Marketing in Business

Marketing is the extension of natural tribal support between humans, and businesses are simply organizations of people conducting Marketing for gain (can be profit or non-profit).

For the vast majority of human history, hundreds of thousands of years, tribal support between humans consisted of small bands of people working together to provide each other with means of survival and reproduction. Eventually, humans began to trade, granting them access to other goods in return for theirs.

Due to recorded history being a relatively recent invention, only being ~6,000 years old, it’s impossible to verify when exactly humans started trading, but some sources state 100-150,000 years ago. As long as humans have had contact with other groups of humans with different resources and an interest in trading is how long trade has been happening.

The introduction of trade was a major inflection point that affected how humans procured their means of survival and reproduction. Instead of being necessarily self-centered and limited to just what a person or group could collect for themselves, trade meant that people could survive and reproduce just as well, if not better, by satisfying other’s desires as well.

Marketing has been around since individual humans have cooperated with one another, and businesses have been around as long as individual humans have grouped together to do Marketing with the same goals. 150,000 years ago, the concept of ‘Marketing’ was simply working together to survive to satisfy your own needs, and a ‘business’ was simply working together to solve all your needs.

Fast-forward to now, add the invention of money, sedentary agricultural societies, and modern economic practices like the division of labor, and you have got some very effective businesses! Now that many first world countries are past the threshold of worrying about survival, although business still have the underlying core goal of conducting Marketing for gain, this ‘gain’ is more specialized and abstract than before.

For example, some businesses are operated as non-profits. Their main purpose is not to create monetary gains for the owners but instead to create positive social impact (typically). While this doesn’t seem very important to some people, the value is better understood through the lens of societal development as a whole.

Means of survival and reproduction come before all else, but once you figure out how to satisfy these needs to a regular excess for many generations, what else are humans supposed to do? This is entering a highly debatable, philosophical area, but Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is a good example (although not without flaws) of the sequence of needs that humans look to satisfy. This topic of discussion is plenty subjective, but the point that stands is that once humans satisfy a need to a certain extent for a certain period of time, they become confident in its certainty and look collectively to the next level of needs.

This is all to say that Marketing in Business is the means of cooperating as a group to conduct Marketing (tribal support) for the purpose of achieving the collective need of the business that then enables the satisfaction of the needs of the individuals that make it up. Businesses act as sort of a meta-entity that individuals can operate within while also having their own unique identity, resources, goals, and outcomes.

With a historical background of Marketing, the modern business environment and it’s relationship with Marketing make a lot more sense. Marketing works because of fundamental human needs and relationships, but how is tribal support supposed to work once you start trading with enemies or interacting with people from across the globe? With just a little bit of help from Capitalism of course.