page_title: History of marketing
section_title: Marketing history: an overview
hierarchical_section_title: History of marketing / Marketing history: an overview
caption_attribution_description: Palestinian amphoras, St. Peter's castle; Bodrum, Turkey
context_page_description: The study of the history of marketing, as a discipline, is meaningful because it helps to define the baselines upon which change can be recognised and understand how the discipline evolves in response to those changes. The practice of marketing has been known for millennia, but the term "marketing" used to describe commercial activities buying and selling a products or services came into popular use in the late nineteenth century. The study of the history of marketing as an academic field emerged in the early twentieth century.
  Marketers tend to distinguish between the history of marketing practice and the history of marketing thought:
  the history of marketing practice refers to an investigation into the ways that marketing has been practiced; and how those practices have evolved over time as they respond to changing socio-economic conditions
  the history of marketing thought refers to an examination of the ways that marketing has been studied and taught
  Although the history of marketing thought and the history of marketing practice are distinct fields of study, they intersect at different junctures.
context_section_description: Historians of marketing tend to fall into two distinct branches of marketing history - the history of marketing practice and the history of marketing thought. These branches are often deeply divided and have very different roots. The history of marketing practice is grounded in the management and marketing disciplines, while the history of marketing thought is grounded in economic and cultural history. This means that the two branches ask very different types of research questions and employ different research tools and frameworks.
  Historians of marketing have undertaken considerable investigation into the emergence of marketing practice, yet there is little agreement about when marketing first began. Some researchers argue that marketing practices can be found in antiquity  while others suggest that marketing, in its modern form, emerged in conjunction with the rise of consumer culture in seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe  while yet other researchers suggest that modern marketing was only fully realised in the decades following the industrial revolution in Britain from where it subsequently spread to Europe and North America. Hollander and others have suggested that the different dates for the emergence of marketing can be explained by problems surrounding the way that marketing has been defined - whether reference to 'modern marketing' as a planned, programmed repertoire of professional practice including activities such as segmentation, product differentiation, positioning and marketing communications versus 'marketing' as a simple form distribution and exchange.
caption: In pre-literate societies, the distinctive shape of amphora served some of the functions of a label, communicating information about region of origin, the name of the producer and may have carried product quality claims
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