---
url: "https://questionstar.com/blog/history-of-marketing/"
title: "History of marketing: how the customer became scarce"
description: "The history of marketing in scenes: from the Wertheim store of 1897 through the seller's market and the buyer's market to the machine that writes texts."
lastmod: "2026-11-14"
type: "blog"
---

# History of marketing: how the customer became scarce

*How marketing came about and how it developed into what it is today.*

The history of marketing in scenes: from the Wertheim store of 1897 through the seller's market and the buyer's market to the machine that writes texts.

I had teachers who helped build the field of marketing in Germany and wrote down its history. Some of them have since retired, and their books are no longer printed. On the web you find little of what they taught me. That is why I am writing it down here, the way I heard it from them and later told it to my students. That is also where my view of the field comes from.

I studied under Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Ursula Hansen in Hannover and worked in her department as a student research assistant. Dr. Matthias Bode was her assistant at the time. He had taught in Pennsylvania shortly before. I wrote my diploma thesis there under Dr. Thorsten Hennig-Thurau, who was then working in her department toward his habilitation, the German post-doctoral qualification for a professorship, and who later, in Weimar, also became my doctoral supervisor. He was her student. I was his. The history of marketing mattered to Ursula Hansen personally. She had helped shape part of it herself, and she collected photographs and much else to preserve this knowledge and pass it on to the students who came after.

The story begins in Berlin, in 1897. On Leipziger Strasse a new building of the Wertheim company opens, built by the architect Alfred Messel. It is a Warenhaus, a department store. A customer walks in. She may look around without having to buy anything. The prices are fixed, for her as for everyone else, and she doesn't have to haggle over any of them. If she no longer likes the fabric once she is home, she can exchange it. Payment is in cash (Ladwig-Winters 2020, Förderverein Historische Warenhäuser n.d.).

Today that sounds perfectly normal. The Neue Deutsche Biographie, a German dictionary of national biography, calls fixed prices, cash payment and the right to exchange goods the Wertheim brothers' "new business principles" (Ladwig-Winters 2020, translated from the German).

![Black-and-white photograph from 1898: a tall atrium with a glass roof, two curved staircases and a statue in the middle, in front of it tables with stacked goods.](/assets/blog/x03/x03_wertheim_1898_lichthof_architekturwelt_crop.jpg)

*Atrium of the Wertheim department store on Leipziger Strasse, Berlin, 1898, one year after the opening. Architect: Alfred Messel. Photographer unknown. From: Berliner Architekturwelt, 1898. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.*

This account follows a lecture, and the lecture rests on a book: "Marketing & Konsum" (Marketing and Consumption) by Ursula Hansen and Matthias Bode (1999). The book was not at hand while this essay was written, so there are no page numbers from it here. The years and figures have been checked against other sources, which are listed at the end. The story is told from Germany. The question this essay asks:

*Why did marketing look like the distribution of goods around 1900 and like advertising in 1960, and why does it look like data processing today?*

In short: marketing takes care of whatever a company lacks most at the moment. As long as goods were scarce, that meant making and distributing them. When there were more goods than buyers, the customer became scarce, and companies had to learn to ask. That is the turning point that gives this essay its title. Since the 1970s society has had a say, and in the 1980s the edge over competitors becomes scarce. Today what is scarce is the one thing that can't be multiplied: attention.

In business, there is a term for a point like this. In German it is Engpass, in English a bottleneck. You know it from the supermarket when only one checkout is open. The store may be full of goods and full of staff, and still things move only as fast as that one checkout can ring people up. A bottleneck is the place where things back up. A German marketing textbook puts it this way: a bottleneck is the part of a company that restricts all the other parts in what they do (Gelbrich et al. 2008, p. 6).

This essay traces the historical development of marketing as the story of a bottleneck that moves. We follow it through six scenes: from [goods and routes](#goods) to the [customer who becomes scarce](#customer), from there to [asking as a profession](#asking), to [society having its say](#society), to the [competition for an edge](#edge) and to [attention](#attention), including the machine that writes texts.

