Marketing , as a profession is a century old and in that period it has shaped and mapped the economic progress of the developed world and enabled those economies to not only acquire immense wealth but to define what the rest of the world aspired to .
In this period Marketing was and still is the definitive discipline that created the progressive tomorrows that created the stupendous standards of living that are witnessed today because the discipline was able to create for the customer what they wanted .
Marketing has also been at the forefront of creating new wants that were latent and unknown simply by anticipating the direction of development and moving the world ahead in mega-steps . It is in such moments that the true magic of Marketing is felt . It changes the future .
During that eventful century , Marketing has evolved from a basic philosophy of taking things to market to a philosophy of marketing to customers and to where we are increasingly getting to currently and that is marketing with the customer . The customer has always remained the focus .
The shifting reality has over time been captured by the discipline ’ s ability to adapt to current needs and from the initial building blocks of Marketing of Product , Price , Promotion and Place the discipline added four more Ps to adapt and enrich the practice .
It is worth noting at this point that Marketing has borrowed from both the physical and social sciences in its effort to map and understand the customer . This dynamism is what has allowed the discipline to adapt and incorporate new thinking that grow the core functions .
The four extra Ps that became part of the original Ps , took cognizance of the fact that for the Marketing function to operate it was necessary to pay more attention to how the Marketing function interfaced with other business necessities .
The extra Ps that found their way into Marketing were People , the essential component , Physical Evidence due to the marketing of services , Process brought about by mass marketing and the need for consistency and lastly Philosophy that determined individual approach to the market .
It would suffice at this point to state that a great deal of research and rigors of experience are what contributed to the extra Ps being adopted as a part of the teaching of the discipline . The mark of a profession is its ability to collate and teach standard fundamentals .
Marketing was a cause and response of the industrial revolution and for the first eighty years the profession was dominated by advertising and research as companies vied not only to understand the customer better but to let him know what was available .
Corollary developments in the media especially in the cinema and television were a boon to the profession as companies could now visually demonstrate and advice on product use . The era of modern Marketing had been born .
The power of Marketing is at times underestimated when one does not take into account other significant changes that were simultaneously taking place in the world , here we are referring to the transition of planned economies to market driven economies .
The spectacular collapse of the Socialist and Marxist doctrines and the attendant political and economic upheavals that reverberated in the world masks what happened to those much touted ideologies which purported to have a humanitarian approach to running countries .
Those hard stance economies surreptitiously but surely transformed into market driven economies led by the unification of Germany and soon there was no distinguishable difference between the then totally opposing ideologies and practices .
Whether this was a move in the right direction or even desirable is a debate for another time but the transition had to be Marketing led as those economies switched from cooperative to individualistic models and espoused capitalistic practices .
The economies emerging from the Soviet bloc were in search of business know-how especially the marketing know-how as they charted their way into the unknown business waters . It appears that the Anglo- Saxon marketing model worked for these economies in transition .
Economic history identifies four industrial revolutions starting in 1765 when coal was discovered and the development of the steam engine and mechanization saw the economy transform from an agricultural based one to an industrial one .
The second industrial revolution saw the discovery of electricity , gas and oil and the invention of the combustion engine . The telegraph and the telephone were also invented allowing a much faster dissemination of information .
Marketing was created as distinct business practice in the second industrial revolution . The term marketing would be coined much later in the period but the sales and distribution functions were recognized at the outset as core activities of business .
By 1969 the third industrial revolution was underway when electronics and nuclear power entered the industrial scene . By now marketing was established as a profession for two decades and the next thirty years were the golden years of the profession .
In the last two decades we have transitioned into the fourth industrial revolution with the advent of internet and renewable energy . This stage of industrial revolution also referred to as the digital or information revolution has occasioned mega shifts in the economic landscape .
This has had a profound effect on Marketing as a profession since for the first time the marketer has loads of information about the consumer at his disposal , which is what the marketer always dreamt of but the consumer also has unprecedented access to market information that guides his decision making .
In any case the last two decades have seen the rapid transformation of the Marketing profession to accommodate this new reality and the creation and modification of traditional marketing practices to reflect the changed business environment .
The next decade is going to be a very exciting one for marketers as they learn and invent new ways to connect with the customer and to navigate the technological advancement which is moving at warp speed and before one can properly master a new tech skill it is obsolete .
The industrial revolution has no doubt created a fantastic lifestyle for the world and many things that were the stuff of science fiction are today a reality and