Investigating marketing’s evolution

You may be an experienced marketer interested in reading around the subject. Alternatively, you may have discovered this because you are a student or early stage entrepreneur looking to increase your chances of success. Well, we will start by saying that this guide caters for both, and in fact, all audiences.

To understand this, we first need to understand what a market is. A market is a collective group of companies that together satisfy a clear business need for a customer.

Markets by their very nature are flexible, as are the businesses that operate within them. For a start, human needs are ever-changing, which means that businesses will become more or less necessary with time. Furthermore, businesses are aware of this and are therefore able to diversify and operate in multiple markets to ensure that they remain relevant.

Marketing is therefore the process that a business can use to interact, understand and evolve with the needs of the market.

Marketing has always existed to some degree in competitive markets. This is because market competition and marketing go hand in hand. When customers have more than one choice for a product or service, then naturally, they will develop different perceptions of each available option.

But let’s interrogate this for a second. Before marketing emerged as a dedicated discipline in the last hundred years or so, you may argue that bread makers, architects, carpenters, and builders all operated without considering marketing. After all, they didn’t have a dedicated marketing department. Nor did they know what ‘marketing’ was.

But, if you really think about it, it’s clear they were all marketing to some extent. They just didn’t call it as such. A bread maker would cater to the needs of buyers, e.g. making more of what they liked and less of what they didn’t. Alternatively, a carpenter would get to know what customers wanted, and find ways to appeal to them. We know this because the products of their labour changed over many centuries before marketing was even a thing. Furthermore, there is a lot of evidence to show these changes weren’t simply the result of better productivity, but changing tastes.

So, the question here is much more about why marketing has evolved to become a dedicated discipline and an important part of today’s society.

Marketing’s rise has not been coincidental. It is also not down to any marketing visionary or genius as perhaps you may believe. Instead, it is the logical consequence of growing competition and complexity within markets, particularly in the western world.

A free market doesn't restrict market entrants, which incentivises innovation and subsequently increases competition. Over the years, the increased competition within markets led to a point where they began to mature. This increased the desire for businesses to find every way to gain an advantage.

This began from an operational perspective, with accountants looking for every way to increase productivity and reduce costs. But it soon went further. In industries where choice was high and value was subjective, businesses could increase their profit margins by better understanding the needs of their customers. As a result, they began to adapt the way they designed them, what they called them, how they were packaged and so on.

This is an important consideration and a critical way to consider marketing’s evolution up until present day. Typically, marketing is now used as a way for business to increase profit margins and market share beyond simply increasing productivity and reducing costs. This requires specialist skills and therefore specialist departments.

As we’ve seen, marketing has always existed in competitive markets to some extent. For this reason, not all marketing related activities happen within the marketing department. The price that a business sets for its services is a major element within a market and therefore a major element within marketing. This is often set by the operational and finance departments, with additional input from marketing. Furthermore, the way a product is designed such as a car or a hair dryer is completed by product designers and not marketers, yet it is a crucial part of marketing. Further still, the way in which a business diversifies within a market by merging, making new products, and making acquisitions also has a major impact on the way it operates and is therefore viewed within a market.

This means a business's position is in a constant state of flux based on current market conditions. As a consequence, the majority of internal people will have an influence on the way a business markets itself to some degree. Take HR for example. HR people are involved in recruiting and motivating teams, which has a knock-on impact on the way a business presents itself and its reputation.

Taking this to its extension, the way in which the business operates as a whole determines how authentic a business can be in relation to its marketing efforts. This is particularly relevant in today’s society, where the average member of the public can quickly find out what happens behind the scenes at most companies. They may look at their financial performance, the type of people who work there, and so on.

Over the years, marketing has evolved as a specialist business area. This process started out as an art, but as a result of the digital age, quickly evolved to become more of a science. As a result, marketers are typically selected for their skills in being able to understand and adapt to changes in human behaviour.

Marketers are expected to understand how the products or services that their business offers are received and appraised by their customers. In other words, their main specialism is understanding how the company is communicated, perceived, appreciated, understood and experienced. Because they are not dedicated to the operational performance of the business, they are generally seen as a cost centre for it, which can be problematic. As mentioned earlier, many of the core marketing elements can be performed outside the marketing department (e.g. price setting), which means that – particularly in difficult times – the marketing department can be expendable.