## Goods are scarce

Between 1871 and 1910 the population of the German Empire grows from 41 to 65 million people. In 1871 eight cities have more than 100,000 inhabitants. By 1910 there are 48 (Strohmeyer 2022). Factories make more goods than ever before, and the people who need them live in the cities. In between lies a gap. The manufacturer is in Dresden, the buyer is in Hamburg, and the two will never meet.

The department store belongs in this gap. It brings the goods of many manufacturers under one roof and puts them where the people are. The Wertheim brothers bought from the producers without middlemen (Ladwig-Winters 2020). Fixed prices and cash payment make each purchase quicker: where nobody haggles and nobody buys on credit, a salesperson can serve more customers in a day.

The decades used to organize this story are a memory aid, not strict boundaries. The new thing had usually begun before it had a name. The Wertheim brothers had already introduced the principles of the Berlin store of 1897 in their parents' shop in Stralsund, which had been founded in 1875 (Ladwig-Winters 2020). Professorships in marketing did not exist at German universities until the end of the 1960s (Gelbrich et al. 2008, p. 1).

The second example is smaller than a department store and fits in one hand. In 1892 Karl August Lingner founds a company in Dresden. It is called "Dresdener chemisches Laboratorium Lingner", Lingner's Dresden chemical laboratory. Its best-known product will be a mouthwash called Odol (Lagally 1985). The buyer in Hamburg doesn't know Mr. Lingner. She knows the name on the bottle, and she knows it from the newspaper. Brands and advertisements solve the same problem as department stores: they bring a factory and a stranger together.

![Newspaper advertisement from 1908: on the left a drawing of the Odol bottle with its neck bent to the side, on the right text about 'Odol mild' with a rose flavor.](/assets/blog/x03/x03_odol_1908_anzeige.jpg)

*Advertisement for "Odol mild" showing the bottle with its neck bent to the side, published on June 27, 1908, in an Austrian newspaper, sixteen years after the company was founded. Dresdener chemisches Laboratorium Lingner, designer not named. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.*

An example from the United States shows how much can depend on a package. Crackers there came out of a barrel or a crate: the grocer sold them loose. In 1898 bakeries merge to form the National Biscuit Company. Its first new product is called Uneeda Biscuit and comes in a cardboard box with an inner wrapper of waxed paper. The company calls the packaging "In-er-seal" and has it patented (Mondelez International n.d., International Directory of Company Histories 1993). The box says who made the cracker, and anyone who was satisfied can ask for the same name next time.

Another example concerns production itself. On October 7, 1913, an early, still makeshift assembly line starts operating at the Ford plant in Highland Park near Detroit. According to the company, it cuts the time needed to build one car from 12 hours 30 minutes to 5 hours 50 minutes. In 1914 it is down to 93 minutes (Ford Motor Company 2008).

![Workers in flat caps stand close together in 1913 along a long line at the Ford plant in Highland Park, putting together round flywheel magnetos.](/assets/blog/x03/x03_ford_1913_fliessband_highland_park.jpg)

*Workers on the assembly line at the Ford plant in Highland Park, Michigan, 1913. They are assembling flywheel magnetos, that is, a component and not yet the whole car. Photographer unknown. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.*

Department store, brand, box, assembly line: the same concern in four forms. The goods have to be made in large quantities and find their way to the buyer. Textbooks call such a situation a seller's market, in German Verkäufermarkt: demand exceeds supply (Gelbrich et al. 2008, p. 4). In the lecture this period carried the label "Marketing als Distributionsfunktion", marketing as a distribution function. What that means: the thing we call marketing here in hindsight was, in this period, mainly distribution.

> 💡 **How solid is this?**
> 
> The order of the eras comes from a lecture and from the book by Hansen and Bode (1999). It is a simplification for the lecture hall. When the seller's market turned into a buyer's market depends on the industry: in the German car industry, according to one study, it did not happen until the 1970s (Köhler 2010, abstract). Even around 1900 companies were already courting buyers, as the Odol advertisements show. What the eras show is the main concern of a period, not its only one. The Ford figures are the company's own. No independent measurement was available for this essay.

## The customer becomes scarce

Oklahoma City, June 4, 1937. The grocer Sylvan Goldman puts a new device into one of his stores, a grocery store called Humpty Dumpty. It is a frame on wheels, modeled on a folding chair, with a basket on top. Goldman wants to make it easier for his customers to buy more (Smithsonian Magazine 2025, Tep 2025).

