Page 261 - The Drucker Lectures

242 [ The Drucker Lectures

And that went on until about 1829, and then you had what I call
the service revolution. It began with the railroads. And for 40 or 50
years, the new possibilities were largely in services. The technical
university, the commercial bank, the telegraph, the postal service,
and the modern corporation all arose not by using new technology
but by using a new mentality. This period is usually neglected by
economic historians, who focus on technologies and products.
And then came the new industries, with new products that
had never been even imagined before—one after the other. This
began around 1840 or so and continued until World War II and,
again, no marketing was needed. In fact, not much selling was
needed. The problem the telephone company had until 1960,
say, was to put in enough lines. The demand was there.
And it was only in the next stage when things began to be
more complicated. Confused is a better word. Until then you
had one kind of demand, one kind of technology, one kind of
product. Then things began to crisscross. The first one perhaps
was the American automobile of the 1920s and ’30s. The Cadil-
lac had the same components as a Chevrolet. But the Cadillac
wasn’t for transportation; it was for status.
That’s when selling began, but that’s also when marketing be-
gan. In fact, you may say that the American Cadillac is the first
product that was marketed. And what was marketed was not an
automobile but status. The Rolls-Royce was built to last forever.
And the early Rolls-Royce stressed that it was the cheapest car
on the market over its lifetime. No such claim was ever made for
the Caddy. The Caddy sold status. And this was the beginning
of marketing as being more than selling.
And this was 60 to 70 years ago at most. And now we are
beginning to enter a new stage. We are entering it because the
Internet shifts information to the customer.
One of the great advances in the theory and practice of mar-
keting over the last 30 or 40 years has been that we have learned