fernand Braudel

Josiah Wedgwood introduced direct mail, traveling salesmen, and catalogs during the eighteenth century.

Image source: Josiah Wedgwood

Research by McKendrick, Brewer, and Plumb found extensive evidence of English entrepreneurs using product differentiation, sales promotion, loss leaders, planned obsolescence, fashion magazines, national advertising, fancy showrooms, and elite taste-setting.

Eighteenth-century advertising demonstrated considerable sophistication in both execution and its ability to reach mass audiences.

Image source: Advertising

In the early eighteenth century, London merchant Daniel Defoe published information about the trade and economic resources of England and Scotland.

Image source: Daniel Defoe

Daniel Defoe published Trade of Britain Stated in 1707, one of several popular trade-focused works aimed at merchants and business houses.

Daniel Defoe published Trade of Scotland with France in 1713 as part of his influential body of commercial and economic writing.

Daniel Defoe published The Trade to India Critically and Calmly Considered in 1720, continuing his popular examination of international commerce.

Josiah Wedgwood and Matthew Boulton were identified as pioneers of modern mass-marketing methods.

Improved transportation systems from the mid-nineteenth century unified markets and enabled companies to distribute standardized, branded goods nationally.

Image source: Industrial Revolution

The term marketing came into popular use in the late nineteenth century to describe commercial activities assisting the buying and selling of products or services.

The contemporary dictionary definition of marketing as moving goods from producer to consumer, with emphasis on sales and advertising, first appeared in 1897.

Films produced by Auguste and Louis Lumière at the request of Lever Brothers in France featured Sunlight soap and are regarded as the first recorded instance of paid product placement.

Image source: Product placement

Social media emerged as a major marketing environment between 2003 and 2006, with MySpace and LinkedIn appearing in 2003, Facebook in 2004, and Twitter in 2006.

Image source: Social media

MySpace and LinkedIn emerged in 2003 as part of the development of social media platforms that later became important channels for marketing communication.

Facebook emerged in 2004 during the formative period of social media, contributing to the later expansion of digital and social-media marketing.

Image source: Facebook

Twitter emerged in 2006, completing the sequence of major social-media launches identified in this account of marketing history.

Image source: Twitter

Marketing as an academic discipline was first taught in universities during the very early twentieth century, generally identified with the first decade of the century.

The University of Michigan offered a marketing course in 1902, widely regarded as one of the first university marketing courses.

Image source: University of Michigan

The University of Illinois also began offering coursework in marketing in 1902.

Image source: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

George B. Waldron used tax registers, city directories, and census data to show advertisers the proportions of educated and illiterate consumers and the earning capacities of occupations, in an early example of demographic segmentation.

Image source: Market segmentation

The University of Pennsylvania commenced teaching marketing during the 1904–1905 academic year.

Image source: Wharton School

The publication of Arch W. Shaw’s Some Problems in Market Distribution is regarded as the origin of the functional school, which documented the functions of marketing.

C. C. Parlin’s 1916 article helped establish the commodity school, which focused on objects of exchange and the classification of commodities.

L. D. H. Weld’s The Marketing of Farm Products became a key work in the institutional school tradition of marketing thought.

An article by Melvin T. Copeland proposed the convenience, shopping, and specialty goods classification, which remains influential in marketing.

The new Journal of Marketing gave academics a forum for exchanging ideas and research methods and helped establish marketing’s distinct identity as a maturing discipline.

Wendell R. Smith published Product Differentiation and Market Segmentation as Alternative Marketing Strategies in 1956, documenting practices he described as a natural force.

Wroe Alderson’s Marketing Behavior and Executive Action marked a shift from macro approaches based on functions, institutions, and commodities toward a micromarketing management paradigm.

The marketing-management school became dominant in the 1960s after the publication of McCarthy’s Basic Marketing, replacing the functional school as the leading approach.

E. Jerome McCarthy published Basic Marketing: A Managerial Approach, a key work in the marketing-management tradition.

Robert J. Keith’s article The Marketing Revolution described Pillsbury’s shift from a production focus in the 1860s to a consumer focus in the 1950s and became a pioneering history of marketing practice.

Philip Kotler is credited with first proposing the societal marketing orientation in an article published in the Harvard Business Review in 1972.

Robert Bartels’s The History of Marketing Thought marked a turning point in understanding how marketing theory evolved into a separate discipline.

Ronald Fullerton developed a more subtle and nuanced periodisation of the so-called marketing eras in 1988.