At first the customers don't want the cart. It reminds women of a baby carriage, and they don't want to push one around the store too. Men find pushing a cart unmanly. Goldman pays people to walk through the store with full carts until others follow their example (ibid.).

Goldman wants to make bigger purchases possible. To do that he looks at what his customer can carry, not at his shelves. His attention shifts to the other side of the counter.

In Germany this moment comes after the postwar reconstruction. In the 1960s conditions change sharply in many markets: now supply exceeds demand (Gelbrich et al. 2008, p. 4). You can see it in two shops. Outside the first, a bakery with too little bread, the buyers stand in line. In the second, thirty kinds of yogurt sit on the shelf, and in front of it stands a single person who can't decide. In the second shop it is the goods that stand in line, and they are waiting for that one person.

In the first shop the seller calls the shots, because the goods sell without effort. That is the seller's market from the previous section. In the second the buyer calls the shots, because there are many equally good offers to choose from. Textbooks call that a buyer's market, in German Käufermarkt (Gelbrich et al. 2008, p. 4, and for the English terms Merriam-Webster n.d.).

With that, the customer has become scarce. Where demand exceeded supply, companies had less need to court buyers. Now it matters more whether customers come, what they take and whether they come back. Making more is no longer enough. The additional goods also have to find buyers. What used to be decided at the oven is now decided in front of the shelf.

The field's first answer is to put things in order. In 1960 the American E. Jerome McCarthy sorts the means a company uses to court buyers into four groups: product, price, place, promotion. Place stands for the route by which the goods reach the buyer, promotion for advertising in the broad sense (McCarthy 1960, cited in Kilian 2020). The "four Ps" are in the textbooks to this day. In the same year Theodore Levitt writes that selling is guided by the needs of the seller and marketing by those of the buyer (Levitt 1960). There is more on Levitt in the essay [Positive marketing](/blog/positive-marketing/).

In Germany the subject becomes a university discipline. In 1969 Heribert Meffert is appointed to a chair in Münster that the trade press calls Germany's first chair of marketing (absatzwirtschaft 2017). The lecture described the situation in those years as "Marketing als dominante Engpassfunktion", marketing as the dominant bottleneck function. What that means: the department that looks after the scarce customer sets the pace in the company.

## If customers are scarce, you have to ask

The corner grocer knew his customers. He saw who came in, what they took and what they complained about. A factory that sells through wholesalers and department stores all over the country usually does not meet its buyers. As long as its goods sell easily, the lack of contact hardly shows. Once the customer becomes scarce, that lack of knowledge gets expensive. The question of who actually buys, and why, turns into a profession.

This profession, too, starts earlier than the era it belongs to. In 1934 Wilhelm Vershofen, Erich Schäfer and Ludwig Erhard found an association in Nuremberg. Its name is Gesellschaft für Konsumforschung, Society for Consumer Research, or GfK for short. The founders wanted, as the successor institute describes it, to make the voice of the consumer heard. People called correspondents did the work. They lived in the district where they asked their questions and knew everyday life there. They usually visited people at home and held conversations that were only partly scripted. According to the successor institute, a large study cost 20,000 Reichsmarks and could gather up to 10,000 voices (NIM n.d.).

The association was founded in the second year of National Socialist rule. It kept working under that rule as well. The historian S. Jonathan Wiesen describes how the GfK produced dozens of reports on buying and consuming from 1936 to 1945, while the regime tried to reshape the economy along racist lines (Wiesen 2010, ch. 4, abstract). The successor institute writes that in the founding phase the research met with resistance because its ideas were not always compatible with the regime's ideology (NIM n.d.).

![A man in a dark suit stands in a field in 1940 with a questionnaire and takes notes while a farmer in a straw hat sits on a horse-drawn rig and answers.](/assets/blog/x03/x03_befragung_1940_census_interview.jpg)

*He is not a consumer researcher, but he too asks questions with a form in his hand: a U.S. census taker interviews a farmer, 1940. A freely usable picture of an interviewer doing consumer research in these years could not be found. Photo: U.S. Census Bureau. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.*

In 1936, an example from the United States showed that asking questions takes more than diligence. The magazine Literary Digest wanted to predict the outcome of the presidential election and mailed out ten million ballots. Almost 2.4 million came back. The magazine predicted 54% of the vote for the challenger, Alfred Landon. The winner was Franklin Roosevelt, with more than 60% (Lohr and Brick 2017, pp. 65-66).

