Marketing: a short history

Are you looking for more customers? Or perhaps you want to promote your products or services out in the world?

If so, you’ll eventually need some help with marketing. But who do you choose? What makes a good marketer? Who do you trust to communicate your message in this socially driven high-tech world that has the attention span of a goldfish? Do you look for someone who understands every new app, platform or trend? What about influencers, keywords, pixels, and voice?

Technology can sound like a load of gobbledegook — and marketing is full of both — but if you’re looking for a marketer, a little bit of history will help you choose.

Marketing has come a long way. We can trace its path, from Bronze Age marketplaces; through the Silk Road and the Clipper Ships of the high seas; all the way to Mad Men, Social Mania, and where we are now.

That’s some journey, and despite the long passage of time we come to realise that nothing has changed at all. Every transaction in history— from bartering bangles to peddling websites— was carried out by people, and people have only ever bought one thing: Improvement.

People have only wanted products or services to make life better for them or their loved ones. That’s easy then, right? One box marked ‘improvement’ for sale. If only it was that easy. To find out why it’s not, we have to go back a bit further.

Our evolution began 450 million years ago. It was a quiet Tuesday morning in the primordial swamp and everything was fine until a teenage tadpole decided to defy his parents. No surprises there.

The tadpole was sick of swimming in circles and knew he was destined for better things. So, without a backward look, he popped his head above water and dragged himself onto dry land. Before long, his mates saw what was going on and decided to follow. That’s when things started to get a little crazy. Tadpoles turned into reptiles. Reptiles became rodents. Nobody knew who was who until, a few hundred million years later, some primates turned into humans and started to set things straight.

When the dust settled, the humans were huddled in hovels but things were just getting going. Hovels grew into villages, which in turn gave rise to towns, before giving up their place to the sparkling cities that we love (and hate) so much. Each new version was built on top of the old until the hovels could no longer be seen. Importantly, even though the new city was unrecognisable from what went before, it still followed the lie of the land.

Our brain is like one of those cities. From the small beginnings of stem and cerebellum, it was built on — layer by layer — until we have the big shiny one we have now.

The cerebellum has remained unchanged from the beginning. It underpins our self-preservation — it allows us to swallow, breathe, and dodge things that will kill us. It’s also left us motivated by fear, and caring about ourselves and our loved ones above everything else.

The next layer of our brain to be built turned us into social creatures and reliant on our tribe. It also left us able to judge if someone is trustworthy in the time it takes to blink.

The last layer changed everything. Built on top of all the others it enabled us to do critically essential tasks like make beer and go to the moon. And make more beer.

But just as the main streets of any new city follow ancient tracks and steams that can be found underneath, so our modern Neocortex is built over pathways that point back to our primitive past. It’s a legacy that influences our daily decisions and cannot be ignored. This is especially true for marketers, for once we understand our evolutionary upbringing, we can appeal to our human customers. A good marketer must:

• Be honest and authentic,
• Focus on the benefits to the customer, not the qualities of the product,
• Point out the pitfalls of not having that product, and
• Provide proof that the product is of value to others in their ‘tribe’.

Our history is complicated but marketing is not. Good marketers don’t need to understand the latest digital trends — they need to understand people, and that nothing has changed at all. And if any of this makes you feel like a fish out of water, don’t worry, it’s in your genes.