Drucker believed that marketing first emerged as an identifiable business practice when the principles of management were applied to distribution and sales by a handful of entrepreneurs including Cyrus McCormick and the founders of Sears,He credited McCormick, the inventor of the mechanical harvester and a dealer system for distributing it, as well as the first use of market research and analysis, with defining the creation of a customer as the fundamental business goal and a specific job of management.

By stressing the importance of customer orientation, Drucke restablished the raison d'etre for marketing as the most vitalpart of management, as a fundamental value for the organization, but not, it must be noted, as a distinct business function. Customer orientation and the related discipline of market segmentation were the hall marks of what has since then been referred to simply as The Marketing Concept. Drucker was particularly impressed with developments at the General Electric Company where formal market research activity was providing inputthroughout all stages of new product development and production

节选于The wisdom of Peter Drucker，管理学不可不读德鲁克，这个主要是德鲁克认为在未来将以市场导向为管理基础的概括性介绍