1911 was a titanic year
1911 was not only the year that The Chartered Institute of Marketing was founded. It was the year Roald Amundsen beat Captain Scott to the South Pole, Italy annexed northern Libya, Hiram Bingham rediscovered the deserted Inca city of Machu Pichu, the Wuchang Uprising triggered the Chinese revolution and the Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre. Herbert Asquith was the prime minister, having been elected in 1908, and was busy curbing the power of the House of Lords with the 1911 Act of Parliament. The dockyard of Harland & Wolff, Belfast, was finishing the construction of the world’s largest passenger steamship. The Titanic would sail in April the following year.
Elixir spawned marketing
The origin of the term “marketing” as a noun is unclear. Robert Bartels in his History of Marketing Thought dates it to between 1906 and 1911, and David Bussiere has cited examples as early as 1896. While most major marketing concepts emerged in the 20th century, many can be traced from earlier – from pawn brokers’ balls to Queen Anne’s resurrection of patents. The late 18th century was a particularly fertile period, notable as the golden age of quack remedies such as Daffy’s Elixir, when ingenious marketing was paramount. In her paper Medical advertising and trust and late Georgian England, Hannah Barker analyses the marketing of such elixirs, which involved pamphlets, branded packaging, bold claims for longevity and colourful testimonials. The parallels with the current smoothie market are unmistakable.
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