Product Marketing

Product Marketing

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Product Marketing

A competing and widely held alternative definition of marketing is that it is the stimulation of demand for the firm's output or, more generally, its 'productive resources' (Davis, 1961). This viewpoint gained broad support as the practice of modern marketing developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Britain, the US, and Germany. The important context for this development was the rapid increase in mass production and the concomitant appearance of intense competition and excess manufacturing capacity (Fullerton, 1988; Tedlow, 1990). Aggressive personal selling and advertising were in full bloom by the early 1900s as firms faced the need to create new customers for their products, especially innovations such as the mechanical harvester, the typewriter, the automobile, and a plethora of health and beauty aids, packaged foods, and household cleansers (Rowsome, 1959).

Firms began to differentiate their products, hoping to do a better job than their competitors of responding to and satisfying customers' needs (Shaw, 1916). The practice of, if not the term, market segmentation was well known at the turn of the twentieth century (Shaw, 1916: 106; Fullerton, 1988: 113). While Henry Ford is celebrated for his vision for mass production and design of a standard product for the working class (the Model T), he also purchased the Lincoln Motor Company in order to offer a luxury car. He used advertising and publicity of all kinds, including racing, to stimulate demand for Ford products (Ford, 1922; Fullerton, 1988: 118).

Clearly, firm managers a century ago understood the importance of marketing as demand stimulation, although they did not often call itmarketing. Selling, advertising, and other forms of promotion (the terms that were used) were essentially synonymous with 'marketing' in the common understanding. Business people were focused on the problem of stimulating demand and creating preference for their products, and on pricing and distribution as part of the demand stimulation process. Marketing presented the company and its products to the customer. Communications were one-way, from producer to consumer. Within the firm, marketing was synonymous with selling.

Marketing as Creating and Managing Markets

While business people were focused on the problems they faced, academic theorists were trying to define marketing as a field of study and a distinct academic discipline. The first marketing management case book to be used as a text was published in 1920 (Copeland, 1920), but it did not offer an analytical framework for decision making.

Early academic definitions of marketing grew out of an attempt to understand how markets actually worked in moving the products of farm, forest, sea, mine, and factory from the producer to the consumer. Thus, many early scholars attempted to understand the differences among commodities in terms of their unique market structures and processes (Breyer, 1931). There was a heavy emphasis on the functions (McGarry, 1950; Weld, 1917) and institutions (Breyer, 1934; Duddy & Revzan, 1947) involved in the marketing process as marketing scholars attempted to discern the fundamental principles of marketing (Ivey, 1921; Maynard et al., 1927). On the other ...