History of Marketing
Marketing is a business practice that involves identifying, predicting and meeting customer needs
The concepts that allow Marketing to function have been around as long as humans have existed. While the term Marketing itself is a fairly recent expression tied to capitalist culture0, Homo sapiens (modern humans) have survived and thrived for literally hundreds of thousands of years by operating on the same underlying principles.
Now, this doesn’t mean that our stick and stone wielding ancestors were Don Draper advertising whizzes though. It instead illustrates the fact that Marketing is simply an extension of fundamental principles of survival – being able to identify, predict, and satisfy the needs of others.
The dominance of capitalism has made such practices very financially profitable but helping others with their needs – tribal support – is an important part of what made humans the dominant species of the entire world.
Having evolved over millions of years from earlier groups of primates that were themselves tribal, modern humans (Homo sapiens) and our ancestors have always depended on cooperation as an essential means of survival. Tribal cooperation is an incredibly effective way to survive and reproduce – having to obtain food, secure shelter, stay safe from predators, birth and raise offspring, and heal from sickness all by oneself is a very challenging task. When a group of beings works together though, they not only have more resources to do all of these things, but they have less individual risk as well.
The first humans (emerging roughly 300,000 years ago0) were easily able to understand each other’s needs, as they were mostly the exact same. Food, water, shelter, and safety, to name a few. Therefore, achieving the needs of the tribe was as easy as understanding your own needs and providing them to your fellow tribe members.
Nowadays, the understanding and practice of Marketing is obscured by complex systems of commerce, but the underlying origin remains the same – tribal support. It might not feel this way when dealing with a globalized world and interacting with people on a daily basis that you might never see again, but it’s true.
Tribal Support
Tribal support is a defining characteristic of human society, but the lines become very blurred when the perceived tribes are scaled up. If you and your nuclear family are a small tribe of hunter gatherers, surely you are supporting each other. If you band together with 10 other families, you’re all likely supporting each other just the same, but probably with more specialized function. But what if we scale up to a small village of 500 people? Well, the support becomes more complex and less direct.
A small family can have a hunter, a gather, and a child carer, for example, all directly supporting each other. A band of 10 families (let’s say 50 people) can have a significant portion of the group hunting, gathering, and raising children, allowing for at least a few people to focus more on other areas like maintaining buildings, clothing, and tools, still directly supporting each other, but making things more complex. A village of 500 people may have all those things further covered, with additional ability to have shepherds, priests, healers, traders, and so on. As complexity increases, so does the indirectness of the tribal support.
For example, imagine two members of the 500-person village: a seashell collector, whose only job is to collect seashells for traders to barter with, and a healer, who is the village medicine-person that tends to any and all health problems. If the seashell collector grows up perfectly healthy and never has to call on the healer for aid, it would be easy for them to have the mindset that the healer does not benefit them at all. Likewise, in the busy life of being a healer tending to the variety of injuries and ailments of the village, they never once come in contact with seashells or even the traders that use them, and could consider it useless that someone even spends time collecting seashells.
It is no major surprise though that these two specialists still support each other, albeit in a less direct manner than the small family that feeds and cares for each other only. The seashell collector’s finds allow traders to barter for valuable herbs that the healer uses to make medicine, for example, while the healer keeps the hunters and gatherers healthy so that they can feed the village, including the seashell collector.
But how broad, complex, and indirect can these examples get before we draw the line of considering tribal support to not exist? A city of 100,000 people? A country of 100,000,000 people? A world of 8,000,000,000 billion people? Surely, not every person can support every single other person on Earth, right? It really comes down to the strength of the support and connection considered.
Distant but Present
Consider how many ancestors each person has, such as yourself. 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8 great-grandparents, 16 great-great-grandparents, and so on. 2n number of ancestors, where n is the number of generations before yours. If you look 10 generations back, you have 1024 direct ancestors. Look 20 generations back, and you have over a million direct ancestors at 1,048,576.
A generation might sound like a long time, but this is not even that long ago. An average generation can be considered to be 25 years – 10 generations ago is 250 years ago, 1774, and 20 generations is 500 years ago, only 1524!
Now, in the context of tribal support, where can we draw the line of our past ancestors not supporting us? Surely even the actions of one of our 500-years-ago one-in-a-million ancestors carries the same weight as our parents’ actions, because any deviation at any point would have prevented us from being born. Just because they are much further separated in time and space does not make their contributions less important, just because there were more ancestors in their generation that contributed to our creation.
But what’s the point?
Well, when considering just how supportive somebody might be to another, when looking at a very large sample size, the globalized world we live in largely means that ‘the line’ can only be drawn at the point where we care to stop looking. This means that much of the world is connected through global trade and communication in one way or another and just like our ancestors, a person that is far removed from our reality only becomes less important because they are not top of mind.
For example, let’s consider a corporate CEO in Paris and a tuna fish cannery worker on a south pacific island. The Parisian CEO is going to consider their sphere of influence to be centralized around their family, friends, and business associates, as would the cannery worker. There is hardly time and attention to spare to consider how far our network extend in the modern world, but they extend much farther than we think.
