OPPapers.com

Marketing Generally

Marketing

Geoffrey Miller
For John Brockman’s “Inventions Project” (Simon & Schuster)

Published as:
Miller, G. F. (2000). Marketing. In J. Brockman (Ed.), The greatest inventions of the last 2,000 years, pp. 121-126. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Marketing has become the most important idea in business and the most dominant force in culture. It is commonly misunderstood as a pretentious term for advertising. But it is more than that. It is systematic attempt to fulfill human desires by producing goods and services that people will buy. It is where the wild frontiers of human nature meet the wild powers of technology. Like chivalrous lovers, marketing-oriented companies help us discover desires we never knew we had, and ways of fulfilling them we never imagined we could invent.

Almost everything we can buy is the result of some marketing people in some company thinking very hard about how to make us happy. They do not always get it right. But they try. Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand has spawned the Invisible Eye. Production is no longer guided by the clumsy feedback provided by last quarter’s profit figures. It is guided directly by empirical research into human preferences and personalities: focus groups, questionnaires, Beta testing, social surveys, demographics. Psychology has given way to market research as the most important investigator of human nature.

Markets are ancient, but the concept of marketing arose only in the middle of the 20th century. In agricultural and mercantile societies there were producers, guilds, traders, bankers, and retailers, but economic consciousness was focused on making money, not fulfilling consumer desires. With the Industrial Revolution, mass production led to an emphasis on the cost-efficiency of production rather than the satisfaction of the customer. As markets matured in the early 20th century, firms had to compete harder for market share, but they did so through advertising and sales...