Marketing and its History

Thierry MAILLET

The eternal search for the ideal consumer.

The term marketing is well known, yet often misunderstood. What is marketing? How and why was it created? The origin of marketing is often unknown, but knowing its history can help us to better understand it. This book shows us why marketing was created in the middle of the 19th century, and how it was developed and used in the 20th century the great century of the consumer society.
The book's objective is to describe, decade after decade, the advances in marketing by demonstrating how the frontrunners in the field have always attempted to adapt to society's expectations.

- Products are constantly improving because marketers know how to take frustrations and desires into account when coming to adapting and developing new products.
- An original book that highlights two facets of the same individual: consumer and citizen.
- An unrecognized history that describes a discipline in constant evolution, one that never ceases to question itself in an ever more complex world.

Thierry Maillet is a marketing consultant, a columnist at Le Nouvel Économiste and a teacher. He also leads a seminar at the Science-Po University in Paris. As early as 2001, he invented the terminology consum'actor, which is now commonly used.