The Shifting World of Marketing
Marketing, the art of promoting and the science of outselling your competition. The term “marketing†was born at the University of Pennsylvania when they offered the first course in the matter, “The marketing of Products†back in 1904. Although there was no term assigned to the act, marketing existed ever since people had things to sell. Even the successful gladiators in ancient Rome were getting paid to wear and advertise products.
Throughout the years and as the products changed and competition grew in virtually all industries, marketing became a critical part of any business and the backbone of every success story. Marketing has gone an evolution so great and rapid that only a few sectors of the industry went through. In the turn of the 20th century, the early days of the automobile industry, marketing efforts focused mainly on delivering the cars to everyone since products sold themselves at that stage. Henry Ford’s quote “They can have any color they want… as long as it’s black†simply sums up the spirit of marketing at that time. As the years progressed and the global markets became more and more interlocking, the competition between businesses grew dramatically, it was a survival game and those with the best marketing makes it out alive. Starting in the 30s with radios, then the 50s with tv, to the 70s when the first form of synergy marketing took shape through McDonald’s happy meal toys and Disney parks characters attractions.
However, the first major revolution in the marketing industry happened in the early 80s, when the experts of the field agreed that marketing should be about building a personal relationship with the customer instead of the traditional one-time interaction. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) became a powerful tool for businesses and suddenly companies were forced to develop and nurture a relationship with all their customers and even the cold leads. In the 90s, with the introduction of the internet, marketing took a turn for the best[1]. Marketing became accessible to everyone, new websites delivered special traffic to businesses. The specialized search engines filtered the ads to only the people who will be interested in such products.
Today, as social media takes over our lives, and the internet became more personalize-able than ever before marketing is so much more specialized and targets only the potential customers. Social media allows users to personalize their internet footprints which in return allows businesses to target specific people that show interest in their product or service[2]. Inbound marketing of today is more powerful than ever and businesses are in a rat race to be in the lead on the next big thing.
[1] Jeaney Yip, Susan Ainsworth, “Whatever Worksâ€, Journal of Macromarketing, 2016, 36, 4, 443
[2] Castronovo, Cristina; Huang, Lei. Journal of Marketing Development and Competitiveness; West Palm Beach Vol.        6, Iss. 1, (Feb 2012): 117-134.
Although America has always been a service-based economy, where the number of employed Americans has been greater in the service sector than in manufacturing since the turn of the 20th century. It is noteworthy that the manufacturing efforts in the US have declined dramatically in the past few decades. Industrial powerhouse cities like Detroit and Tennessee fell victims to the migration of American manufacturing. The loss of manufacturing in America manifested itself most Cleary in job losses, according to the Economist, for the first time since the Industrial Revelation fewer than 10 percent of American workers are employed in manufacturing.