You may be thinking that this is an awkward relationship between marketing and the rest of the business, and you’d be exactly right. It’s certainly not perfect. The exceptions aside, however, the vast majority of companies still operate with a fairly rigid and disparate marketing function.

The CEO wields the power within a business, as he is ultimately responsible for its success. And as a business' main priority is to make money, CEO's usually come from accounting/ business management backgrounds.

For this reason, a Head of Marketing or CMO will task the finance department for quarterly/yearly marketing budgets based on past performance and industry benchmarks. This can lock marketing departments in a constant cycle of projecting, allocating, reviewing and so on.

This may sound counterintuitive, and in many ways, it is. If marketing’s role is to adapt to the market, then it might be expected that marketers would need to adapt their budgets freely with market conditions. Yet, apart from a few clear exceptions, this is how the majority of marketing departments operate.

At this point, we can segue into an area that dominates marketing discussions. Branding’s co-emergence with marketing over the last hundred years was very much a driving force for the growth of marketing.

Branding aims to ensure that all the products or services a business creates should add up to a set of values that convey trust and authenticity. Its emergence was revolutionary because it provided a stamp of authenticity, thereby providing peace of mind for the buyer.

For many products, it subsequently provided a way to distinguish between levels of quality, particularly when it was difficult to determine by the naked eye.

Clearly, customers weren’t just paying for a name or a stamp, but the underlying values that the brand represented. Marketers then set about understanding and subsequently defining them to increase the appeal of their products or services. The customer might be looking for high quality, in which case the marketer might highlight the production process. Alternatively, they might be looking for a personal touch, in which case the marketer might highlight the people involved in making the product.

And with time, the ability to perform this branding process became an arms race. The more one company was able to improve its success through a set of branding techniques, the more others would follow. And this leads us to today, where branding has become so sophisticated, that it touches every aspect of sense and emotion. Leading global brands now consider everything that can be perceived as a way to define their brand values – the name, brand colours, tone of voice, images, sounds, fonts, packaging and so on.

You may be thinking that branding is the same as marketing, but branding is simply one aspect or specialism within marketing. We’ll explain why.

Usually, a single brand approach would suit every product or service a business creates. However, this is not always the case. Let’s consider this by thinking about a new mobile phone company that only decides to make one phone. In this case, it might be logical to assume that they could use the same brand values to roll out the brand across the world.

But if we give this a little more thought, we will realise that people have different needs across the world. So, even if a company makes just one phone, it will need to vary its marketing communications in each country. In some regions, the camera’s ability to take selfies might have the greatest appeal. In others, it might be the battery life. The same can be said for the type of influencers chosen, the type of advertising, and so on.

These discussions already show how difficult it is to determine what to include in the overarching ‘brand values’ and what to leave to the needs of each market. In fact, the majority of brands that you may believe have universal appeal are perceived differently to varying degrees in other regions. In general, brand logos and colours remain the same, but everything else is often tweaked ever so slightly.

If we move on to consider businesses that sell multiple products, it’s easy to see how difficult this process can become. A clothing brand, for example, may define a set of ‘aspirational brand values’ that it believes reflect all its clothes. Then, with each new piece of clothing, it will have to decide how much to deviate from them. For this reason, there are many clothing brands that have struggled to evolve with new trends because their overarching brand values are no longer deemed relevant by customers. Furthermore, there are many clothing brands that have pivoted their overarching brand values through time to make them more appealing.

Hopefully this shows you that marketing and branding are not the same thing, and that branding is simply an element within branding.

To underline the point, we can also consider how the importance of branding has changed as a result of the digital revolution. The complexity of the digital revolution has made it more difficult to create and keep to a rigid set of overarching brand values. This is because the number of media channels and platforms has increased dramatically. Each platform requires its own communication techniques, which in turn means that brand values have to be loosened to provide digital marketers with the agility they require.

For this reason, when marketers define a company’s ‘brand guidelines’, they may include dedicated rules for each platform. The result of this is differences in the content produced on each platform. For example, a global brand may release a marketing campaign on social media that it wouldn’t release on TV. Furthermore, it may converse with customers on Snapchat differently to how it would on LinkedIn and so on. Of course, even this is not perfect. Digital marketers are in a constant struggle to update these guidelines as the needs of users change.

