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.
