On the Market

Marketing is a funny thing.

It’s everywhere, in essentially every form you can think of, whether you’re aware of it or not. Probably at least in part due to omnipresence, I think it’s earned a bit of a  negative stigma – one some might even call unfair.

I mean me. I’d call it unfair.

Now, that negative stench that some attach to different examples of marketing  is sometimes earned. I don’t regard everything from the consumer product pantheon as saintly gospel. For instance, one of my favourites is the “Our brand/product is a party and super hip” trope. How and/or why is Miracle Whip a party (thank you Colbert for skewering this)?  That said, this keynote from the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show might be the most ridiculous example of “we’re cool and you should like us,” in my opinion. So bad it loops back around to great (watch and manage the thoughts of “why” if you have a few minutes):

 

We’ve looked at the bad, and that rabbit hole goes deep. Yet why do people still lap up marketing when it’s pulled off well? What is it about cocksure (come on, when else am I going to get to use that word?) marketing  that is attractive  to everyone, despite everyone generally saying the opposite about marketing as a whole?

The long and short of it is that most can’t tell when marketing blurs the lines, whether through repeated exposure or subversive work. I rarely eye-roll as thoroughly as I do when someone tries to tell me “marketing doesn’t work on me”. They then proceed to use a mass-consumer item that is not the *objective* best product in its specific category (in a lot of cases, seems to rhyme with shmiPhone, a product of a certifiable marketing zenith), and cannot articulate why. Fun little experiment.

Now I’m not some terrible, unfun child of a Truant Officer and Debbie Downer (it’s an abomination to just think about that). I just wanted to point out a little fallacy because shit-disturbing passes the time. Marketing can be interesting, and (dun dun dun) not bad at all. Entertaining, emotional and engaging even. Is 98% of it kind of aggressively mediocre? If you use a fine toothed comb, sure. But then again, what genre of creative production *isn’t* mostly just that? If gold was easy to produce, it wouldn’t be worth as much as it is.

In any case, before you write off the entirety of marketing, take a breath and see if you can find some that resonates with you. There’s a lot of it out there, and to dismiss it all is literally to shut yourself off from a whole world of creative genius (and albeit, a decent amount of fluff to sift through). The good stuff is worth it, trust me.

EXTRAS:

Here’s one of my favourites from over the years. Hope to one day be a part of creative as compelling as this.