Back to William's Archives.
About Marketing:
September 2, 2002:
I have addressed the issues of the marketing industry in other
essays, but they bear revisiting. Marketing is, of course, a necessary
activity of any business which seeks success. Wesoomi Publishing
is such a business. Even though our efforts have been singularly
unsuccessful so far, we continue to seek ways to legitimately
market our products.
Marketing is what our website and catalog are all about. We produce the catalog for folks who do not have internet access, poor souls. It is just a limited edition of our website. In both cases we try to offer interesting and useful information to our potential customers. We hope that will generate interest in our products. Generating interest becomes a severe problem for us because of the people who populate the marketing industry. They have become so dishonest and aggressive in their approach, that they have spoiled it for honest merchants with real products.
Madison Avenue seems to think what sells products in America is gross, loud, and obnoxious advertising. But, how would they know? They have never tried anything else. Even so, because we cannot be stridently obnoxious and still maintain our integrity, we seldom get any attention. Just telling the truth is clearly not effective.
Our marketing problems are just a small part of the issues which I want to address here. There are other things occurring in this industry which go beyond obnoxious and dishonest. These are activities, within the industry, which I consider to be very clearly evil. I speak of the accelerated trend toward victimizing children.
I recently watched a segment on CBS 60 Minutes which I chose to call fat city revisited. The segment was pretty much a repeat of a previous segment. I suspect the show is running out of material because they repeat old shows often. In this segment, they talked about the fat problem in American youth. They showed us how fat and sugar are being marketed to children with the help of people whom we should normally expect to protect children.
As I watched, I got the impression that these folks had never read Vance Packard's Hidden Persuaders. This is a rather ancient book about marketing. The paperback edition was copyrighted in 1957. This is old, not new stuff. It has been going on ever since there was a marketing advertising industry. Yet, these 60 Minute folks managed to project a sense of new discovery in this presentation. It was as though they were saying, "Look what we uncovered." In fact, they did not uncover anything on 60 Minutes which was not exposed in this book almost fifty years ago.
What is new in recent years and is pointed up by 60 Minutes is the increase in marketing directly to children. This did not begin with the fast food industry's successful attempt to addict children to fat and sugar. It is just more evil now. Beer companies have been marketing to teenagers for many years. Their national ads are clearly directed toward immature undeveloped minds. The obvious targets are children. The big difference in the fast food effort is the victims are getting much younger. They are deliberately and maliciously targeting preschool children.
In another related segment, 60 Minutes showed us how Nike and others go after young children. They buy off grade school coaches with pittances to get at the grade school athletes. The coaches then sell out their kids to these incredibly dishonest marketers. To be sure, the parents of the kids also participate. It amazes me how easily and cheaply an adult's integrity can be bought with vaporous promises of reflected glory and wealth. The only difference with the fat and sugar peddlers is the ever decreasing ages of their victims.
Most public school systems have sold out to the fat and sugar peddlers. They offer the unhealthy stuff in their cafeterias and also allow the installation of vending machines in the schools. They have abdicated their responsibility to protect the children for pitifully small sums of money. They give all kinds of rationalizations for their betrayal. A favorite one is, "If we don't give it to them, they will go outside the school to get it." That is like saying, "If I don't victimize my kids, someone else will."
As I indicated, I believe the parents bear a responsibility. I believe the worst part of the 60 minutes presentation was the implicit exoneration of the parent in the order of culpability. I would place the parent at the top as the most culpable in these crimes against children, but 60 Minutes does not even mention them. They examine everyone else but ignore the failure of the parents.
The common parental defense is that parents are helpless against the entreats of their children. The advertisers put the kids up to blackmailing their parents and the parents become helpless victims. What a bunch of bologna. The truth is, the parents have abdicated their responsibility. Parents are responsible for the health and well being of their children. No one else is. Any parent can put a stop to this nonsense with the simple word, no! It is nothing less than cowardly to not use it.
To be sure, parents are not the only ones who have betrayed their trust. We would expect psychologists to have a degree of integrity. In fact many do not. They are actively engaged in aiding the marketers though so called focus groups and studies. They get paid enormous sums for this work.
A very naive woman on this 60 Minute segment said that the task of psychology is to aid human development. I have no idea what the task of psychology is, because psychology is a concept or, at best, a field of study, not an organization. I doubt that concepts and fields of study can have tasks or goals. I suspect the goal of any individual psychologist would be the same as most other people who pursues an education. That is to enrich him or herself.
For sure, the psychologists are villains in this victimization of children. They lend their services to this monstrously villainous marketing industry. Madison Avenue is a villain by its very nature. I believe these people see their primary goal as not to present products in a reasonable light, but to deceive people into making purchases regardless of quality or need. That is criminal insanity. They have a complete and irrational disregard for human life, health, and even dignity. They do evil things simply for money.
I believe deliberately targeting children in marketing is a criminal act and should be so treated. Unfortunately, we have no laws for that. It is currently legal to defraud children through advertising. In America, anything which is not illegal is legal by definition. Morality is irrelevant. Conceptually, that is as it should be. However, when we see something that goes so completely against all of our principles of decency and justice, we ought to get some laws on the books to cover it.
Now, not everyone in marketing is a monster and marketing is not inherently evil. As to motivational marketing, there is nothing inherently wrong with giving people what they want. What is wrong is marketing directly to defenseless children. What is also wrong, is using insecurity, guilt, lies, and fear to sell products. It is wrong to make people want things that they do not need and are not useful. It is wrong to make people want things they did not want before. It is wrong to make people want things which will ultimately diminish their spirits and fail them, like cosmetics and erection pills.
I do see some hope in all of this. I believe marketing, as
done by Madison Avenue carries within it the seeds of its own
destruction. It must get more and more strident with each iteration
until it completely contradicts even the simplest of logic. Then
it won't even work on children. As it is, thoughtful people reject
advertising out of hand. Therein lies the problem of legitimate
merchants. How do we tell the world about our products without
subscribing to this marketing industry insanity.
Back to William's Archives.
|
|
|
|