Marketing has come a long way ever since it’s inception some 4000 years back where it was represented in the form ofwall paintings and writings. Also the then method of marketing was through verbal communication where in peoplewould shout out what they had to sell and try their best to sell themselves and their products. But the effect of this formof marketing was that the reach was restricted to a few hundred people which was governed by the extent theindividual went in order to market the product.
With the discovery of paper another channel was introduced which if we had to compare to a medium in our time it would be in the form of the modern day fliers .This helped because a person/brand could reach out to a greater population without having to be there in person. Thus the prospect base was expanded to a greater extent but it also meant that a lot of effort and planning needed to go into designing the fliers so as to make the maximum impact. Thus brands began getting creative in creating fliers which would help them distinguish their product from another brand.Fliers were and still are the cheapest form of marketing and hence the investment that one needed to put into generating a marketing campaign using fliers were very low when compared to the other forms of marketing.
The introduction of radio further expanded the scope of the population that could be reached via the marketing medium of sound .But it meant that there was no visual medium to market the brand/product. This made brands get creative further to be able to position their product effectively. Since radio is a medium that has a large reach , the population that could be targeted also increased significantly. But in a country like India which such great diversity the language that would be used also was a determining factor. Along the way creativity played a large part in the way a product was positioned to the prospect customers.
With the introduction of television the scope of marketing was expanded to a whole new dimension where audio and visual mediums were combined to position a product. But to try and market a product via the television meant that there was a constraint on how much time a brand had to market it’s product and also was very expensive .Typically the television commercials duration vary between 10 seconds to a minute. This meant that brands needed to figure out a way to deliver the message in a very short time frame and that meant that creativity was cranked to another level. This also meant that brands could make a come back into the market by the way they marketed themselves via the television. Of late the marketing strategies of IDEA Cellular and Vodaphone have been very creative and impactful.
In the 20th century another medium gained popularity as it was less expensive and more impactful. This medium was the internet.Since the internet was a medium where almost all the people above the age of 15 could be targeted .Also since the reach of the brand/product was worldwide.Another important thing to take notice was that organizations startedusing the internet to use market the products/brand in the form of posters,videos,animation.Thus one can see that there is no one ideal medium for marketing and the only constraint is creativity.