I've been having trouble thinking of what to talk about the last few weeks. Truth be told, I'm not super interested in marketing as an overall subject. I'm interested in the particulars.
Something that does interest me, and has come up quite a bit in class discussions is ethics in marketing. The question "is marketing evil?" is often brought up. I think the answer really must lie in the idea that marketing is simply a tool (or set thereof). It can be used for good and it can be used for "evil," if you will. That is, marketing can be used to discover and satisfy an unmet or poorly addressed need, thereby improving the lives of countless people. Or it can be used to discover where a human weakness can be exploited in order to make money.
Let me try and elaborate: when a company conducts a marketing study to figure out how to sell junk food or cheap toys to children, in my opinion that company is using marketing in an "evil" way. If a startup tries to figure out how to better enable families to keep in touch or stay safe in their cars, marketing is being used for good. Many of the most important technological advances have happened, or at least gained traction, through marketing just as much as engineering. Without proper knowledge of the market and people's needs and wants, a seemingly great idea can fizzle. Even nonprofits benefit from marketing. Fundraising is greatly improved through effective research and outreach. Inversely, a firm understanding of current trends and desires (and maybe brainwashing techniques) can make a useless gadget or toy sell like hotcakes. Ever seen a Furby?
Some amount of marketing is nearly always essential for the success of a business, and it's pretty clear that there are a huge range of businesses with a wide range of goals and ethical standards. Regardless, I'm excited to learn more about how marketing can help regenerative business to be an effective force for improving our world.
Chris, I tend to agree with you that marketing is basically like science -- it's neither good nor bad, but it can be put to either good or bad uses. (And, BTW, I reserve the word "evil" for things like genocide.) On balance, it's useful. So if you're looking for ways to get interested in Marketing (or any other discipline), you might want to ask yourself how you might apply what you're learning to something you already care about. The theory is all well and good, but it's the application that makes the material come alive!
ReplyDeleteThanks for your comments Jill! I'm starting to understand the potential of marketing for good (just writing this post helped me to sort through these ideas). Like you said, it's the application that makes marketing interesting, and diving into some real-world examples in future posts will make this process much more engaging for me.
ReplyDeleteGreat post Chris. I tend to agree with your assessment. I think figuring out how to market sustainability may very well be one of the most important things we can do. Although, on the other hand, I’m appalled by large corporations using engineered marketing messages, which have little authenticity, to maximize their profits.
ReplyDeleteWhat I’m curious about is where it’ll all end up going. It seems like people are watching TV less these days, relying more on the internet for entertainment. Magazines are following the way of the newspaper and disappearing from relevance. At the same time, companies like Google slyly market to users in a way that that they hardly notice they’re being marketed to.
I sense that consumers are much more aware of and guarded against overt marketing than they were fifty years ago. However, I wonder if this will change people’s consumerism behavior, or whether marketers will just become much more effective in marketing to them in a way they won’t notice.