Standardizing selling. Pharmaceutical marketing, the pharmaceutical company and the marketing expert (1900–1980)

This paper investigates the development of pharmaceutical marketing in Germany between 1900 and 1980. Based on material from business archives, it demonstrates that such marketing developed from practice and the theoretical reasoning supporting it followed later. The standard narrative of marketing handbooks presents its development as the result of the period after World War II and of American influences. In contrast, this article points to the 1930s as the most important phase, a time in which the field of market research took shape, with major impacts on producers and consumers, sellers, and buyers. The period after the 1950s, especially in the 1970s, brought some change, but it was primarily a matter of scale and scope, combining statistical methods with opinion research and its sophisticated tools.