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| Do you really need another one? |
Let me ask you a question? How can you tell a difference
between an average dog food and a premium dog food? I can bet that majority of
you have no desire of trying it for yourself, and unfortunately until the
powers of science can translate dogs barking into English we are left with an
interesting dilemma: do we trust the very same people who are trying to sell us
the product. This IS the best dog food in the world!!
This is actually quite a common occurrence. In our daily lives
we come to rely on the advice of the very exact people who are trying to sell
us to goods. Its called one of the two things, Advertising: which means that
the company tries to beat its chest and tell you that they are the best and PR:
in which case the company convinces somebody who you trust that they are those
people in turn tell you that the company is the best. I find it really
fascinating. In order to understand
what’s happening you have to sometimes stop and take a breather, am I really
doing something that makes sense or something that you are being told?
Being in the Marketing field I used to think I could
identify the tools of the trade and avoid their influence. This is indeed not
the case, the volume and sophistication of tools is such that you actually grow
to “want” to give them your hard earned money.
It went from being a field in which you are made aware of the company
offering to something in which your brain is being tricked into thinking that
you absolutely need the thing. It appears that the strongest linkage is the one,
which identifies the product with happiness.
Essentially if people can be convinced that they’ll become
happier if only they had this bigger car instead of the smaller one their
neighbor drives. This in itself not a
bad thing but we gradually get pulled into a treadmill of unhappiness. People
start associating happiness with material things; this lays a foundation for a
life long quest for things to make us happy. Its very rare that people can
unplug from this idea and really ask themselves, is Ferrari going to really
make me a lot happier than a Honda? Do you need yet another Watch to make you
feel good? Does the money a guy pays to De biers equal his love for the girl?
Which business De Biers is really in? Diamonds or brides?
More about this in a later post…
Let us dig a bit deeper now, and touch on a concept of
value. For example, how do we determine what something is worth? In the old
times it used to be a lot simpler. If you need it to survive its worth a lot and
if you don’t need it then it doesn’t have intrinsic worth to you. Then it
became a bit more complicated.. if other people wanted it then it became more
valuable. When I said old times I was of
course thinking slightly further out.
Its really fascinating, we are not only told that we need it
to be happy, but also that the more it costs the more happier we’ll be. Guess
we haven’t really gone far in terms of old times when magical potions that will
make you healthier and happier were pushed by some shady characters.
So the next logical question then becomes what Should
marketing do? I believe that instead of tricking people it should actually help
them. For example can Marketing be a feedback channel to the Product
development. It’s a bit of an idealistic view of the world I guess. Perhaps
marketing should also help people realize that more things don’t necessary mean
more happier, it just means more clutter and waste. Certainly it’s a risk on
behalf of the company and a lot of marketing executives would argue that it
would be a best career suicide. Best stick to the majority and continue trying
to trick people into getting more and more useless stuff. What’s interesting is
that your customers are getting drowned in the ocean of marketing bombardment.
Customers evolve to protect themselves against marketers, marketers try to
invent new ways to trick them into buying. Whole companies structure their
proposition around delivering the most targeted tricks: Google and Facebook.
The trend is that advertising is going to be living with us for a long time.
On the other hand we have the best example of how to live
happy, take Warren Buffet. The guy is worth billions and he lives like you and
me. I was really impressed with his humbleness, the only thing he says he is
different from me is that he gets to fly his personal jet which saves him some
hustle at the airport. Wow, he lives in the same modest house for the longest
time, drives an OK car and eats burgers. He really sounds like the guy who
figured what’s important in life. Moreover, its really amazing that the guy was
able to resist all the wealth managers and sales guys who hound rich people for
their money.
Excuse my ranting, its part of me thinking process of
figuring out how to live rightly. I’m not saying that I’m righteous person, I
have faults and my own lost moments. I am trying to find the answers and I
won’t give up until I find those. I recognize that its an upwards slope and the
going is gonna get tough, at the same time I’m lucky enough to have luxury of
being able to get involved in these type of mental exploration and self
searching.
In any case, I’ll continue sharing these ideas on this blog together
with some thoughts about marketing, and will try to keep it less philosophical and
not to bore you with some more hypothetical ideas.
Oh, by the way, I live in Singapore, I have quite an interesting
path that lead me here, I’ll share bits and pieces of that journey in the
future posts! Stay tuned.
George
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