---
title: "Revisiting 'Marketing in the Next Century': User Marketing vs. Scenario Marketing"
description: "This article discusses the concept of 'cross-cycle growth' and defines the marketing of the last century as 'user marketing' centered on user needs via mass media, while the next century's marketing is defined as 'scenario marketing' centered on scenario jobs-to-be-done via internet self-media. It argues that scenario marketing, with its concrete tasks and interactive value creation, is better suited to the new media environment than traditional user marketing."
author: "刘春雄"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
telephone: "+8615854817671"
published: "2025-11-01"
categories: "Brand Marketing, Management & Methods"
language: "en"
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original_source: "https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/RjisJwrgqwwlwaiUbdgHag"
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citation: "刘春雄. “Revisiting 'Marketing in the Next Century': User Marketing vs. Scenario Marketing.” New Distribution, 2025-11-01. https://xinjignxiao.com/en/articles/revisiting-marketing-in-the-next-century-user-marketing-vs-scenario-mark-a1145f2b/"
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---

# Revisiting 'Marketing in the Next Century': User Marketing vs. Scenario Marketing

> This article discusses the concept of 'cross-cycle growth' and defines the marketing of the last century as 'user marketing' centered on user needs via mass media, while the next century's marketing is defined as 'scenario marketing' centered on scenario jobs-to-be-done via internet self-media. It argues that scenario marketing, with its concrete tasks and interactive value creation, is better suited to the new media environment than traditional user marketing.

