Why Every Great Marketer Should Be a Student of History

The best marketers don’t just study campaigns. They study empires, revolutions, wars, scandals and human nature.

Marketing has a terrible habit of believing it has just invented something.

Spend five minutes on LinkedIn and you’ll inevitably stumble across someone announcing the death of traditional marketing, the birth of some revolutionary framework, or the latest AI prompt that is apparently about to change civilisation forever.

It rarely does.

Because almost everything we do as marketers has been done before.

Not with smartphones.

Not with TikTok.

Not with Google Ads.

But with printing presses, public executions, church sermons, pamphlets, newspapers, cigarettes, soap, tea and even Roman graffiti.

If you really want to become a better marketer, stop looking only at this year’s Cannes Lions winners.

Start looking at the last 2,000 years.

Because history is marketing’s greatest textbook.

The greatest marketing lesson I never expected to learn

One of the reasons Marketing Made Clear exists is because I became fascinated by something that wasn’t really marketing at all.

At least, that’s what I thought.

I found myself reading about revolutions.

Kings.

Queens.

Political conspiracies.

Propaganda.

Wars.

Not because I wanted to become a historian, but because I kept noticing something strange.

Every successful political movement seemed to use exactly the same techniques that successful brands use today.

Create a story.

Find an enemy.

Simplify a complicated idea.

Repeat it endlessly.

Make people feel something.

Build symbols.

Give people something to belong to.

Long before anyone coined the phrase “brand strategy”, entire nations were already running them.

And once you see it…

…you can’t unsee it.

The Marketing Made Clear Podcast

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Marketing didn’t begin with Facebook

One of the biggest misconceptions in our industry is that marketing is somehow a twentieth-century invention.

It isn’t.

The Romans painted advertisements on walls.

Medieval merchants developed symbols so customers could recognise trustworthy traders before most people could even read.

Guilds acted almost like modern certification marks.

Shop signs became logos.

Town criers were effectively outdoor advertising.

Even the roads built by the Roman Empire were, in many ways, marketing infrastructure.

They allowed goods, ideas and reputations to travel further than ever before.

The technology changes.

Human psychology doesn’t.

Revolutions are masterclasses in persuasion

Over the last year I’ve written several articles exploring propaganda during some of history’s most dramatic moments.

On Bastille Day, we’ll look at how competing narratives shaped the French Revolution.

I’ve also explored how Catherine the Great survived one of history’s most extraordinary propaganda battles after overthrowing her husband, and how stories, rumours and carefully crafted pamphlets became weapons every bit as powerful as armies.

These aren’t simply history lessons.

They’re lessons about positioning.

About framing.

About controlling narratives.

About understanding that people rarely buy facts.

They buy stories that explain the facts.

It’s exactly the same reason two companies can sell almost identical products while one becomes iconic and the other disappears.

Edward Bernays didn’t invent persuasion

Many marketing textbooks introduce Edward Bernays as the father of public relations.

That’s true.

But it’s also slightly misleading.

Bernays didn’t invent persuasion.

He industrialised it.

He studied wartime propaganda, psychology and crowd behaviour before applying many of those techniques to commercial problems.

His famous campaigns—from encouraging women to smoke as a symbol of liberation to making bacon and eggs appear to be the “traditional” American breakfast—weren’t random acts of creativity.

They were carefully engineered manipulations of public opinion.

The fascinating part?

Even Bernays himself misunderstood parts of propaganda’s own history, with later historical research challenging some of his claims about how the term had originally been used.

Which creates a wonderfully ironic lesson.

Even the people who write history sometimes rewrite it.

The marketing world has an incredibly short memory

One reason so many “new” ideas feel familiar is because they’re usually old ideas wearing fashionable trainers.

Influencer marketing?

Celebrity endorsements have existed for centuries.

Content marketing?

The Michelin Guide was teaching businesses to educate customers over a hundred years ago.

Native advertising?

Political pamphlets perfected it long before newspapers existed.

Community building?

Religions mastered that one thousands of years ago.

Brand storytelling?

Human beings were sitting around fires telling stories long before they invented writing.

Every generation believes it has discovered something revolutionary.

Usually, it has just rediscovered something old.

This is why I love brand rivalries

Some of the most enjoyable articles on Marketing Made Clear have explored rivalries.

Uber versus taxis.

Coca-Cola versus Pepsi.

Burger King versus McDonald’s.

Because rivalry forces us to see marketing stripped back to its essentials.

Positioning.

Differentiation.

Perception.

Choice.

The products often become secondary.

It’s the story surrounding them that wins.

Exactly the same principle applies whether you’re analysing Tudor succession, Cold War propaganda or the cola wars.

History teaches judgement, not just knowledge

The biggest benefit isn’t collecting interesting facts.

It’s learning how to think.

When you read enough history, you begin spotting patterns.

You notice moral panics.

You recognise manufactured outrage.

You become more sceptical of statistics presented without context.

You start asking who benefits from a particular narrative.

That’s an incredibly valuable skill for marketers.

Because marketing isn’t just about creating messages.

It’s about understanding messages.

Including the ones aimed at you.

Further Reading on Marketing Made Clear

If you’ve enjoyed this article, you might also like our recent explorations of:

• The Original Fake News? How Catherine the Great Used Propaganda to Take an Empire
• The Swiss Firm That Helped Sell a Civil War: Marketing, Propaganda and Nigeria
• Uber vs Taxis: When Better Marketing Beats Better Products
• What Does Brand Activation Actually Mean?
• Brexit: The Marketing Shame

Because marketing isn’t just happening today.

It’s been happening for thousands of years.

The only thing that keeps changing is the technology. Human nature has been remarkably consistent all along.