Not all marketing is bad. I need to get that on paper first and foremost. I live in the world of advertising and marketing. Albeit I’m not at the forefront. The fruits of my labours are the execution of marketing ideas. My issue with marketing is not that it in itself is wrong, it is how it’s being used.
I was talking with a good friend of mine today; he and I were talking about work and well, complaining I guess. I just recently released an HTML email marketing campaign, and I mentioned that “I feel like I sell my soul to the devil every time I make one of these things.”
He told me that he feels like that every day.
Me: “What do you mean?”
Him: “Well, I lie for a living. I have to lie to all of the people that read these materials that I make, and I have to artfully play with words to hide the truth.
Me: “Oh. I know what you mean: marketing.”
All Hail King Dollar!
My problem with marketing is that its misrepresentation. The general public deep down inside knows this. These companies try to give people warm and fuzzies, but they’re just after their money. They care about the people’s experience and what the customer service was like because they want the people to come back, so they can get more of their money.
I had an other conversation with a different friend on the topic of social structure. We determined (at least as much as us amateur sociologists can) that our society’s structure is still a monarchy, or even theocracy, and nothing has really changed much from the medieval and ancient times. We just have the illusion that things are better. Quite pessimistic, I know.
No we don’t have the Prime Minister as the King, and we certainly don’t worship him. We worship the dollar. The dollar is our King. We still have upper, middle, and peasant classes, except we outsource our peasant class to third world countries.
I don’t know. Maybe I’m new to this world. Or maybe I’m just naive, but I personally like when a company goes one step further than the other guy, and does something that is actually useful to me. Companies have been able to take away some of my so-called freedom just by going a few extra steps, and I don’t mind.
Paradox of Choice
Let me qualify that statement: Apple Computers. I buy Macs all the time now. I’m fully in the cult-of-mac. I argue with my brother regularly over the PC and Mac. In any case, common complaints against Macs: you can’t customize them, you’re restricted on hardware choices, restricted on software choices.
I don’t mind losing that freedom, because the with the choice I do have, the results work very well. For those who know what they’re doing with PC hardware/software, they have the illusion of choice. Yeah they can choose from 100 different graphics cards, but only 3 of them are worth it.
I just want to buy a system that works. Apple has done the heavy lifting on making sure everything is compatible and will run exceptionally well, otherwise they wouldn’t sell it. Apple doesn’t give me a warm and fuzzy feeling. Microsoft tries to give me a warm and fuzzy feeling, but I just get creeped out by them. I don’t want to cuddle with Microsoft.
Path of Least Resistance
I imagine marketing people sitting around looking at new products, or ad campaigns. In my head they’re thinking about this equation: how to I do the least, and get the most? Not a bad equation. I would like to achieve the same thing: it’s called efficiency. The problem occurs when they make a decision about that equation. There’s usually a few roads to choose from: easy or hard (and maybe some in between). More often than not, I see them go down the easy road: they lie.
It’s the path of least resistance. It’s what everybody else is doing. I hope I never get that way.
“…we choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.” — President John F. Kennedy at Rice University in Houston, Texas on 12 September 1962. via WikiSource
I want to do the hard thing. More often than not, it’s the right thing.
Tags: dollar, John F. Kennedy, lies, marketing, paradox of choice, path of least resistance