The large number of answers did not protect against the error. The addresses came from telephone directories and from lists of registered cars (ibid., p. 65). Someone who owned a telephone or a car in 1936 did not represent the whole country. And not even one in four of those who had been sent a ballot had answered. The lesson: many answers alone are not enough. Whom you ask and who answers are crucial too.

There is a well-known objection to asking. Henry Ford is supposed to have said that his customers would have asked for faster horses if he had asked them. There is no documented evidence that Ford himself said it (Quote Investigator 2011, Bizonet 2013). The objection still has a point: a customer doesn't design a car. But a customer can say that the trip into town takes too long. What comes of that, a faster horse or a car, is the manufacturer's business.

Here the story connects with the work of anyone who builds a survey today. The scarcer the customer became, the more asking turned into a profession. The correspondents from Nuremberg are among the forerunners of today's [customer surveys](/blog/customer-surveys-overview/).

## Society has its say

The better companies got at winning buyers, the louder a question from outside became: is what is happening here good for people? In the lecture two names stood for this criticism of consumption. Herbert Marcuse's book "One-Dimensional Man" appeared in the United States in 1964 and in German in 1967, Erich Fromm's "To Have or to Be?" in 1976 (Marcuse 1967, Fromm 1976).

There was also debate about where marketing can be applied. In 1969 Philip Kotler and Sidney Levy wrote that marketing goes far beyond the selling of toothpaste, soap and steel. It also concerns organizations that are not in business. The two asked whether the principles of marketing can be transferred to organizations, persons and ideas (Kotler and Levy 1969, abstract).

In the language of this essay, consent became scarce in these years. Companies had to deal more with the demands of people and organizations that bought nothing from them, such as neighbors, consumer advocates and lawmakers.

In Germany, Ursula Hansen approached marketing from the consumers' side. In 1975 she was appointed to the newly founded chair of Markt und Konsum (markets and consumption) at the University of Hannover. In 2001 the Freie Universität Berlin awarded her an honorary doctorate and called her a "pioneer of consumer-oriented marketing" (Freie Universität Berlin 2001, translated from the German).

From her I learned to see a company through the eyes of its customers.

In those same years, oil became scarce as well. Then came a Sunday when the autobahns stayed empty. On November 25, 1973, West Germany had its first nationwide Sonntagsfahrverbot, a Sunday driving ban, and three more Sundays followed. On the other days the limit was 100 kilometers per hour on autobahns and 80 on country roads. The reason: in October the Arab oil-producing countries had decided to deliver less. A barrel of crude oil cost three dollars in 1973 and up to twelve the year after. In 1974 West Germany spent just under 23 billion deutschmarks on oil, almost 153% more than the year before. In 1975 economic output shrank by 1.8%. The number of unemployed people rose from 273,000 in 1973 to more than a million within two years (bpb 2013).

![Black-and-white photograph taken from a bridge: a four-lane highway with a central crash barrier, and not a single vehicle on it all the way to the horizon.](/assets/blog/x03/x03_autofrei_1973_nl_autobahn_anefo.jpg)

*Empty highway on a car-free Sunday, photographed on November 4, 1973, in the Netherlands. So the picture shows neither West Germany nor November 25: the Netherlands started three weeks earlier. Photo: Rob Mieremet / Anefo, Nationaal Archief. CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.*

For a company this meant: suddenly something was scarce again on the purchasing side. The lecture called the answer Beschaffungsmarketing, procurement marketing. What that means: a company courts its suppliers the way it normally courts its buyers. Hansen and Bode saw it this way: the companies hit hardest by the two oil crises were those that had no marketing or only weakly developed marketing. That is their assessment, not a measurement. For one industry there is a description of how it reacted: after 1973, according to the historian Ingo Köhler, the German carmakers turned their attention more toward the buyers and less toward production (Köhler 2010, abstract).

