Recently, marketing expert Miao Qingxian asked when evaluating marketing theory: if marketing doesn't talk about needs, what else can it talk about? The answer is Clayton Christensen's "Jobs To Be Done". If we continue to ask: if marketing has no users (consumers), what else is there? The answer is scenarios. If we ask again: if user needs "disappear", is marketing still marketing? That's hard to answer. User needs are the root of modern marketing. Uprooting the root of a theory is a serious problem. Why is "market orientation" equal to "consumer orientation"? In 1957, John McKitterick of General Electric formally proposed the "marketing concept". In the era of post-war overproduction, he made a groundbreaking declaration: enterprises are not product-centric, but consumer-centric. More than seventy years later, this statement has been upheld as a golden rule by generations of marketers. When the economy shifted from shortage to surplus, marketing turned from the supply side to embrace the demand side, from a seller's market to a buyer's market. This general direction is certainly correct. But people have never delved into a strange question: why does "market orientation" equal "consumer orientation"? The market is so large, containing channel partners, competitors, and scenarios. Why is it ultimately anchored on the three characters "consumer"? This seemingly natural equation is not inherently so. It was shaped by three forces under specific historical conditions. The first force is the marriage of marketing and mass media. Since its birth, modern marketing has been inseparable from mass media. Brands must "borrow" mass media to reach mass consumers. Newspapers, magazines, and television—the most powerful communication tools of the twentieth century—organized content and sold advertising space based on "audience labels". Newspapers needed to know the age, income, and address of their readers (audience, readers, listeners, viewers); television stations needed to tell brands how many millions of housewives were watching the 8 PM slot. Media needed to segment audiences into identifiable, priceable blocks, and marketing just happened to need precise targeting. So they hit it off. Media audience labels and manufacturers' consumer labels—age, gender, income, region—became the basic language of marketing communication. Companies said, "My target users are women aged 25 to 35 in first-tier cities," and media said, "I have this labeled group here." The match was perfect, and the logic was closed-loop. Over time, everyone forgot to ask: is this "consumer" a real person in real life, or a statistical unit abstracted by media for the convenience of transactions? The second force is the nature of demand itself. For a long time, the core issue in human society was efficiently satisfying functional needs. Even in the era of surplus, functional satisfaction still dominated for a long time. When hungry, eat; when cold, wear clothes. Functional needs have a notable characteristic: they are highly correlated with consumers' natural attributes. Dividing the market by consumer labels precisely finds the greatest "common denominator". In that era dominated by functional needs, using "consumers" as the marketing origin was not only correct but also highly efficient. A shampoo divided the market by "oily, dry, normal" hair, paired with a targeting strategy of "women aged 18-30", and the effect was immediate. This logic ran for fifty years, almost unquestioned, because it truly worked. The third force is hidden in the shelf space of shopping malls. Traditional mall shelves: organized by category, users push shopping carts, and purchases are mostly planned. In this scenario, companies do not know the specific consumption scenario of users—is that bottle of water for the gym, or as a spare in the car? Therefore, marketing to the "consumer" as the object is appropriate: since customers find things by category and brand, companies only need to define the consumer profile and wait in front of the shelf. In the internet era, the term "consumer" is used less, replaced by "user". E-commerce invented the concept of "people, goods, and scenes". Traditional commerce is "people looking for goods", while the internet is "goods looking for people". User labels have been further refined. Algorithms infer user preferences based on browsing, clicking, and purchase records, pushing more precise products. Essentially, this still establishes a connection between people and goods, just changing from passive waiting to active matching. That "scene" is either a store aisle or an app page, always a place of transaction, not the place where needs arise. The business ecosystem has changed From the above analysis, it can be seen that it is the business ecosystem that determines that market orientation equals consumer orientation. This is the best choice. Zhang Ruimin proposed "scenarios replace products, ecosystems replace industries". This statement starts from the changes in the business ecosystem. And the changes in the ecosystem first occur on the media side. The dominance of mass media has ended, replaced by the self-media matrix represented by Douyin, Xiaohongshu, Bilibili, and WeChat. Communication has shifted from "centralized broadcasting" to "decentralized distribution". Content is no longer planned by companies and produced by advertising agencies, but produced, uploaded, and commented on by every user in specific life scenarios. This is the rise of UGC content. How is UGC content triggered? Of course, by scenarios. A UGC piece contains both people and scenarios. A bowl of instant noodles after a late-night overtime, a spontaneous short trip, ten minutes of sweating in the gym. The producers of these contents may be 25-year-old women or 40-year-old men, but what connects them is not age or income, but specific scenarios like "wanting a hot meal quickly after overtime" or "needing a versatile jacket for business trips". The similarity of scenarios is crushing traditional labels like age and income. Business communication needs density; communication without density is ineffective. When everyone is self-media, the density of communication labeled by users disappears, but labeling by scenarios can form communication density. At the same time, demand itself is undergoing profound structural shifts. The economic concept of demand is a macro description, but marketing is micro and specific. When the marginal utility of functional needs sharply diminishes, people pay more and more to satisfy social and emotional needs. Buying a cup of Heytea is not to quench thirst, but to not be left out during office afternoon tea time; buying an off-road vehicle is not to cross mountains, but to join an outdoor community on weekends. Social and emotional needs are naturally scenario-based. Loneliness is not generated in statistical reports, but felt in a deep-night empty rental room; a sense of belonging is not obtained from consumer labels, but surges in the crowd of a music festival. When the focus of demand shifts from "useful" to "where do I belong" and "how do I feel", scenarios inevitably come to the forefront. Even in