Click on the above picture, and you will see Grover and Kermit (Sesame Street) putting a perfect portrayal of what marketing supposedly stands for in our society: selling things to people who don't need them. If you have read my previous post, you will remember the senior milkman's keen observation to be a good testimony on this fact.
Before you sigh and nod your head in agreement from the vantage point of your moral high ground, take a moment to think if you might be responsible for doing the very same thing. How many of you tried to make yourselves look like the perfect candidate for a job you knew you were ill-suited for, just because you were desperate to get the bills paid? How many of you feigned (or denied) interest in this musician or that ideology just to get in someone's pants? How many of you dressed (packaged) yourselves differently than you normally would, in order to leave a good impression on people (customers) that could have lasting influence (profits) on your lives?
This is why our understanding and practice of marketing is warped. For most people, marketing and advertising are interchangeable terms. We push things at people. This is far from an ideal practice of marketing, which should have been finding the right product/customer for the right customer/product.
Rotten old days
Back in the old days, we could not possibly have been blamed for this. For what choice did we have, if we were not blessed with the good fortunes of being in the same geographical proximity as our perfect customers? If you did not have the perfect product, you made it look like the perfect product as much as possible, for finding instead the perfect customer for your product would be a costly adventure. We considered very little, if at all fathomed, the possibility of pull marketing; simply because as individuals and customers ourselves, we had very little means of pulling.
But things have changed.
(To be continued in: "Internet as a socialist revolution." Coming soon to a blog near you!)
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