## The edge becomes scarce

In the 1980s the pressure came from other suppliers, above all from Japan, as the lecture put it. In 1985 the Japanese consultant Kenichi Ohmae described the world market as a triad of three large markets: the United States, Japan and Europe (Ohmae 1985). The lecture added the remark that within Europe, Germany was the strongest market.

If you have many equally good competitors, knowing the customer is no longer enough. You need an edge, and an edge doesn't last long. The field got new words for this: competitive advantage, positioning, strategic marketing. Positioning means that a supplier gives its product characteristics that appeal to a particular group of buyers and set it apart from what competitors offer (Gelbrich et al. 2008, p. 4). The field also began to look at the numbers differently: a customer you already have is different from one you still have to win. The single sale gave way to the relationship. The textbook dates this view to the 1990s (Gelbrich et al. 2008, p. 10).

> 💡 **How solid is this?**
> 
> An often-quoted figure belongs to this chapter: winning a new customer is said to cost five to seven times as much as keeping an existing one. Where it comes from is unclear. A textbook that cites it considers it possible that it is one of the legends of the field (Gelbrich et al. 2008, p. 10). A study that measures such a factor for all industries could not be found for this essay. Only this much seems reasonable: what it costs to win or keep a customer depends on the business. Loyal customers have advantages for a company (ibid.). No fixed multiplier has been shown.

The shift can be followed in a single sentence that exists in four versions. It is the definition of marketing used by the American Marketing Association, the field's professional body in the United States.

**Four definitions, one shift**

| Year | According to the definition, marketing is ... | Emphasis |
|------|------|------|
| 1935 | business activities that direct the "flow of goods and services from producers to consumers" | distribution |
| 1985 | planning and executing conception, pricing, promotion and distribution "to create exchanges" | the tools and the exchange |
| 2004 | creating value for customers and "managing customer relationships" | the relationship |
| 2007 | offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners and "society at large" | society |

*Definitions of the American Marketing Association, shortened, with selected emphases. Wording of 1935, 1985 and 2004 from Wilkie and Moore 2007, p. 269. Wording of the current version from the association's website (AMA n.d.), the year 2007 from Gundlach and Wilkie 2010, p. 89.*

The four versions emphasize different things: distribution, exchange, customer relationships and society.

## Attention becomes scarce

With the internet an old limit fell: shelf space. In 2004 Chris Anderson described in the magazine Wired what follows from that. A store without walls can also offer what sells only rarely, and make money with it (Anderson 2004). Online, suppliers could carry far more titles than a single store. The lecture had a sentence for this: the next supplier is only one click away.

What did not multiply was people's time. The economist Herbert Simon had said it as early as 1971: "a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention" (Simon 1971, p. 40). In front of the shelf with thirty yogurts stood a person who couldn't decide. Now that person carries the shelf in a pocket, and it has no end.

At the same time, a supplier today can record which pages a visitor opens and which goods the visitor clicks on. The lecture of the 2010s called this the gläserner Konsument, the transparent consumer. Visiting a page can leave data traces. Some suppliers use them to show visitors advertising on other pages as well. The bottleneck now is a person's gaze. The messages stand in line.

The part about artificial intelligence begins on September 8, 2020. The British newspaper The Guardian publishes a column with the headline "A robot wrote this entire article". It was written by a language program called GPT-3. Not entirely on its own. The editors had given the program its assignment and the opening text. The program delivered eight versions, and the editors put one together from the best parts. That is what their note below the text says (The Guardian 2020).

I showed this column in a talk in 2021 and called artificial intelligence "yet another wave" there: another wave of technology to which marketing responds as it did to the earlier ones.

What the years since then will mean for marketing in the long run is still open. Here is what can be dated.

On November 30, 2022, the company OpenAI presents a program called ChatGPT that you can use by having a conversation with it (OpenAI 2022). What was a newspaper story in 2020 is now something you can try yourself.

The Pew Research Center analyzes how 900 adults in the United States searched on Google in March 2025. When a machine-written summary appears above the results, they click on one of the regular search results in 8% of visits. Without a summary it is 15% (Pew Research Center 2025). For a supplier this can mean that its page is opened less often from search. The comparison alone does not show why the two cases differ.

