The study of the history of marketing as an academic field emerged only recently with the publication of ‘The History of Marketing Thought’ by Robert Bartels in 1976. Broadly defined marketing is any activity that connects producers with consumers, which was previously considered a subtopic of economics. Wroe Alderson’s book, ‘Marketing Behavior and Executive Action’ (1957) is also considered a break-point in the history of marketing thought. After Alderson, marketing began to incorporate other fields of knowledge besides economics, notably behavioral science, developing into a multidisciplinary field.
Marketing historian Jagdish Shethhave identified three schools of marketing: Managerial (systematized marketing emerged during the late 1950s and became arguably the predominant and most influential school of thought in the field), Consumer/Buyer Behavior (the use of behavioral science to market goods and services was popularized in the second half of the twentieth century), and Social Exchange (recently, ‘exchange’ has been forwarded as the fundamental concept of marketing).
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The Daily Omnivore 