ABSTRACT
This chapter will assess the historical development and meaning of marketing per se before we address what marketing specifically means in an event context. Marketing is a very broad discipline and we shall briefly address all the main areas that encompass marketing because marketers need the breadth of all these areas; and they will probably also have a far greater depth of knowledge of some. We will finish the chapter by anchoring the detailed practice within a wider conceptual discussion. By the end of this chapter, students will be able to:
In pre-industrial societies marketing meant going to market, whether to buy or sell. While this process involved several of the core components we would today recognise, such as an exchange taking place, what we understand to be modern marketing is a direct result of the Industrial Revolution. Mass production of goods, growing consumerism and the growth of global markets created new, and larger, problems which had to be solved through the development of unique skills and processes. By the first third of the twentieth century we could identify a discrete discipline, with practitioners in companies who fulfilled a marketing function.