Since August 2, 2026, a requirement under the regulation on artificial intelligence has been in force in the European Union. It concerns systems that interact directly with people, in speech or in writing. Their providers must build them so that people are informed that they are dealing with a machine, unless that is obvious (Regulation (EU) 2024/1689, Art. 50(1) and Art. 113).

Where the bottleneck moves this time can't be said yet.

> 💡 **How solid is this?**
> 
> Little can be said with certainty about the last few years. The Pew study covers 900 people, one month, one country and one search engine. It does not show what that means for other countries or later years. The requirement under the European regulation has been in force for only a few months. The sources used here do not show how it has been applied so far. The view from 2021 reflects that moment in time. It is not a prediction being tested here. Whether artificial intelligence is one more wave for marketing or more than that is open. The three dates do not yet show whether a new bottleneck will come of it.

## The development of marketing in five bottlenecks

Goods and routes, buyers, consent, the edge, attention: this story has identified five bottlenecks. The scenes show how companies distribute goods, get to know buyers, respond to criticism from society, look after customer relationships and analyze data traces.

The most important shift remains the first one, from the goods to the customer. Ever since the customer became scarce, it has been worth knowing the customer. Market research and questionnaires help with that.

If you know a scene that is missing here: [Write to me.](mailto:editors@questionstar.com)

*Dr. Paul Marx*

## Further reading

- [Positive marketing: more than taking the pain away](/blog/positive-marketing/): an essay on the question of what you do with what you know about customers.
- [Surveys and witness interviews: two fields, one question](/blog/survey-and-witness-interview/): an essay about two professions that live by asking.
- [Market research methods](/blog/market-research-methods/): which of the inventions in this story are in today's toolbox.
- [Customer surveys: an overview](/blog/customer-surveys-overview/): the points at which companies ask their customers today.
- [Survey methods](/blog/survey-methods/): online, by phone, on paper or mixed, and how the ways of asking questions have changed.

## Frequently asked questions

### How long has marketing existed?

The first chairs and institutes of marketing in Germany were established at the end of the 1960s (Gelbrich et al. 2008, p. 1). The practice is older. Fixed prices, branded goods and newspaper advertisements existed before 1900. So the history of marketing begins, depending on how you look at it, with industrialization or with the university chair.

### What is the difference between a seller's market and a buyer's market?

In a seller's market demand exceeds supply: the goods are scarce. In a buyer's market supply exceeds demand: the customer is scarce (Gelbrich et al. 2008, p. 4). In many German markets the change took place in the 1960s, in some industries later.

### What are the four Ps of marketing?

Product, price, place and promotion. Place stands for the distribution channel, promotion for advertising in the broad sense. E. Jerome McCarthy sorted the means of marketing into these four groups in 1960 (McCarthy 1960, cited in Kilian 2020). The classification is in the textbooks to this day.

### When did market research begin in Germany?

One fixed point is the year 1934. That year Wilhelm Vershofen, Erich Schäfer and Ludwig Erhard founded the Gesellschaft für Konsumforschung (Society for Consumer Research) in Nuremberg (NIM n.d.). Its correspondents interviewed consumers at home. The association came into being in the second year of National Socialist rule and kept working under that rule as well (Wiesen 2010, ch. 4, abstract).

## Sources

absatzwirtschaft (2017). Article on the Marketing Center Münster, issue 7/8 2017. In German. It says that in 1969 "der erste Marketinglehrstuhl Deutschlands" (Germany's first chair of marketing) was filled with Heribert Meffert. Offprint on the faculty's website: [wiwi.uni-muenster.de](https://www.wiwi.uni-muenster.de/fakultaet/sites/fakultaet/files/attachments/mcm_muenster_asw_7_8_2017_002.pdf).

AMA, American Marketing Association (n.d.). Definitions of Marketing. Current definition. The page does not name the year of adoption, see Gundlach and Wilkie 2010. Accessed November 14, 2026: [ama.org](https://www.ama.org/the-definition-of-marketing-what-is-marketing/).

Anderson, C. (2004). The Long Tail. Wired, 12(10), October 1, 2004. [wired.com](https://www.wired.com/2004/10/tail/).

