Drucker Chapter 1

To begin our course on marketing, we were introduced to Peter Drucker and his views on marketing. It does not take long to learn the Drucker feels very strongly that marketing is immensely important.  In the first chapter, we learned about the six eras of marketing. These eras were the craftsman and simple trade era, the production era, the selling era, the marketing era, the marketing company era, and finally the societal marketing era. After learning about each of these it is clear that we are not yet in the societal marketing era. In this era, companies are mindful of the impact their marketing efforts have on society and they take responsibility to be sure they are doing their part to improve society. Companies are not just looking to increase profits as high as possible and at any cost necessary but they are attempting to create customers rather than convince people to buy a product.

The modern form of marketing came about in 1650 in Japan. It was introduced by the Mitsui family who at the time were simple retailers but today the family has built the largest corporate conglomerate in Japan and one of the largest publically traded companies in the world. It took another 250 years before these same principles were put into action in the United States by Sears, Roebuck. It took until the 1920s in Europe for modern marketing to be used due to certain prejudices between classes of individuals. Drucker saw the first product in the United State to truly be marketed happen in the 1940s with the Cadillac. Drucker also saw that modern production methods intended to give a competitive advantage could be overcome with effective marketing. The Rolls-Royce Company denounced the advantages of Ford’s assembly line by offering individually machined automobiles that were promoted as “never wearing out”.

Drucker acknowledged the Era Theory but he did not necessarily agree with it. Drucker felt that innovations and innovators defined marketing, not just the era we found ourselves in. Forward-thinkers did not follow the crowd but they risks and tried new ideas. These people took advantage of the situations they were in and what they were given to work with to make the most of what they had. Drucker believed that a successful marketer did what they needed to in order to ethically provide society what it wanted and needed.