I don’t register on Hugh’s radar. I’ve never commented on his blog which I read with varying degrees of regularity in much the same way I imagine fundamentalist bible thumpers look at Playboy: they’re sort of revolted and compelled at the same time.
Hugh works in marketing. He is a marketing guy. He also thinks pretty hard about how marketing, branding, and the internet intersect and he writes about them regularly at Gapingvoid.com. These are all topics in which I have some interest but my view of Hugh’s blog matches that of the fundamentalist bible thumper’s in that I believe marketing to be one of the primary sources of evil in modern culture.
Put simply: Marketing exists to tell you that you’re deficient and point out the ways in which Company A’s product can help you make up for that heretofore unknown deficiency in ways that are so much more productive, efficient, and have a higher probability of getting you laid – because creating the illusion that a product will increase your probability of getting laid is really what marketing is all about – than Company B’s product. Given that religion already existed to tell us we were deficient on an eternal damnation sort of scale way before anyone thought of marketing did we really need another juggernaut force beating us down? I don’t think so.
Still, marketing is tangentially part of my professional life so I need to pay attention to what the people who get paid to think about marketing think about marketing so I can steal their best ideas and pass them off as my own.
Hugh also does a wee bit of drawing. His cartoons always strike me in the most visceral ways. Unlike marketing they lack prevarication and, more often than not, cut directly to the center of a particular situation or emotional state. This is the sort of mood I was in today.
Let’s just say that I’m looking forward to tomorrow.
I think people who find marketing evil, are evil 😉
You can replace marketing with management or even sales, it’s the same age-old argument! What I’ve come to realize is people don’t hate good marketing, good management, or effective sales people.
Those functions exist to improve the customer’s experience, life, business in some way. Bad marketing, management, and sales, however, is what we all seem to associate the aforementioned functions with.
If you’d said “bad marketing” then I would have more sympathy with your argument. Bloggers such as Hugh and myself are arguing in varying degrees and manners that most marketing is inept and thus engenders the reaction you have. If you want more, read the two posts at the top of my “popular posts” sections.
Paul,
Perhaps that is because there is so much of those three things that should the good versions actually exist they are taken as exception rather than the rule.
John,
It is difficult from either the consumer or the product developer (roughly my professional position) sides of the equation to differentiate between ‘good marketing’ and ‘bad marketing’ As one of Hugh’s cartoons put it: if you talked to people the way advertising talks to people you’d get punched in the nose.
Thank you for the references, though. I will take a look, perhaps learn more, and perhaps revise my opinion.
Your definition of marketing, I think, was put to music nicely by Jagger/Richards in “Satisfaction,” and how much has changed since that hit record is certainly open to debate. Once upon a time, marketing was compartmentalized from the quality and performance of what was sold. If the marketing sold a bunch of stuff, it was good marketing. If it didn’t,it was bad marketing. These days, if a great product sells itself, assuming good distribution and awareness, we can call it good marketing, maybe the best. Of course this excludes user imagery advertising that attempts to fill a consumer’s personality vacuum. If I’m being simplistic, I blame it on “Satisfaction.” I mean, it’s three-chords.