Post by JD Prater

This is an ~8,000 word post about 152 years of marketing theory, frameworks, and thought. Most of the frameworks in modern marketing strategy, the ones taught in business school, the ones consultancies sell decks on, the ones marketers argue about on LinkedIn like they’re brand new, is doing what Hopkins did to Kennedy. Taking a real, working idea and making it sharper and more usable for whatever room it lands in next. I walk through the actual lineage: where the good ideas in marketing strategy came from, who built on whom, and what changed each time. Underneath everything below, marketers keep circling back to four questions, in different clothes, over a century and a half apart. 1) What job is a buyer actually hiring something to do? 2) What’s the shape of the market that buyer sits inside? 3) How do you win a place in their mind? 4) And is winning it even worth the trouble?