Bizonet, R. (2013). Henry Ford's Quotations. The Henry Ford (museum and archive in Dearborn), March 12, 2013. It says that the sentence about the faster horse has never been satisfactorily traced to Henry Ford. [thehenryford.org](https://www.thehenryford.org/collections/explore/articles/henry-fords-quotations).

bpb, Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung (2013). Vor 40 Jahren: Erster autofreier Sonntag in Deutschland. Hintergrund aktuell, November 25, 2013. In German. The publisher is Germany's Federal Agency for Civic Education. [bpb.de](https://www.bpb.de/kurz-knapp/hintergrund-aktuell/172918/vor-40-jahren-erster-autofreier-sonntag-in-deutschland/).

Ford Motor Company (2008). The Moving Assembly Line Debuted at the Highland Park Plant. The company's page on its own history, as of October 21, 2008, read in an archived copy: [ophelia.sdsu.edu](https://ophelia.sdsu.edu:8443/ford/10-21-2008/about-ford/heritage/places/highlandpark/663-highland-park.html).

Förderverein Historische Warenhäuser Wertheim und Tietz in Stralsund e. V. (n.d.). Familie Wertheim. In German. The publisher is a society for the historic department stores in Stralsund. [historische-warenhaeuser-stralsund.de](https://historische-warenhaeuser-stralsund.de/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Familie-Wertheim_D.pdf).

Freie Universität Berlin, Fachbereich Wirtschaftswissenschaft (2001). Ehrenpromotion Ursula Hansen, awarded on July 13, 2001. In German. Original wording of the quoted phrase: "Pionierin des verbraucherorientierten Marketings". [wiwiss.fu-berlin.de](https://www.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/fachbereich/ehrenpromotionen/hansen.html).

Fromm, E. (1976). To Have or to Be? New York: Harper & Row. German edition: Haben oder Sein. Used here only for title and year of publication.

Gelbrich, K., Wünschmann, S. and Müller, S. (2008). Erfolgsfaktoren des Marketing. München: Vahlen. Chapter 1: Entwicklungslinien des Marketing, pp. 1-13. In German. Checked against the chapter of the first edition that the university chair provides: [ku.de](https://www.ku.de/fileadmin/160111/Buecher/Erfolgsfaktoren_des_Marketing_3._Aufl/Kapitel_Entwicklungslinien_des_Marketing__1._Auflage_.pdf).

Gundlach, G. T. and Wilkie, W. L. (2010). Stakeholder Marketing: Why "Stakeholder" Was Omitted from the American Marketing Association's Official 2007 Definition of Marketing and Why the Future Is Bright for Stakeholder Marketing. Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, 29(1), 89-92. On p. 89: the association issued the new definition in late 2007.

Hansen, U. and Bode, M. (1999). Marketing & Konsum: Theorie und Praxis von der Industrialisierung bis ins 21. Jahrhundert (Marketing and Consumption: Theory and Practice from Industrialization into the 21st Century). München: Vahlen. In German. The basis of the lecture that this essay follows. The book was not at hand during the writing, so no pages are given.

International Directory of Company Histories (1993). Nabisco Foods Group. Vol. 7. Read in the reproduction on [company-histories.com](https://company-histories.com/Nabisco-Foods-Group-Company-History.html).

Kilian, K. (2020). Article on sixty years of the "four Ps". transfer, Zeitschrift für Kommunikation und Markenmanagement, 1/2020, pp. 50-53. In German. [markenlexikon.com](https://markenlexikon.com/texte/transfer_kilian_seit-60-jahren-praegen-die-4-ps-von-mccarthy-das-marketing_1_2020.pdf).

Köhler, I. (2010). Overcoming Stagnation: Product Policy and Marketing in the German Automobile Industry of the 1970s. Business History Review, 84(1), 53-78. Used here: the abstract of the paper.

Kotler, P. and Levy, S. J. (1969). Broadening the Concept of Marketing. Journal of Marketing, 33(1), 10-15. Used here: the abstract of the paper.

Ladwig-Winters, S. (2020). Wertheim, Georg. In: Neue Deutsche Biographie, vol. 27, pp. 857-858. In German. Original wording of the quoted phrase: "neuen Geschäftsprinzipien". [deutsche-biographie.de](https://www.deutsche-biographie.de/sfzW4525.html).

