Dirty Marketing Campaigns

This is a ridiculous, elitist and naive article. This is marketing - the job of marketing is to sell something to someone. In most cases, the customer doesn't really NEED the product, so you have to convince them they need it. What you call "stigma" is another man's "defining the pain in the marketplace."

Does this mean you want Ring Around The Collar for for Apple - do you put them in the "badly behaved" bucket? They employ "icky" marketing to put a stigma on PC users. Or do you believe PC users ARE, in fact, dorky, suit-wearing, pudgy, clueless people? The article only looks at the less sexy CPG and credit card industries? "Creams and detergents" solve a problem that is, frankly, unpleasant. Bringing up unpleasant realities to market a solution to those realities is not "icky" its marketing.

And by the way...when people discuss the latest pop business tomes, and Made To Stick (or Tipping Point, et al) comes up, and you hear a resounding "What! You haven't read Made To Stick?!?!?" - isn't that too a stigma? Time to look in the mirror guys, marketing is marketing.

Bob

www.hypermediate.blogspot.com

This is neither ridiculous, elitist or naive. It is spot on. It's about time marketing companies et al started making more responsible choices. Life is more than selling products.

Ummm...we're not talking about "life." We're talking about business and marketing, which is, in fact, about selling products. That's the point, we're reading "Fast Company" not "O."

Robert, this isn’t pointed at you but to Dan in Sales or at least media's version of sales. I like sales people, I don’t have much affinity for marketing people; I like graphics people but I don’t have much affinity for those cronies who speaketh in the group tongue of “intellectual social media”. In terms of you Robert I don’t have an affinity for blogs that simply rehash stuff but I do like your blog at Hypermediate, as I do Max Lenderman at “Experience the Message”, Sam Decker at “Decker Marketing”, James Cherkoff at “Modern Marketing”, Drew McLellan at “Drew’s Marketing Minute” and Bob Gilbreath “Marketing with Meaning”. I like them because they are not marketing blogs, they are people; people who in their own individual ways have developed their own virtual touch, without sounding like cronies or isolated islands of excellence. So life in part is about marketing, but marketing by itself it’s just a system in a world that is increasingly integrated with more systems. Bruce Phelan and Jo Phelan are sociologists, they are not marketers. I just happen to like people who talk about life but I also don’t have much affinity for “sociologists” and so your right, you say tomato(e), I say tomato – so there is nothing new in speaking in tongues – but there is something new in integrating thoughts across the horizontal, because like it or not Robert, Marketing simply sits in one of many professional verticals. So if you happen to shift the world sideways, an interesting situation occurs – you will find the people of like-minded ways to begin to spill their thinking and mingling new awareness from the resulting professional accident, (and IMHO intelligence happens at the same professional cerebral plane when boundaries no longer define ingredients). There are also people who have a raw physical view of life, rather than fancy-schmancy view of things that we “thinkers” do, (or what it means to be “professional”), and they gather at their particular horizontal (but they are not dumbfucks)– they are simply people like Vince Papali, who a particular community turns into heroes and marketing simply brings their story to the horizontal universe that we may be busy segmenting and cutting up into tiny pieces - so we can analyze it or surgically comprehend from our “profoundity of our own professional view. The difference between the vertical and the horizontal is that verticals consist of professional boundaries but the horizontal invariably consists mostly of life. So when you turn the profession of marketing sideways, I bet you that you are going to the result of the spillage form into this thing that most of us seemingly are afraid of, called “life”. So IMHO that isn’t about learning to deal with it, or elitism or naivety or whatever, but simply learning to see. In that regard the skills a sociologist brings is no different to the skills a marketer brings. The difference in the horizontal is about personal appreciation not public marketing. I don’t have much affinity for marketing people because I have seen the smartest of them still operating mostly out of their particular vertical and the verticals within marketing don’t seem to see eye to eye either, such as creative designers vs. analytical researchers. Sales people like Dan don’t do this, they won’t get their accounts unless they know how to cross a boundary, how to connect with real lives, because great sales people are not robots, they have to have an innate sense of what people want and the beliefs they hold that separate a simple “no” from a complicated “yes”. That is the problem with marketing in the enigma we call the digital age, or with sociologist or psychologists with their focus on “stigma’s” – it is therefore ironic that these professionals understand “life” so well, within the magnificent bibliography of their respective textbooks and professional guru’s. They also IMHO understand it psychologically and numerically to the point of ad nauseum measures and detailed in-depth analysis, that it makes me wonder why it is that so many professionals end up living stressed out lives, because they seemingly squash with so much professional detail into their respective vertical. Since I want to live in an integrated universe, IMHO marketing becomes secondary to existence, which basically means that in my world, marketing moves from the public to the personal. At the personal level I have already tried to create my own brand, mostly just to mock it and certainly not to receive prestigious marketing or social media awards. So this note isn’t written for you Robert, it is written to Dan – you just happen to be a conduit through which I am passing on a subterfuge message (i.e. one that isn’t meant to look like an expert view). Beyond that, what I say doesn’t matter one iota or as they say in the land of Vince Papali or Kurt Warner “a hill of beans”; for an opinion is simply an opinion – and while the common brand is the tethered branded life, IMHO life isn’t what a marketer see or what a sociologist studies – it’s about personal appreciation, in other words its bigger than any profession that has been infiltrated by psychobabble and far too much computational or powerful analytical toys – and so when I read this article I have already taken away more from it than you can possibly imagine, but whether you are sociologist dissecting stigma’s or marketer trying to label the enigma of an interactive age– yes, Robert you are right – “do your job” or understand the “job of marketing”. That expression “job” IMHO always reminds me of Adolph Eichmann, when he lamented, “I was just doing my job”. Marketing, sociology or whatever the job of any role becomes (or is) obviously isn’t life, but without a common reference to life, Eichmann in his own deluded way is professionally accurate about what a job is, but he obviously isn’t “right” either – for him, it was just a “job”. What I seek for the rest of the year is six straight uninterrupted months of just shutting up, and that is going to be my personal achievement this year. So I pass my regards to DS and ES, for you know who you are – and as for me, I am still trying to undertake a blog that is about “not blogging”, so just like before, I would like to pass my kind regards and yet again, wish you both the best for the remainder of the year, but most of all, to say Dan I appreciate your ability to discern the difference between that which is cattle and that which is a human, and of course, I better stop here before this turns into a book and a lengthy blog, in the age of Twitter, our becomes an impatient age where everything is an elevator speech or a one-liner that is simply gets people plasetered or stuck in their vertical niche while the rest of us are trying to establish a meaningful social horizon :-)……M.

In a free and open society we all have the opportunity to let marketers know we don't like their dubious push techniques; don't buy their products.