Polish Ponderings

Polish Ponderings

James R. Rosenfield

June 2003

A speaking invitation in Poland has me pondering a number of things, including the nature of marketing.

In the first world, I often write and speak on marketing's excesses. I don't think the Poles want to hear any of that. After all, only yesterday they were standing in line to buy a potato, consumers seeking producers. It's only when producers have to find consumers that marketing is born. Marketing begins in a kind of paradisiacal innocence, when surplus and abundance enter the world.

Alas, paradise soon enough is lost. The American Association of Advertising Agencies, poster boys for disingenuousness, claims that advertising's function is to educate consumers about choices. There is indeed a seed of historical truth in this lie.

But in truth marketing nowadays involves fooling people into thinking there are choices when none exist. In 2003, there is not an excess of choice. There is rather an illusion of choice.

The reality?

--You have a Hobson's choice among a near infinitude of identical commodities. The black art of branding is designed to create the image of difference.

--You can be manipulated to spend your money uselessly or indulgently, which is compulsivity, not choice.

--You can "choose" between giving your money to multi-national conglomerate A or B, having been propagandized by one of only several giant agencies advertising on one of only several mega media networks.

I don't mean to suggest the Poles were better off standing in line for a potato, or that Soviet-style communism in any way trumps post-industrial capitalism, for all its flaws.

But you can recoil in horror at what the Poles had to endure, and still have distaste left over for what our society has devolved into.

Someone from Australia sent me an email asking how he might work for a large agency and still be socially responsible. I told him it's impossible. But as a practical matter, a person has to have a job. I guess if I were working in marketing, I would try my best to avoid complicity with the following kinds of things:

--Intrusive marketing methods

Outbound telemarketing in the U.S. is not longer merely disliked; it is hated with a vituperative fury.

Predictive dialing, fueled by enormous supercomputers, has made outbound telemarketing's economics so favorable that the most minuscule of response rates can still be profitable. My own phone rings at least 10 times a day with junk calls. The predictive dialing machines are programmed to hang up if you take too long to answer, or if there's no available telemarketer. The result? Millions upon millions of "abandoned calls" a day, scaring people half to death as they think their homes are getting cased for burglaries.

Less threateningly, but very annoyingly, the phone rings several times during one's dinner hour.

What horrible social disruption! Day after day, mass anxiety, and mass annoyance. The worst days are when you're expecting an important call, particularly one involving family illness. This requires you to answer the phone, only to be greeted with yet another badly scripted and horribly delivered sales pitch. (One of the many unintended side effects of predictive dialing has been to grow outbound telemarketing to a size far outstripping the labor pool. Most telemarketers are now barely qualified for their jobs. Add to this the burnout rate among telemarketers, who are, after all, the coal miners of the information age.)

Finally, thankfully, outbound telemarketing in the U.S. is about to be reined in. Beginning later in 2003, there will be a national do not call list. Any calls to anyone on the list can be subjected to an $11,000 fine. The Direct Marketing Association and the telemarketing industry are weeping their usual crocodile tears, claiming the economy will collapse without outbound telemarketing. That's nonsense. It's worse than nonsense, in fact, it's a lie: When the DMA and its tele-members trumpet telemarketing's economic impact, they include inbound as well as outbound, agglomerating a benign channel with a social evil.

Spam is the other most hated medium. As loathsome as it is, though, I rank it a far second behind telemarketing. It doesn't have the same monstrous social impact. And technological solutions I think are at hand. But certainly no one can create spam and claim entry into civilized society.

--Manipulative marketing methods

Spam and telemarketing is the domain of direct marketers. Manipulation is the prized property of general above-the-line advertisers.

Advertising manipulation revolves around one central principle, articulated most eloquently many years ago by Marshall McLuhan, the great 20th Century media sage: "Advertising makes you sick and then sells you the cure."

Advertising tells us we are not rich, young, beautiful, or desirable, but that driving the right car, drinking the right beer, using the right deodorant will cure us of these ills.

The amazing thing about image advertising is that it works. It's not terribly effective in creating sales or even building brands, but it works marvelously well in the aggregate. The sheer weight of all the advertising messages assaulting us day after day convinces us, deep in our being, that we are not whole, and that only certain products can repair us.

I remain astounded at the power of the typical bozos and bimbos beer commercial on TV, showing beautiful young people partying, their dynamism and sexiness inspired by beer, a liquid that makes you fat, fatigued, and flatulent. But there you are.

--Subliminal marketing methods

The intrusive stuff is right in your face, so at least you can defend against it. The manipulative garbage gives you a theoretical fighting chance: you can turn off the TV, zap the commercial, or educate yourself about media and advertising. But the subliminal stuff is really, truly wicked.

This is marketing that pretends to be something else. It's advertising disguised as entertainment, hard sell in sheep's clothing.

The most insidious instances are product placements on TV or in the movies. When the handsome hero drinks a Coke, you can bet it's there for a reason.

Less virulent examples are the endemic corporate names sponsoring stadiums and concerts. On the one hand, in a tanking period of post-industrial capitalism it's nice that Sara Lee sponsored the Vienna Philharmonic concert I attended in Chicago last week. But on the other hand, Sara Lee makes a lot more from the positive propaganda than it spends on the sponsorship. The hand of Mammon is never far away, and soon enough it forms a fist.

--Big lies

If we're talking about circles of hell here, this must be the ninth and deepest.

Examples: car manufacturers and oil companies extolling their environmental sensitivity. Or Philip Morris taking ads opposing youth smoking. At the very time Philip Morris began this kind of campaign, I was in Kuala Lumpur, walking through the Central Market, watching pretty young girls hand out sample packs of Marlboros to teenagers.

Public relations is the marketing discipline designed to sell the big lie. A large portion of what you read in the press and see on the nightly news is put there by extremely skilled PR people, working hand in glove with the media. (You already knew that, didn't you?)

Intrusion, manipulation, lying: Kind of makes you proud, doesn't it? Well, I won't mention any of this to the Poles, who have very different fish to fry at their particular stage of development. But I hope mentioning it to you makes you at least a little more sensitive to your daily battering at the hands of mega-commercial interests with nothing at heart but their own bottom lines. It might help explain that headache.