Hi, welcome to Module One of Content Marketing University. This is content marketing evolved. So, what we're going to talk about over the next half hour or so is really building a strong business case for content marketing in your organization, and I hope something that's really stronger for you as you move forward with whatever your plans are with content marketing.
So I'm going to start by rebooting here, and I'm going to say what is marketing? And I want to push reset a little bit on the value that marketing actually has in the business.
And the way I want to do that is I want to take it all the way back in history to a guy by the name of Arch Shaw and introduce you to this guy. So Arch Shaw was a really interesting guy.
He was an entrepreneur, first and foremost, office supplies actually, in Chicago. He had a whole company that basically created office supplies, from furniture to the different kinds of supplies that you would need to operate a business. He was also, by the way, a professor, one of the very first marketing professors, although they didn't even call him that in those days, at Harvard Business School, which was a new school at the time.
And he also was, by the way, the first editor of a little publication there called the Harvard Business Review.
But as an entrepreneur, before he was actually a marketing and business professor at Harvard, as an entrepreneur, he was a really interesting guy, because he was trying to figure out a way to move his business forward, how to sell more office supplies. And so interestingly, he came up with this idea of creating a magazine. And the magazine he called System, the magazine of business.
And this magazine talked about all kinds of things, the news of business, whether it was best practices, of how to create a financial operation or a sales operation, and it really helped businesses become better businesses.
And that was what System the magazine of business was all about. Now interestingly, I can almost make a case that content marketing precedes even what we think of as direct-make or campaign-based marketing today.
I won't make that case here today, but I'm just going to say that the first thing that Arch Shaw did before he even started to talk about the practice of marketing, was to create something valuable for consumers. And that, in this case, was his System, magazine of business.
And that's a really interesting idea here. As a side note, he had this writer that was writing for him at the time by the name of Edgar Rice Burroughs, who was-- just hated writing marketing drivel, as he put it, so he actually went off and created this little book called Tarzan.
Just a little side note there for you. Anyway, so Arch created all kinds of content for businesses, everything from sales materials, to how to be better office managers, to how to be better financial managers, all kinds of books. And of course, System, the magazine of business, was a huge hit, a huge hit. It went the 1920s equivalent of viral, really.
And then Arch Shaw actually went off, and he was a professor of business, and professor of marketing at Harvard Business School, where he would introduce a number of the things that we look at today as marketing scholar worthy.
And he would of course, as I mentioned, become the editor of the Harvard Business Review. Now interestingly, when Arch Shaw retired, he actually sold his magazine, System, the magazine of business to McGraw Hill in 1929 for a very big sum of money, and it actually-- they renamed it to The Business Week, which of course these days, we know as a little magazine called Business Week.
So here we are a hundred years later almost, and Business Week is now the legacy that Arch Shaw leaves us in creating value for subscribers. So a wonderful, wonderful story, but interestingly, what I want to tell you really about with Arch is his marketing utilities.
It's something that really precedes even what we think of as the four P's of marketing, classically taught in university if you went to university for marketing. So the four marketing utilities as Arch Shaw described them were one, physical utility. The physical utility were inputs to help the production of the product in business.
What he meant there was basically, how do we provide insight into the business to help us where to put product? Whether we should be shipping it to the west coast, whether we should be offering it in the street, how we should be producing it in mass quantities, how much of it should we be producing?
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