Marketing is the process of getting people to be more interested or aware of your company’s products or services. This can happen through a wide range of techniques and strategies, with or without the assistance of a marketing agency. Here’s a short guide to how marketing developed into the behemoth it is today!
The modern idea of marketing first came about during the 1950s when people began to use more than just printed media (think newspapers and magazines) to endorse products. The advent of the television, and the internet, into most family homes offered companies the chance to conduct various campaigns across a wide range of media devices.
Marketing can be traced back as far as 1500BC, where evidence has been found which seems to show that traders marked their goods with early forms of logos – producers of goods would stamp their products with a signature mark to show buyers who had made the items! This worked as a simple reminder to people back then that a specific product came from a specific vendor.
A little later, the printing press was invented (around 1450). Johannes Gutenberg developed the first way of mass-producing print materials, allowing for vendors and producers to show their “logo” alongside words to reach a greater number of people, through books, posters and papers. This is where the first iteration of print advertising was born!
From the early 1700s up to around the 1900s, magazines, billboards and outdoor advertising were beginning to form. Magazines were first developed to share essays, poems, stories and political views. This idea of using printed publications for mass consumption created a new way to share information over a much larger area. Brands were keen to get into the pages of the new magazines!
Once we entered the early 20th century, the introduction of radio, and later, TV paved the way for adverts as we know them today. The first paid radio advert hit the airwaves in 1922, with a ten-minute segment to promote Long Island apartments.
The biggest leap in marketing history came with the arrival of household computers. Once computers were no longer taking up the space of a whole room and could be owned by individuals in their own homes, it wasn’t long before the internet was invented to link millions of us together. With the internet came search engines and directories, where users could easily search across the whole world for the things they wanted and were interested in. Here came the beginnings of search engine optimisation and digital marketing. Now that marketing is such a massive industry, with companies globally wanting to be seen by all the right people, marketing agency firms are very popular to use to get the best results.
