Markets and Marketing

Markets and marketing, in the broadest sense of exchanging or bartering goods and services, are likely prehistoric. They predate the origin of money as entire trade systems based on barter clearly existed. Z. S. Demirdjian, places the start of marketing more than nine thousand years ago in the Mesopotamian civilization of Proto-Armenia. He suggests that

ever since humankind settled to a sedentary life style, marketing may have emerged to facilitate the exchange process of either surplus or scarce food grown through agriculture and domesticated animals raised for food or for beasts of burden. (2005, 102)

Exchange is considered the key element defining marketing (Bagozzi 1975). According to Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations (1776), the propensity to “truck, barter, and trade” is common to all humans. ...