Revolting Against Marketing
As a verb market is not merely about selling. It is about convincing. Its ideal is control. This may not be what enlightened marketers want the verb to mean, but marketing comes from the sell side, not the buy side. Thus in practice has become a tool of control by the industrial machine. Yes, some good people in marketing actually do talk to customers, actually do advocate them. But this is still the exception, not the rule. Marketing still comes from the side of the axe that’s buried in all of our heads — no less deeply than the electric spikes on which the heads of the human batteries that power The Matrix are impaled.
It won’t be enough to revolt against the marketing machine. We need to build the Real World again, from the humans out to the companies that serve them. Real markets — the noun, not the verb — are what we need to strike a Neo’s bargain with the machinery of marketing. Unless we build tools for ourselves, we’ll just be talking the talk.
Great stuff. Somebody should make the distinction between evangelizing new ideas and marketing products in the way that Doc is talking about marketing. What to do when you innovate (legitimately) and create something “new”? Obviously there is room to get the idea out there. That requires effort and, in some cases, effort to convince. How does one do that without it being “marketing”? “Real”, demand-driven markets in the way Doc describes are easy for commodities — food, cars, etc. but what about the (admittedly few) great things that haven’t become wide-spread yet?
There are plenty of things that we all expect/depend on today that wouldn’t exist in their current form if the supply-side hadn’t done a fair bit of pushing — the jumbo jet, the automobile, RSS, etc. What’s the best way to push such innovations forward without crossing the line?
