Marketing: authentic or absurd

Marketing in today’s multinational capitalistic world is ubiquitous – like air it surrounds us but is invisible. Sure there are the neon signs, the gigantic billboards, the clearly marked advertorials. But that’s only the tip of the iceberg. Beneath the surface, the world is plastered with marketing. From the narratives we hear expressed on the evening news to the opinions voiced by our peers.

All this marketing isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It is both a symptom and a solution in a society that presents people with many different choices about everything from what car to drive to what clothes to wear to what music to listen to. But not all marketing is equal.

All marketing is either one of two things: authentic or absurd.

Today I was standing in front of the refrigerator, where I tend to spend a lot of time, when I heard a sound like the crinkling and shuffling of paper. I turned from the refrigerator door to the front door, peeping through the spyhole. The motion-sensing light in the hall was on.

Opening the door, I found a small, folded advertisement crammed in the threshold. The culprit: satellite TV (again). A shadowy figure with a handful of papers stood at the end of the hallway.

“You forgot this,” I said, motioning for him to come back and take his pamphlet.

This is an example of absurdity in marketing. Who reads this crap, much less buys it?

At the other end of the spectrum, I have a friend who recently started her own business. It is focused on a very niche audience, a group of people with their own style, a group of people to whom she herself belongs.

As I sat down with this friend to give her some tips for building the new company’s brand, I was surprised to find out she had instinctively figured out most of it by herself.

This friend of mine has no background in marketing or business. On the contrary her background is in social work. One is concerned with meeting people’s material needs; the other with meeting people’s spiritual needs. But because of her personal investment in her customers’ lives – the community they belong to, the interests they share – she was able to empathize with her audience. She knew their needs.

Listening to my friend describe her plans to reach customers, I realized that her ideas had come not from a business school or a marketing seminar – they had come from her identity and were refreshingly authentic. What a contrast to the satellite TV company and their gang of door-to-door cronies, who are ashamed to even look their customers in the face!

The right to be heard in such a crowded marketplace is getting harder and harder to buy. But what I saw that day in the eyes of my entrepreneurial friend was a case study in knowing your audience … the first step to being known.