Summary

At its core, Marketing is the concept and process of identifying, predicting, and satisfying mutual needs. While Marketing exists in modernity as a business practice, this field and practice extends from the key evolutionary trait of tribal support that has aided in enabling humans to dominate the globe. Although modern tribal support looks very different than it did for tribes of early modern humans, the underlying principles are the same.

Just like any animal, humans evolved to adopt advantageous traits that improve our ability to survive and reproduce. For hundreds of thousands of years (and even millions of years, if you look back before modern humans), tribes of human beings have survived and eventually thrived from working together to create a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. When even a few people worked together to gather food, maintain shelter, and fend off danger, they could end up with more resources and a better quality of life than by operating alone.

While tribal living seems like long ago history, present day humans utilize the same exact principles of tribal support, albeit in an exponentially more complex system. While you might not go out and collect berries while your tribe mate watches your children, you likely work a job that satisfies somebody else’s needs, who in turn gives your company money to satisfy their needs, who in turn gives you money to satisfy your needs. With a universal form of value (money) and technology that connects the world (transportation and digital networking), we interact with and contribute to a globalized tribe and system of satisfying needs.

Since Marketing involves understanding and satisfying people’s needs, it is important to understand how people work in the first place and how they interact with others to satisfy their needs. Human beings are complex biological systems that are controlled by their brains, which can be understood to be organic computers. If you wanted to figure out how two computers “talk” to each other and exchange data, you would learn how computers operate and function at a fundamental level. Likewise, while brains are much more complicated and still not fully understood, you will want to understand how they interact with the world around us and influence our behavior, to be able to understand how humans navigate solving their problems. In doing so, the grand concept of Marketing makes itself clear.

Marketing consists of innumerable elements, but they all exist for the goal of identifying, predicting, and satisfying mutual needs – giving somebody something they need, and they will give you you something you need. You can’t just make a website and expect somebody to give you money. Nor can you go sit in the middle of the desert with water for sale expecting people to show up. Marketing is a complex process of understanding why people have needs, how they go about solving them, and how you can solve them in a way that maximizes value for all parties.