Matthew Atkinson

FEB 15, 2026

The term marketing has evolved significantly since its academic origins in the early 1900s. If you work in the field today, you might assume marketing has always been about demand generation campaigns, brand messaging, and digital funnels. But early marketing thought was heavily shaped by physical distribution in commodity markets. It was a physical act—you took your goods to the market, and you sold them.

A Look Back: In Noah Webster's 1841 dictionary, marketing was defined simply as the "supply of a market; attendance upon a market" (Webster, 1841, p. 517). In other words, supplying a market with goods and services, or literally showing up at the market to buy or sell.

Bounding the Discipline

As business practices formalized, so did the terminology. In 1911, when organizing a course in selling at the University of Wisconsin, Ralph Starr Butler decided on the term “Marketing” to cover this emerging field of business activity, naming his class “Marketing Methods.”

By the 1920s, G.R. Collins, writing in an early business school textbook, noted: "To many minds, 'marketing' is still precisely synonymous with selling, and in many business enterprises nothing exists in the way of marketing organization beyond a sales department." For the average business at the time, marketing and sales were the same thing.

In 1935 the National Association of Marketing Teachers (the predecessor to the American Marketing Association) tried to define the core activities that constituted a distinct "marketing function." Researchers analyzed textbooks of the era to identify the most universally accepted tasks within the field. While literature mentioned a wide variety of activities, a core group emerged as the most consistently recognized marketing functions: transporting, storing, financing, risking, and selling.

What did "Risking" mean? In older marketing literature, "risking" usually meant bearing commercial risk: inventory risk, price fluctuations, spoilage, uncertain demand, and credit risk. Getting your corn, tobacco, or beef to market in the early 1900s was a risky venture!

In defining the field, these early academics drew a hard line: Marketing, outside of packaging, was not production (i.e., product development). Marketing's job was moving an already-built product into the consumer's hands.

Their official definition was: "The performance of business activities that direct the flow of goods and services from producers to consumers."

Simple. Bounded. Clear.

The Marketing Revolution

That bounded definition largely stood for a long time. Then, the 1960s changed the discipline forever.

In 1960, Robert J. Keith published "The Marketing Revolution," an incredibly popular and well-cited article in the Journal of Marketing. In it, he made a new argument: “Marketing permeates the entire organization. Marketing plans and executes the sale—all the way from the inception of the product idea, through its development and distribution, to the customer purchase.”

This was a significant shift. Marketing was no longer a downstream function that just took what Product built and figured out how to sell it. Now, it was supposed to influence what got built and why.

By 1985, the American Marketing Association (AMA) finally caught up to where scholars like Keith and E. Jerome McCarthy (creator of the famous 4Ps framework) had been heading. They adopted new language:

"Marketing is the process of planning and executing the conception, pricing, promotion, and distribution of goods, ideas, and services to create exchanges that satisfy individual and organizational goals."

With this, the AMA explicitly captured product strategy, pricing, and distribution under the marketing umbrella.

The Modern Disconnect

The definition has only continued to expand since then. In 2004, the AMA added the concept of "managing customer relationships" to the definition.

And then we arrive at today's AMA definition, first adopted in 2007:

"Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large."

This modern definition is much less specific. It is aspirational, elevating marketing from a business function to an entity with a responsibility to society itself. It is also, arguably, much more confusing.

I wonder if we were to survey various business executives which definition they would say most fits their view of marketing?

References

American Marketing Association. (1985, March 1). AMA board approves new marketing definition. Marketing News.

American Marketing Association. (2004). Definition of marketing. https://whattheythink.com/articles/22134-marketing-101/

American Marketing Association. (2008, January 14). AMA releases new definition for marketing. WhatTheyThink. https://whattheythink.com/news/31797-ama-releases-new-definition-marketing/

Chartered Institute of Marketing. (2015). Marketing and the 7Ps: A brief summary of marketing and how it works. https://www.cim.co.uk/media/nhdlxs1i/7ps.pdf

Collins, G. R. (1930). Marketing. Alexander Hamilton Institute.

Keith, R. J. (1960). The marketing revolution. Journal of Marketing, 24 (3), 35–38. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224296002400306

National Association of Marketing Teachers. (1935). Definition of marketing. The National Marketing Review, 1 (2), 148–166.

Ringold, D. J., & Weitz, B. (2007). The American Marketing Association definition of marketing: Moving from lagging to leading indicator. Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, 26 (2), 251–260. https://doi.org/10.1509/jppm.26.2.251

Webster, N. (1841). An American dictionary of the English language. https://archive.org/details/an-american-dictionary-of-the-english-language-by-noah-webster-1841/page/517/mode/2up

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