If we were to simplify the difference between the role of marketing and branding, it would be to say that branding is used to increase the value that continuity has in a customer’s eyes. By contrast, marketing more broadly caters for a customer’s exact needs at any given point in time. For this reason, there will always be a give and take relationship between the two. And for this reason, both processes are run by marketers and sit within the marketing department.

To answer this, it is first important to understand how we’ve got to this point. If you haven’t read this guide from the start, then we fully recommend that you do. Why? Because marketing today is really a product of where it started. It’s therefore essential to understand the history of the discipline, its role within the organisation, and the relationship between branding and marketing.

So, with that covered, let’s answer the question. Marketing underwent a revolution in the 70s, 80s and 90s, when some of the biggest global brands e.g. McDonald’s, Coca-Cola etc. achieved incredible growth. There were many operational reasons for this to do with globalisation, but marketing certainly played its part, with mass marketing techniques such as TV advertising taking off.

Media consumption exploded. And media consumption was paid for in the majority by advertising, which meant advertising consumption exploded. The millions of TV viewers also had fewer choices. There were a limited number of channels, which meant that a captive audience could be easily reached.

The same could be said of every media area during this time, not just TV and radio. Newspapers and magazines were in their heyday, and there were no signs of burnout. Each media area was regulated by fairly rigid market forces.

If we fast-forward to today, then we can see clearly that everything has changed as a result of the digital revolution. Media channels have exploded in every area. Not only that, more and more social media platforms, apps, and publishers have developed business models based on advertising, which has led to greater exposure and therefore a reduction in its effectiveness.

The logical result of this complexity and the move to digital has meant that marketing departments have become increasingly complex and specialised. Both offline and online channels or ‘touch points’ have changed.

Of course, the greatest changes have happened online. Websites allow businesses to sell and advertise globally across multiple platforms. Content marketing has grown as a unique discipline, with marketers able to be content publishers and measure success based on the number of shares, clicks, and views. Furthermore, branding and graphic design can now be tested. In fact, every way that marketers can understand and interact with customers has changed because of the digital revolution.

If we consider marketing to be dedicated to the discipline of understanding customers and how best to appeal to them, then it is logical to think that there are countless ways to convince a customer. These have been separated into dedicated disciplines catering for particular touchpoints or groups of touchpoints. These disciplines are also ever-evolving, given marketing’s continuing evolution. We’ve created an in-depth video (below) to explain them.

Data is unbelievably valuable, given the noise that we are all exposed to every day. However, even in today’s world, marketing is by no means an exact science. It would be easy to think that everything in marketing can be measured and that marketers now know exactly what customers want, but the reality is anything but.

Today’s data providers, even when pooled together, only provide part of the picture into a customer’s behaviour. There are still many elements that can’t accurately be measured, and certainly not in real-time. To understand this, we’ve defined seven elements to every purchase. Although a marketer may use data to understand them, they will still need to apply a broader understanding of human behaviour.

For this reason, many marketing roles require skills that are not data focused. Designers require creativity, copywriters require a natural ability to write, and CMO’s need to be able to manage and get the best out of people. Data analysis is still necessary, but it is not the most important skill.

This can be seen by considering how a marketing department that is about to select an influencer to front a brand campaign. With the campaign set to roll out media interviews, emails, digital adverts, and TV adverts – can they rely on data to make it? Maybe they can look at the influencer’s followers on social media? Or consider the age of their followers? Or the engagement level of their posts?

These all provide great insights, but they don’t provide all the answers. Ultimately, many aspects are intangible and subjective, such as determining how ‘cool’ the influencer is, or how ‘authentic’ they are. There are no exact metrics for these aspects.

We can then go further to consider how the company can use data to evaluate the influencer’s success at the end of the campaign. How will they know whether its success was due to the influencer and not the creative activation or the market conditions? It’s difficult to tell, isn’t it?!

Realising that data doesn’t provide all the answers, it’s more valuable to consider the marketing channels where data is essential. This can be easily considered if all the available marketing opportunities are split into eight growth areas.

In fact, marketers can’t run digital advertising campaigns without data. This is because it is essential to build a targeting profile, and modelling inventory costs. However, in other channels where decisions are not made in real-time, data may not be the most important factor.

In summary

Over this course of this guide, we’ve endeavoured to explain how marketing works by building up from base principles. We hope you found it valuable. If you would like to take your interest further to understand how to create the most effective marketing strategy, then check out our other guides. Alternatively, get in touch. We look forward to hearing from you!