Understanding Marketing

Intersubjectivity as a phenomenon to conceptualize marketing

Abstract

This article is a theoretical essay that proposes to reflect on the understanding of marketing from its closest meaning to the individual who underlies the consumer, taking into account their particular and social circumstances, those that occur in the world of everyday life, which is in essence, intersubjective, and where similarities build social relationships and social identity (Shultz, 1964). Thus, in the first instance, it proposes the recognition of marketing as a set of activities that relate production and consumption, to later include constructs such as the satisfaction of the needs of the lacking individual and the search for the benefit of the other, in which efficiency is inexcusable. In this way, business and social marketing are no longer divergent. This meeting between the business and the social is given as an effect of understanding the individual, whatever his role in the transaction, as the point of origin of marketing decisions, and his similar environment, as the field of cultivation of strategies with greater probability of success, from the identification of the target segment resulting from the segmentation process. Thus, the subjective and the intersubjective play two fundamental and complementary roles in the effort to understand marketing: The first, the result of individual consciousness, as a minimum indivisible unit in which the meaning of things makes sense; and the second, in which these meanings can be valued based on the importance assigned to them by the group, as a target group that gives meaning to marketing actions.