### **Source** | Teacher Liu's Scenario Marketing **ID** | liuchunxiong1964 Author | Liu Chunxiong
Recently, the phrase "growth across cycles" has become very popular. Thinking within a cycle is quite different from thinking across cycles. "Marketing in the last century" and "marketing in the next century" are examples of cross-cycle thinking. An important approach in cross-cycle thinking is to identify the premises of a cycle, as well as to name and define the cycle. For instance, the mass media era and the internet era are cycle names. So, how should we name marketing cycles?
My definition of marketing in the last century is: marketing that uses mass media as the primary medium and user needs as the marketing origin. In short, user marketing.
My definition of marketing in the next century is: marketing that uses internet self-media as the primary medium and scenario jobs-to-be-done as the marketing origin. In short, scenario marketing.
This makes it clear: it's not about replacing marketing with scenario marketing, but replacing "user marketing" with "scenario marketing." The last century's marketing was user marketing; the next century's marketing is scenario marketing.
The above definitions involve two key terms: core medium and marketing origin.
These two terms have a corresponding relationship: mass media-user needs, internet self-media-scenario jobs-to-be-done.
So why use these two key terms to define a marketing era? Or, to sort out an era with these two key terms.
**Mass Media vs. Internet Self-Media**
The value of media is clearly stated in the subtitle of McLuhan's "Understanding Media": The Extensions of Man.
The widespread dissemination of people's thoughts and viewpoints requires the power of media. The dissemination of marketing ideas and consumer viewpoints requires media. Without modern media, there would be no modern marketing, or modern marketing would revert to the word-of-mouth era. Therefore, marketing expert Li Jing said that media is the single largest variable affecting marketing.
Every historical change in media has caused tremendous social changes. The diagram below, compiled by Teacher Fang Gang, shows the media evolution timeline.
When I understand the last century of marketing, I take the commercial application of radio in 1920 as the starting point of modern marketing, precisely for this reason. Although the commercial application of television had greater communication power (combining text, images, and sound), it still did not break away from the basic characteristics of mass media.
Similarly, I take the start of the next century of marketing as the application of mobile internet self-media in 2010. Why 2010? Teacher Kong Shou has compiled relevant materials.
The power of media in marketing is reflected in the following aspects:
1. Media is the carrier of information. People's understanding of the world is first encoded through information, then disseminated through media, and finally understood through user decoding.
2. The dissemination of marketing ideas and consumer viewpoints must rely on the core media of the period to have influence.
3. The commercial dissemination of a society's core media inevitably produces a symbol of commercial cognition.
Word-of-mouth, brands, and IPs are all results of commercial cognition. Word-of-mouth is commercial cognition that relied on mouth-to-mouth communication in agricultural society. Brands are commercial cognition that relied on mass media in industrial society. IPs are commercial cognition that relies on internet self-media in the information society.
Industrial society also had word-of-mouth, but it was not mainstream; the internet era also needs brands, but they are not mainstream. The commercial mainstream must be combined with the mainstream media of the time.
To put it bluntly, talking about word-of-mouth in the industrial society and brands in the self-media era is being out of touch and willingly marginalized. The demise of the brand department is an inevitable result of internet self-media replacing mass media. The marginalization of brands is also an inevitable trend of the times. The decline of brand consulting is also an inevitable result of the era.
In the PC internet era, people regarded the internet as a new mass medium; in the early mobile internet era, people regarded it as a mass medium for precise dissemination. Later, they found this to be a great mistake. Especially the idea of precise dissemination via the internet is a great misunderstanding.
The core difference between mobile internet self-media and mass media is not the larger amount of information, nor the difference between video and text, but that mass media is one-way communication, while internet self-media is interactive communication, and the logic of forming commercial cognition is different. Some say it's the difference between broadcasting and spreading.
Teacher Shi Wei said that the brand-building model of mass media advertising is "a loudspeaker, shouting hard." Mass media is the "loudspeaker" of the "global village." As long as the sound is loud, everyone knows. So, the key to success is twofold: first, correct information encoding (Slogan creativity under brand theory), and second, long-term sustained investment of funds.
On mobile internet self-media platforms, everyone is self-media, and commercial cognition is the result of scenario interaction and self-media interaction. Overloaded fragmented information is quickly drowned out. Only UGC that forms consensus can rapidly fission and reach the density needed to form IP cognition.
The common point between brands and IPs is that the dissemination density exceeds the critical point. A vivid metaphor: to boil water, you must bring it to a boil.
The difference between brands and IPs is the difference in the logic of commercial cognition. Brands spread experts' creativity to more people; IPs rapidly fission the cognition formed by public interaction to more people. Two differences: first, where does commercial cognition (value) come from? Second, who initiates the dissemination?
These two differences bring about tremendous changes in marketing. It is impossible to continue new marketing within the original marketing theory framework.
**User Needs vs. Scenario Jobs-to-be-Done**
It is very strange that Christensen's jobs-to-be-done was proposed precisely on the basis of criticizing user needs theory, and it was proposed before the large-scale application of the internet. Christensen proposed the concept of jobs-to-be-done in his book "Competing Against Luck."
"Competing Against Luck" is a strange title. It points out the weakness of user needs. According to the analytical logic of user needs, the failure rate of developed products is extremely high. Those successful products are just a bit luckier.
In my exchange with Teacher Kong Shou, I took the commercial application of radio as the starting point of a century of marketing, and 1957 when John McKitterick proposed the marketing concept as the time node for the formation of the modern marketing system. The image below is the original exchange with Teacher Kong Shou.
Both user needs and scenario jobs-to-be-done can become the origin of marketing. Why did marketing choose user needs in the past, and why do we now propose choosing scenario jobs-to-be-done?
First, when goods were not abundant, the personal characteristics of consumption were more obvious. Consumer needs first satisfied personal physiological needs. Needs labeled by personal characteristics were obvious, such as gender, age, education, income, etc. Although personal consumption was clearly influenced by environmental factors, it still showed personal characteristics.
Second, user segmentation highly overlapped and matched with mass media segmentation. Advertising is a derivative of media content. The three sales of media: the first is selling content (programs); the second is selling viewers (advertising); the third is selling derivatives (comprehensive influence, such as certain commercial world rankings, like the World TOP 500). When mass media segmented by viewers, it was appropriate for advertising to use users as the marketing origin.
