Sliding into the season of shameless consumerism

I guess it's time to say happy holidays. Or merry effing Christmas if you prefer. Already, you scream? I know. This holiday season has come hard and fast. I was walking my four-legged master this morning and one of the neighbors had already decorated for Christmas. I ask you! It's not even Thanksgiving yet. I barely made it through Election Day. I sound so old. Probably because I am old. 

Where am I? Thanks for asking. I'm back in Scottsdale while my friends gallivant on the other side of the globe. I'm looking forward to congealing in the tub for the next three weeks. Maybe get some writing done (besides this blog). The chair I'm sitting in is a tiny bit too low, the desk is a tiny bit too high, or I can no longer sit up straight because my spine is bent, or all of the above. Whatever, I can ignore my aching carpals because there is a little dog snoring in my blankets on the bed behind me. She's like a mobile furnace. That is good because the blue sky and sunshine beyond the window belie the hollow chill of this house. It's unusually cold in Phoenix this week. Low 60s during the day. Oh, woe is me, alas, alackaday. We are hanging out in the bedroom with a space heater. 

What comes next? Who cares? I guess we watch the lunatics take over the asylum. It's mildly anxiety producing but not catastrophic from my vantage point of invisibility. The world is cracking apart, but it probably won't affect me much (unless social security evaporates, then I'm toast). In any case, this mucky dissolution is normal for humans. The civilizations we create fall apart from time to time. Go read a history book, if you can find one that hasn't been banned at your local library. If we are lucky, an asteroid China failed to nudge off course will smack into Earth and put paid to the whole thing. The Earth will continue, maybe in fragments, but don't they say we are all stardust anyway? Stardust to stardust. I ate pancakes this morning, so I'm well on my way to total annihilation. 

Where was I? Holidays, right. The winter holiday season was not all that important in my family. I think we all had ideas of how it was supposed to look. The Hallmark family sitting around the table laughing and talking and eating massive quantities of food that won't make them puke later. The perfect family enjoying the perfect holiday. Yeah, no. Not in my family. We all figured out that was not our reality and adjourned to our safe spaces to endure. Mom to the kitchen, Dad to watch football, my brother to the basement, my sister to her room, my little brother to pestering my sister, and me to my books. Not a Hallmark family. More like the family of Misfit Introverts. 

After an upbringing like that, you can imagine the holiday season isn't a big whoop for me. This is the time of year I go into stores only to buy food. I avoid anything that reeks of cinnamon and pine cones. I never go to coffee shops for pumpkin lattes or eggnog frapuccinos. I don't look for gifts, white elephants, or bargains. To me, everyday during the holidays is Buy as Little as Possible day. I would sooner eat paste than stand in line outside a Best Buy to buy a gargantuan flat screen TV, even if I had a place to hang it. Anywhere hordes of people go, I'm not. 

Now, I know some of you are thinking, wow, Carol, you are such a grinch. Lighten up, already. Go drink some wassail, eat some Chex mix, chill out, your Debby Downer routine is bringing us down. 

To that I say, go peddle your White consumerism to someone who cares. Not listening. La la la. I plan to enjoy my solitude, canoodle with the little dog, bask in the Arizona sunshine, and eat bon bons until I burst. 

Happy effing holidays from the Hellish Handbasket. 

I am the anti-christ of marketing

You can define marketing as "a practice employing methods of communication to persuade people to do, think, feel, or believe something." In that sense, you can call marketing a form of brainwashing. That's how I think of it.

I love the essence of marketing, which to me is the fascinating challenge of understanding consumer behavior. I love figuring out why people buy what they buy, love what they love, believe what they believe. I love style, I love self-expression. The best qualities of marketing are about answering the questions, Who are you? What do you believe in? What do you prefer? What makes you uniquely you? That's why I love marketing research. It's all about asking the questions and trying to understand the answers.

Unfortunately, the part of marketing I hate is the persuasion part, because the objective of so much marketing is to sell more stuff to people who already have too much stuff. Have you seen The Story of Stuff? You should.

I sometimes teach introductory marketing classes. The students invariably are interested in marketing only to make money. They get that it is a game of scheming and manipulation. They are used to it, being experienced consumers themselves. They rarely care about the environmental impact of producing and marketing products in an endless cycle. They don't seem to understand the finite nature of earth and its resources. The world seems like one big mall to them.

They assume that whatever brilliant product they devise for their class project will be of riveting interest to the entire population of the planet. And that everyone has the resources to purchase said product. And of course they assume everyone in the world has a computer, Internet access, PayPal, and Facebook. Don't get me started.

I show them Sut Jhally's Advertising and the End of the World. Yes, it's old, and the scary monster from the 1990s was the hole in the ozone layer, but that was just the harbinger of global climate change. The concepts are still relevant, and the commercials are compelling. My local library used to have a copy, which I borrowed and showed to several marketing cohorts. I'm not sure it did much for them, but it scared the crap out of me. That is how I became the anti-christ of marketing.

Marketing is just a set of tools. Marketing is like fire—it can keep you warm or burn your house down. In unscrupulous hands, marketing is part of the machine that will destroy our planet and us along with it. In the right hands, marketing is a tool that can be used to persuade people to rethink their consumption habits in support of our common welfare. How many hands do you think are in the second category?