Marketing and humanity

You would never expect this article to come from a marketing professional, but then again, this is exactly how he thinks and operates. It is the same reason why I would rate Mark Schaefer as one of the top five marketing gurus in the world today.

Mark recently joined a research project that gathered input from futurists on how AI will change humanity by the year 2030. Of course, nobody can truly foresee what the AI world will look like five months from now, let alone five years from now. But the exercise pushed Mark to ask a far more interesting question than the usual forecasts everyone else seems obsessed with:

If AI is changing humanity, what exactly is humanity to begin with?

Think back two or three hundred years ago, when a human adult had three primary goals: don’t die, find food and shelter, and have babies. That was essentially the entire playbook.

Today, when we talk about AI impacting humanity, we tend to reference careers, privacy, purpose, schools, democracy and relationships. But is that really humanity, or is that simply the modern packaging we have wrapped around it over the centuries?

Mark suggests we strip away the pretense of modern life and ask a much sharper question:

What does not change?

He points back to an old interview with Jeff Bezos during the early days of Amazon, when Wired magazine asked Bezos what new technology excited him most. Amazon was already revolutionizing e-commerce at the time, so the answer should have been obvious, but Bezos took the interview in an entirely different direction.

“Changing technology is interesting,” he said, “but what is even more interesting is what will not change, because that’s how you build a business. I find it impossible to consider that in 10 years our customers will want higher prices, less selection, or slower delivery. Our success comes from focusing on the factors that never change.”

That single insight has aged beautifully, and it is even more relevant today as we face the future with our new AI masters.

There is, admittedly, a lot of hyperbole surrounding AI right now, and most of it deserves a healthy dose of skepticism. Someone even said “AI is the most profound development in history, more than fire, electricity, or the internet.”

So in this hurricane-force environment, how does one actually build a durable business?

The answer, according to Mark, is to take a page from the Bezos playbook. Strip away the pretense and pressure of the modern world and ask the simple question:

What about humanity will never change?

Here is a starter list worth pinning to the wall of every boardroom: safety, love, connection and community, creativity, compassion, contentment and peace, health, family, spirituality and spiritual longing, curiosity, ritual, autonomy and freedom, and hope.

If your business serves one of these enduring needs, you are probably in good shape no matter what happens with AI. And if AI threatens any of them, you can build a durable business simply by protecting them.

Consider the new threats to personal safety: deepfakes, cyberattacks, attacks on electrical grids or the water systems, hacks into credit cards and bank accounts. These threats are not going away anytime soon.

So why hasn’t somebody invented a hack-proof credit card that can only be activated by a fingerprint or iris scan?

There is already a growing niche industry providing insurance against cyberattacks, which is smart business serving a permanent human need.

Try another one: curiosity.

What if you mash up your current product with enduring human needs and reimagine your business value altogether? Say you own a bakery specializing in unique cookies. How can you position your cookies to appeal to basic human needs like love, community, creativity, health, or ritual?

Suddenly that cookie is no longer just a snack, it becomes a moment, a memory, a small act of belonging.

You get the idea now.

Here are the part marketers and business owners need to memorize:

Building a durable business relies on serving persistent human needs. Strip away the centuries-old veneers of social performance and focus on the needs that never change.

AI will keep changing what we do and how we do it, but what people long for at the deepest level is older than the internet, older than electricity, older than fire.

The companies that thrive in the AI age will not be the ones with the fanciest algorithms, they will be the ones who remember that behind every transaction is a human being who wants to feel safe, loved, connected, and hopeful.

Technology evolves. Humanity endures.

Build for what lasts.

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