As mentioned earlier, the mainstream media of an era is crucial for the dissemination of commercial cognition. The matching of user classification and media column classification is very important, allowing relatively precise targeting of target users.
Third, users and needs are related terms, just as scenarios and jobs-to-be-done are related terms. Marketing master Kotler came from an economics background. Needs is an economic term that was applied to the marketing field. It was natural to apply it from macro to micro.
Taking user needs as the marketing origin was initially a business viewpoint, but later became a marketing belief. For example, users are parents, users are God. As a belief, it is not to be questioned. Whenever marketing has problems, it is likely to return to the "user question": Did we choose the wrong target users? Did we misunderstand user needs? And so on.
In the mass consumer field, user needs were applied with ease. This is also why user marketing thrived. When the domestic market was saturated, multinational companies still mainly sold mass products in cross-border marketing, and user marketing was still highly efficient.
When mass needs are satisfied, users become increasingly segmented, including not only the personal characteristics mentioned earlier, but also psychological and environmental segmentation.
The good thing about "Competing Against Luck" is that it points out the fatal flaw of user needs: guessing user needs becomes a "game of luck." There is no logic, only correlation.
How do user needs come about? One way is user questionnaire surveys, which are essentially verification or falsification of the researcher's viewpoint. When users are not in a consumption scenario, the survey answers are likely to be users' imagination; another way is user insight. This is the metaphysics of experts, bypassing logical analysis and directly reaching answers that the public believes. For example, Steve Jobs.
Why is taking scenario jobs-to-be-done as the marketing origin the marketing of the next century?
Let's first look at the concept of scenario from the perspective of scenario marketing.
There are three pairs of concepts that influence scenario jobs-to-be-done: 1. Time/Place. This is a slice of lifestyle. Besides physiological needs, consumption is lifestyle; 2. Role/Process. This reflects the social relationships of consumption—the embodiment of social relations. 3. Ritual/Emotion.
It can be said that if user needs analysis is guesswork and relies on luck, then scenario jobs-to-be-done are specific tasks to be done.
Needs are possibilities, correlations, associations, and probabilities, while jobs-to-be-done are time-sensitive (urgency), task-oriented, and specific. Therefore, taking scenario jobs-to-be-done as the origin of the next century's marketing has the following reasons:
First, scenario jobs-to-be-done are specific.
When user segmentation is taken to the extreme, it becomes concrete scenario segmentation, which is scenario-oriented, and needs become jobs-to-be-done, not "competing with luck."
Second, people increasingly have no commonality, but scenarios have commonality.
In consumption, time/place is a hard constraint (you can't eat KFC at McDonald's), and role/process is a soft constraint (you can't be the protagonist when a KOL is present).
User needs theory assumes: similar users have similar needs.
Scenario jobs-to-be-done assumes: different users have the same jobs-to-be-done in the same scenario.
Third, scenarios highly match self-media dissemination.
Mass media dissemination has a clear initiator—the brand owner, who pays advertising fees, then mass media disseminates, surpasses the dissemination critical point, and then forms commercial cognition—the brand.
Internet self-media platforms are not like this. Although brand owners also invest funds, which we call PGC (equivalent to Slogan in advertising), it plays a role of "insulating" cognition when there is an existing brand (IP), but PGC model investment is certainly difficult to bear the rise of new IPs.
bC integration reaches the scenario, then scenario interaction, user connection, triggering UGC dissemination, UGC fission and detonation to form IP commercial cognition. This is the current logic of IP commercial cognition, which matches the self-media ecosystem. In contrast, the user needs model does not match.
Why associate the two concepts of mainstream media and marketing origin? Because only when the two match can they support the next century's marketing system.
Fourth, compared to needs, jobs-to-be-done emphasize social tasks and emotional tasks more.
In user needs, functional needs come first, then psychological needs. When the marginal effect of product functions approaches zero infinitely, social tasks and emotional tasks become more prominent. Scenarios are more conducive to analyzing social and emotional tasks.
Fifth, solutions are the ultimate solution.
Zhang Ruimin said, scenarios cover products, ecology covers industries. Methods separated from overall solutions are just optional modules of the ultimate solution, not the solution itself. Products are not solutions, but scenario solutions can be. A single industry cannot provide a full set of solutions, but an ecosystem can.
The best provider of scenario solutions should be the retailer or scenario service provider. Given that the current industry segmentation is still severe, and companies still provide relatively single products, it is difficult for business operators to provide true solutions. However, product operators can fully go deep into scenarios, discover jobs-to-be-done and solutions, and find mismatches or unmet aspects in solutions, then use products to make up for the shortcomings of existing solutions.
**Value Proposition vs. Interactive Value Creation**
The creation and dissemination of product (brand, IP) value is extremely important in a marketing system. This is also the biggest BUG of user marketing.
In a century of modern marketing systems, what is the value of mass media? It is dissemination value.
From a value chain perspective, marketing is divided into value creation, value dissemination, and value monetization. Brand owners create value, media and/or channels disseminate value, and channels monetize value. The role of media is to disseminate value.
So, who completes value creation? Of course, it is the professionals within the brand, especially those in the brand department and marketing department, or external brand consultants. Through research and other measures, they propose value based on product functions, disseminate value through mass media, and generate premium in users.
Zhang Ruimin said, scenario interaction, co-create value. Scenario interaction is not only interaction with brand owners, but also interaction among all people in the scenario, interaction of people, goods, and places in the scenario, and finally forms consensus, that is, value consensus.
Similar to Christensen's saying that "products compete with luck," so-called professional value creation is also "competing with luck." But when value is co-created through scenario interaction, it is deterministic.
Scenario interaction not only creates value, but those who participate in value creation also disseminate value through UGC.


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## Citation metadata

- Publisher: New Distribution
- Author: 刘春雄
- Published: 2025-11-01
- Canonical: https://xinjignxiao.com/en/articles/revisiting-marketing-in-the-next-century-user-marketing-vs-scenario-mark-a1145f2b/
- Original source: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/RjisJwrgqwwlwaiUbdgHag

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