Lagally, M. (1985). Lingner, Karl August. In: Neue Deutsche Biographie, vol. 14, pp. 626 f. In German. [deutsche-biographie.de](https://www.deutsche-biographie.de/sfz51674.html).

Levitt, T. (1960). Marketing Myopia. Harvard Business Review, 38(4), 45-56. Documented in the essay [Positive marketing](/blog/positive-marketing/).

Lohr, S. L. and Brick, J. M. (2017). Roosevelt Predicted to Win: Revisiting the 1936 Literary Digest Poll. Statistics, Politics and Policy, 8(1), 65-84.

Marcuse, H. (1967). Der eindimensionale Mensch. Neuwied: Luchterhand. English original: One-Dimensional Man. Boston: Beacon Press 1964. Used here only for title and year of publication.

McCarthy, E. J. (1960). Basic Marketing: A Managerial Approach. Homewood: Irwin. The book was not at hand, cited in Kilian 2020.

Merriam-Webster (n.d.). Dictionary entries "seller's market" and "buyer's market". Used here only for the English terms. The definitions describe the goods as scarce in the first case and plentiful in the second. Accessed November 14, 2026: [merriam-webster.com](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/seller%27s%20market) and [merriam-webster.com](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/buyer%27s%20market).

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NIM, Nürnberg Institut für Marktentscheidungen (n.d.). Two pages in which the institute that grew out of the association of 1934 presents itself. On founders, correspondents and costs: Historical Roots, Early Concepts, and Research Legacy, [nim.org](https://www.nim.org/en/about-us/historic-roots). On the time of National Socialism: A Brief History, [nim.org](https://www.nim.org/en/about-us/history/a-brief-history). Both accessed November 14, 2026.

Ohmae, K. (1985). Triad Power: The Coming Shape of Global Competition. Free Press. Used here only for the division into three, following the description of the book.

OpenAI (2022). Introducing ChatGPT. Announcement of November 30, 2022. [openai.com](https://openai.com/index/chatgpt/).

Pew Research Center (2025). Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results. July 22, 2025. [pewresearch.org](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/07/22/google-users-are-less-likely-to-click-on-links-when-an-ai-summary-appears-in-the-results/).

Quote Investigator (2011). My Customers Would Have Asked For a Faster Horse. July 28, 2011. It found no compelling evidence that the sentence comes from Henry Ford. The earliest ascription to Ford found there is from 2001. [quoteinvestigator.com](https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/07/28/ford-faster-horse/).

Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 13 June 2024 laying down harmonised rules on artificial intelligence. Art. 50(1) and Art. 113. Read in the reproduction on [artificialintelligenceact.eu](https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/article/50/).

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Smithsonian Magazine (2025). An Industrious Grocer in the 1930s Wanted to Make It Easier for His Customers to Buy More. They Just Needed a Push. December 2025 issue. [smithsonianmag.com](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/industrious-grocer-1930s-wanted-make-easier-customers-buy-more-just-needed-push-180987633/).

Strohmeyer, K. (2022). Urbanisierung im Deutschen Reich. Deutsches Historisches Museum, Lebendiges Museum Online, as of June 15, 2022. In German. [dhm.de](https://www.dhm.de/lemo/kapitel/kaiserreich/alltagsleben/urbanisierung-im-deutschen-reich.html).

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Wiesen, S. J. (2010). Creating the Nazi Marketplace: Commerce and Consumption in the Third Reich. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chapter 4: Finding the "Voice of the Consumer", pp. 153-190. Used here: the publisher's abstract of the chapter: [cambridge.org](https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/creating-the-nazi-marketplace/finding-the-voice-of-the-consumer/D9FE5A68FCD3AC2F12CFE68C2597159E).

Wilkie, W. L. and Moore, E. S. (2007). What Does the Definition of Marketing Tell Us About Ourselves? Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, 26(2), 269-276. Read in the version on the author's website: [nd.edu](https://academicweb.nd.edu/~wwilkie/pdf/definationOfMarketingJPPM.pdf).

Author: Dr. Paul Marx
Dr. Paul Marx is the founder and Managing Director of QUESTIONSTAR and was a professor of marketing at the University of Siegen.

*Author: Dr. Paul Marx — see [About](/about).*