Description
Marketing has never been about advertising. It has always been about power.
Every few decades, marketing reinvents itself, and each time most companies are caught off guard. Printing, mass production, television, the internet, data and now AI each changed what customers could know and who held the information. Each shift quietly rewrote who wins.
The Evolution of Marketing is a strategic history of those shifts and a guide to the one now underway. Krishan Kant Upadhyay traces marketing from barter and early trust-building, through the first marketplaces and the print revolution, to industrial brands, mass media, digital platforms and AI-mediated discovery. His argument is that marketing evolves whenever the balance of information between buyers and sellers changes.
Along the way, the book answers the questions that boards and leadership teams actually face:
- Where is value being created and captured in this era?
- Why did distribution, brand, data and platforms each become a source of power in turn?
- How does marketing connect to enterprise value, from customer lifetime value to platform dependence?
- When does data become a real asset, and when is it only noise?
- How should leaders govern personalization, privacy and trust at scale?
You will find historical depth, case studies, executive implications at the end of each chapter, and a framework for reading the next shift before competitors do. The final part imagines the next era of marketing, in which customers have no fixed journey, abundance replaces scarcity, and the marketer becomes less a campaign manager and more a market architect.
This is not a tactical manual. It is a strategic architecture for the next era of competition.
Perfect for: CEOs, CMOs and senior marketers; strategy, product and digital leaders; MBA and executive-education students; consultants and advisors; and anyone who wants to understand why marketing looks the way it does, and where it is heading.
