Back to the Beginning: The Evolution of Marketing

(Originally posted here: https://epicpresence.com/inbound-marketing/)

Marketing is as old as commerce itself.

Most business history literature will describe marketing as a discipline that grew out of economics studies in the early 20th Century, and for most research purposes that works well enough.

Still, ancient cultures did practice some elementary form of marketing. It might have been a case as simple as a Phoenician trader lowering the price of his goods for reluctant Egyptian merchants, but that counts.

We dug around and found some actual examples of pre-modern marketing practices, and what is fascinating about all those old tactics is how well they apply today. In fact, some very old ideas about branding and relationship-building might be more relevant today than they would have been a generation ago.

In even appears that a couple of researchers at Emory University predicted the rise of inbound marketing way back in 1995, when only a tiny fraction of people were even using the internet.

But we’ll come back to that.

First, let’s take a look at how marketing has evolved through the millennia. Once we return to contemporary methods of inbound marketing, we might have a nice road map for how marketing will continue to evolve going forward.
 

The Invention of Farming and The Earliest Forms of Marketing

The big driver of marketing’s evolution is technology, specifically the three technological revolutions mankind has thus far experienced: The Agrarian Revolution, the Industrial Revolution and the Internet Revolution.

So, farming itself kicked off the need for commerce. Most early farmers found they were able to sustain themselves largely through what they grew or raised, but sometimes they found an exchange of goods or services could be more efficient.

Why try to grow wheat when you can just trade a goat for a year’s supply of it? This revelation led to the first markets, where farmers would participate as both buyer and seller.

“[R]elational bonding between traders was also quite prevalent, partly because of the need to do business with others you could trust,” Emory University researchers Jagdish N. Sheth and Atul Parvatiyar wrote 20 years ago.

“Thus, ongoing trade relationships were a critical element of business practices in the pre-industrial era, where ownership was linked with the management of business.”

Relationships emerged as the fundamental aspect of marketing. Farmers and townspeople sought out sellers whom they knew and could trust.

Sellers quickly began to understand the importance of retaining customers and influencing repeat purchases, Sheth and Parvatiyar pointed out, so branding — the original definition of the word, where hot metal was used to singe livestock — emerged around this time as a symbol of the seller’s trustworthiness.

Some merchants even used their family name as a brand to demonstrate they “were willing to ascribe the family name to the product,” they wrote.

It wasn’t just the merchant classes involved in marketing innovations, though,LiveWorld founder and CEO Peter Friedman writes at HuffPost.

“Feudal lords sponsored the medieval marketplace,” he says. “This provided a social hub to draw both town and country dwellers, where they could trade gossip and enjoy the shared experience of entertainment and community. This in turn set the context for commerce that could be taxed, thus supporting the lords’ economy.”

The social aspects of commerce were widely prevalent, it seems, up until the Industrial Revolution. Then, technology and circumstance changed the way goods and services were marketed.
 

The Rise of Outbound Marketing and Transactional Mindsets

Sheth and Parvatiyar argued that industrialization changed the very nature of consumption:

“Unable to sell the entire stock of produced goods, producers were confronted with an increased inventory of finished products. These market conditions gave rise to aggressive selling and the development of marketing institutions that were willing to bear the risks and costs of inventory ownership and storage.”

They argued, too, that these conditions led entrepreneurs and businesspeople to think of commerce not in terms of a social endeavor but in terms of raw numbers.

Their term was “transaction orientation”: The focus wasn’t the customer anymore but the transaction itself, and the enterprise’s ability to scale those transaction numbers skyward.

To influence more transactions, businesses had to get the word out.

Modern content marketing can trace its roots to this period. Just take a look at the John Deere quarterly magazines from 1895 in this great infographic from Uberflip.

Experiential marketing took off, as well. Perhaps the best example from the Industrial Age was the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago. “It introduced people to Juicy Fruit gum, the Ferris wheel, Cream of Wheat cereal, and Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, just to name a few fair firsts,” On Marketing wrote for Forbes earlier this year.

The article points out that today’s music festivals and SXSW-type events grew out from this model. (Insert your own PBR joke here.)

By the time industrialization had matured, the right communications technology had come along to give a voice to all of those aggressive sales pitches.

Print ads were already big business by the mid-1800s, as this excellent infographic from HubSpot points out. By the Depression, half of all American homes had a radio.

And a generation later came the golden age / Mad Men era of advertising.

But then advertising essentially stopped innovating, Fast Company writer Danielle Sacks wrote in 2010. “Like a beetle preserved in amber, the practice of advertising has sat virtually unchanged for the last half-century.”

At the detail level, this seems completely false. In that half-century, for example, we’ve seen the Super Bowl grow into America’s premiere television advertising showcase.

At a more basic level, though, Sacks is right. Advertising is still the same practice of blasting out a one-way message. The medium might change, and the audience might grow, but the approach to communication is still a byproduct of that Industrial Age transaction orientation.

Inbound Marketing and a Refocusing on Relationships

That brings us up to our current technological revolution, the one brought on by the advent of interconnected communications devices. Those laptops and smartphones and tablets we use every day have forced us marketers to re-evaluate how we communicate to potential and existing customers.

“By the mid-2000s, digital behavior changed the power dynamic between buyer and seller dramatically,” Kapost’s interactive post titled “A Brief History of Digital Marketing Technology” reads.

“Users began researching products and making decisions about them online, and on their phones, before ever talking to a salesperson.

The individual consumer has so much more power in the buyer/seller relationship today, and that dynamic is creating a need for more social approaches to marketing.

“[T]he Internet has turned what used to be a controlled, one-way message into a real-time dialogue with millions,” Sacks wrote.

And so, we’re back where we started, with one-to-one dialogues between seller and buyer. Of course, there are economies of scale involved, but the focus is on scaling up social interactions rather than commercial transactions.

Sheth and Parvatiyar predicted this exact shift about five years before it began:

“[A]n alternative paradigm of marketing is needed. A paradigm which can account for the continuous nature of relationship of marketing actors. It might be better for the continuous development of the discipline to give up the sacred cow of exchange theory, in search of some other paradigm.

“What would be the nature of this alternative paradigm is not clear, but as many scholars are trying to argue, that such a paradigm ought to be based on value creation instead of value distribution.”

Go back to that HubSpot infographic once more and scroll down the section titled “The Age of Inbound Marketing.” Here’s what HubSpot’s Corey Eridon wrote about the new paradigm of inbound marketing:

“After the dot-com bubble burst, the Internet begins to enter a new age, characterized by a greater emphasis on information sharing, user-centered design, and collaboration. This new trend leads to consumers engaging with brands in new ways.

“Instead of simply pushing advertising at consumers online, the benefits of creating value for customers and earning their business begins to take hold.”

The idea only sounded new to us in the early 2000s because we weren’t around for the first few thousand years this was the dominant marketing paradigm.

 

images by:
Simon Urwin / Unsplash
Vladimir Kudinov / Unsplash
Vladimir Kudinov / Unsplash
Kevin Curtis / Unsplash