Revenue Disruption: Game-Changing Sales and Marketing Strategies to Accelerate Growth

Chapter 3

Before and After Mad Men

A Brief History of Marketing

Chapter 1 mentioned the process that marketing teams use to hook live ones—in other words, new leads—and throw them over the wall to sales. But just as the hunters and kings who populate traditional sales jobs need to reinvent their approach, the marketing function requires its own revolution. Although the role of marketing has evolved over the years, especially in the post-World War II modern era of marketing, it is surprising how much it has remained the same considering today’s digital world. That, of course, is part of the dysfunction that this book describes. We need to disrupt, deconstruct, and fundamentally reinvent traditional marketing roles and responsibilities. But just who are the fishermen and women who cast their lines for live leads, and how did they come to be?

Marketing as we currently know it traces its roots to the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which were periods of rapid and massive social, technological, and scientific upheaval (sound familiar?). The job of marketing began to emerge as a distinct profession when the mass production of goods became separated from their consumption; in the old days, consumers really did “eat what they killed.”

As industrialization expanded and breakthroughs in transportation opened up new markets, formerly lengthy supply chains shrank and competition increased. Customers began to realize for the first time that they could actually ...