a solo scenario, because mobile internet allows sharing at any time, the person is connected to society, and consumption carries social attributes. The emergence of instant retail has further changed business logic. Ordering a box of cold medicine on Meituan at 11 PM is not triggered by the label "women aged 25-35", but by the specific, urgent scenario of "stuffy nose, runny nose, pharmacy closed, and work tomorrow". For a friend gathering, ordering steak and sparkling wine simultaneously on Dingdong Maicai is driven not by the statistical feature of "monthly income of 20,000", but by the scenario task of "wanting to show off but having no time to go to the supermarket". Orders in instant retail are naturally triggered in specific scenarios. The logic of traditional shelves is "people looking for goods", while the logic of instant retail is "people in scenarios looking for solutions". Orders no longer originate from planned lists, but from situational calls. Companies don't even need to know who the user is; they only need to know "what he needs at which moment". Business emerging from scenarios Imagine a housewife's breakfast scenario. In the past, she had to buy enough breakfast ingredients the day before, and after getting up the next day, spend at least half an hour preparing breakfast for a family of three. Now it has changed. The first thing after getting up every day is to place a breakfast order, then wash up and wake the kids. Half an hour later, instant retail delivers breakfast. Consumption certainly occurs in scenarios, but in the past business model, demand was predicted in advance and required planned purchasing. Under this premise, demand and consumption were separated. This separation has led to the "user need"—the origin of modern marketing—on the road to "disappearing". This is the future happening now: orders are not generated by a pre-defined "user need". What triggers the breakfast solution is the scenario—that specific time pressure, family structure, and the possibility of instant delivery. The adult placing the order is merely a representative of the scenario. Change the scenario, and the same person's order will be completely different. In the same scenario, different people's orders are highly similar. This is determined by the scenario's jobs to be done. Marketing is turning from finding similarities in user needs to finding similarities in scenario jobs to be done. This means that needs are no longer stably carried by people, but emerge from scenarios as jobs to be done. People are still the same physical beings, but as the starting point of marketing analysis, the abstract concept of "user" is losing its effectiveness. Marketers are accustomed to asking "who is our target user". The implicit premise of this question is that users are stable, predictable, and can be locked with a set of labels. But the reality is that the differences in needs of the same individual across different scenarios far exceed the differences in needs of different individuals in the same scenario. Let's look at the standard analysis template of "people, goods, and scenes". In the past, sales scenarios provided a place for people and goods to meet. In the era of instant retail, is the sales scenario still necessary? The person placing the order, if the scenario changes, the order changes. If the marketing origin of a company is still "user", it will fall into confusion: why did the same user buy A yesterday and B today? Why do two users with exactly the same labels have vastly different purchasing behaviors? The answer is simple: it is not the user that determines the purchase, but the scenario. The new origin of marketing Users, needs, or "user needs"—whether expressed separately or together—are the starting point of analysis for modern marketing. According to first principles, if marketing results are not ideal, one should usually return to users and needs and re-analyze. This methodology has been proven effective over the past hundred years. But the ecosystem at the birth of marketing a hundred years ago—mass media, shelf commerce, functional needs—has undergone fundamental changes. Self-media UGC communication, instant retail commerce, and social and emotional jobs to be done constitute a new business ecosystem. Marketing is still called marketing, but it is no longer that modern marketing. Users as physical beings have not disappeared, but as the origin of marketing analysis, they may fade away. Replacing them are scenarios. Scenarios are not a supplement to users, but a replacement for users. The first question of marketing is no longer "who is my user", but "in which scenarios do my users need to complete what jobs to be done". Needs, as an expression matched with users, are being replaced by "jobs to be done". Needs are abstract, vague, and static—"I want to eat my fill". Jobs to be done are specific, observable, and dynamic—"after late-night overtime, I want a hot, guilt-free, slightly ceremonial meal within ten minutes". Jobs to be done naturally include scenarios, while needs do not. Companies sell products, and shelves display by category. In the future, shelves may no longer be physical but scenario-based. If a product is not integrated into a solution for a certain scenario and becomes the default option of that solution, it may have no chance to be chosen at all. A bottle of water is no longer just a bottle of water, but could be a component of the "hydration solution for camping scenarios" or an item in the "electrolyte supplement pack for fitness scenarios". Products still exist, but their identity is no longer a member of a category, but a role in a scenario. Is marketing still marketing? The answer is yes. But its core is being replaced. From user as origin to scenario as origin; from needs as language to jobs to be done as language; from product as unit to solution as unit. This is like a person who has had all organs replaced; the name remains, but life has entered a new stage. The marketing of the last hundred years answered the question "how to get more people to buy". The marketing of the next hundred years will answer the question "how to be needed in more life situations". The former cares about the scale of users; the latter cares about the density of scenarios. The former relies on labels and funnels; the latter relies on insight and embedding. The former treats users as opponents to be persuaded; the latter treats scenarios as stages to be integrated into. The marketing era that McKitterick started in 1957 is coming to an end. Not because it was wrong, but because its implicit assumptions no longer hold. That world where consumer labels could operate efficiently, that world where functional needs dominated absolutely, that world where traditional shelves ruled purchase decisions, that world where independent "users" were believed to truly exist—has become a glorious and respectable history, like film cameras. We can boldly predict the future. Scenarios trigger jobs to be done, then AI understands the intent, generates scenario solutions, and finally instant retail delivers. This may be the mainstream business closed loop of the future.