Evaluating the Marketing Worldview: Ka-ching!
Over the last few weeks I have reviewed some major trends in online marketing. I have contrasted online marketing with traditional forms of marketing. Methods that were once available to a few are increasingly available to everyone with access to the internet.
In evaluating these approaches there is a wider context: wealth concentrates in the hands of fewer people. Part of the solution is in the marketplace but we need to be careful about how we define it.
This leads me to my biggest issue with marketing and that is ka-ching; the sound of a cash register, presumably. Marketing is big business, especially in the United States where desire for personal wealth motivates it. A few marketing gurus have done very well selling training in how to market and there are it seems many small businesses that have done very well applying these methods.
Now, I don’t begrudge their success – they have worked hard to get to where they are and that’s great. They are not the 1% élite who are syphoning public wealth out of the general economy. I don’t suppose there are many successful marketers using the extreme tax avoidance the financial élite use – if there are, I withdraw my support!
Ka-ching! Undersells Marketing
My problem with ka-ching, apart from it making my skin crawl, is that it undersells marketing. Money offers no vision of a better world but use it to change things for the better. Marketing is not solely about generating cash, just as local marketplaces are not solely about financial transactions.
To be fair many marketing gurus make this same point but my impression, after subscribing to several of them and perhaps some of the second rank gurus, is the over-riding theme is “get rich quick”.
But this is the point. Marketing is not a “get rich quick” method. There are tools that sometimes work if you put in the work and have something of value to sell. I think it would be more honest to sell them as get moderately better off slowly approaches but that also undersells them.
My point is we should see these tools for what they are: a means to get a message across. By all means charge for your message, I think the idea that everything should be free on the Internet is pernicious. We need to appreciate that if something is worthwhile then the person who created it deserves a contribution to their income. This is in no way similar to corrupt financial institutions and indeed I believe successful entrepreneurs offer us a glimpse of a viable alternative to the financial markets.
This is the first part of my evaluation. So that my post is not too long, I’ll deal with some more positive stuff next Tuesday.