On a relaxing Sunday with the family, imagine the Parisian CEO wants to make a nice tuna salad. They crack open a can of premium tuna without a second thought of its origins. Little do they know, they are being supported and having their needs satisfied in part by a person thousands of miles away! Coincidentally, that very same tuna cannery worker is the very person that operated the machine that packed that can of tuna, although they had no idea where it would end up. Likewise, the cannery worker is completely unaware that the factory they work at uses quality assurance machines purchased from the company the CEO runs. These machines ensure that the factory maintains strict quality standards and stays in business, allowing the cannery worker to keep earning a salary and providing for their family.
Now, at what point do these two draw the line of mutual support? Would the cannery worker consider the captain of the boat that delivered the machines to be supporting them and helping satisfy their needs, but not the CEO? What about the miner that extracted the raw minerals that were refined to make the machine? Or would the cannery worker not even bother to think beyond the boss that employees them? Likewise, would the CEO consider the stockperson at the grocery store from which the tuna was purchased to be supporting them, but not the cannery worker? Or maybe they wouldn’t even think past their assistant that does the grocery shopping for them?
In a butterfly effect-type sense, we could almost consider that everybody everywhere supports each other – almost.
Real Separation
Globalization has connected more people in more places than ever before, but this is an extremely recent phenomenon. Particularly in thanks to digital technology and the internet, communication and transactions are now highly connected. It’s easy to take this for granted if this is all you know, but the vast majority of history has been anything but this connected.
Hundreds of thousands of years ago, humans were still slowly spreading across the earth, and contact was certainly limited. If you migrated across an icy land bridge to a new continent, and then that ice bridge disappeared, your tribe was certainly not returning from whence they came. Even if food was simply in short supply and a portion of a tribe had to break off and trek on to other lands to find more food to survive, it’s very possible they might never have contact with their original tribe again.
This is to say that while the butterfly effect feel of much of the world exists today, it absolutely did not for most of history. A nomadic tribe (AKA all tribes before the discovery of agriculture 12,000 years ago) could interact with other tribes they ran into and even hear stories of happenings in farther off lands, but they literally didn’t even know of the existence of tribes on disconnected continents, for example. Before long distance seafaring was developed, for example, the people of the Americas and the people of Africa, Europe, and Asia had zero contact and zero conception of each other’s existence. Humans spread from Asia to North America ~15,000 years ago, but nobody was recording or sharing this information across the continents.
In these contexts, we see that tribal support did in fact used to be highly fragmented and localized. People only had access to what was in their immediate surroundings. And what changed this? Technology baby!
Connection Technology
Humans in their original state are literally monkeys just living in the wild. Lucky for us though, we took the evolutionary route of putting our experience points into our brains instead of our bodies, allowing us to make unprecedented developments that no animal has ever been able to. These developments, primarily in the form of improved thought processes and resulting technologies, have enabled humans to connect more and more as time has progressed. This improved connection directly correlated to our ability to support one another. More connection = more opportunity to support.
Steps-by-step, little by little, humans practiced utilizing their newfound mental abilities, refining their use and learning new ways to be, do, and create. In the broadest sense, this took form in the development of technologies. Not to be oversimplified to just physical feats of invention in engineering and science, technology consists of all the improvements that humans have come up to materially affect their lives in a positive way.
Technology is the application of conceptual knowledge to achieve practical goals, especially in a reproducible way.0
This includes religious developments, politics, philosophy, medicine, architecture, engineering, cuisine, medicine, war strategy, damn near everything. Now many developments have had extreme downsides of course but remember the fundamental need of humans – surviving and reproducing. Even with great costs, every technology has been created with some effect of that nature.
Since help from others – tribal support – is a fundamental way humans have been able to survive even far before we were even humans (remember that our monkey ancestors are also tribal) and had any technology at all, it’s no surprise that many technological developments were created to increase human connection and therefore support, both directly and indirectly.
And again, the more connected you are though, the more complex the system is that you will exist in. When it comes to deciphering how far Marketing and Tribal Support extends, the development of technology is what increases the sphere of influence and makes the line of support between people less and less clear as time goes on.
Timeline of Marketing History
ca. 300,000 BCE
First Humans
Anatomically modern humans emerge around 300,000 years ago in Africa. Existing in hunter-gatherer tribes of less than 100 people (on average), tribal support is essential to survival.
Trade
Existing for countless millennia, trade takes place between individuals and groups with different resources. To support yourself and your tribe, the best option is sometimes to satisfy another person’s needs with your resources to have your needs satisfied in return.
ca. 10,000 BCE
Agricultural Revolution
Humanity makes a widescale shift from nomadic hunting-gathering to settled farming. This transition enables larger tribes, excess resources, and more complex/specialized roles in society.
ca. 3,300 BCE
Emergence of True Writing
The first true writing systems (vs. proto-writing) develop in Mesopotamia and Egypt, able to accurately capture and replicate spoken language. The earliest uses of writing are used to document agricultural transactions and contracts, but they were soon used in the areas of finance, religion, government, and law.0
ca. 1,500 BCE
Early Logo Usage
Humanity makes a widescale shift from nomadic hunting-gathering to settled farming. This transition enables larger tribes, excess resources, and more complex/specialized roles in society.
ca. 1450 BC
Invention of the Printing Press
Existing for countless millennia, trade takes place between individuals and groups with different resources. To support yourself and your tribe with goods and resources that you need, the best option is sometimes to satisfy another person’s needs with your resources to have your needs satisfied in return.