Marketing… good or evil?

Is marketing a tool for manipulation or merely a reaction to consumers needs and wants? This is a question that is very hard to answer. On the one hand you have corporations that hold most of the media resources that want to promote their products and make money. Why would’nt they? They have a vested interest in creating a want for their products and they know how to do that. Corporations spend millions of dollars a year to find out who their target markets are and how to best reach them. It makes perfect financial sense. If I had a product I wanted to sell I would do a little research to find out how to best sell it and to who. The only difference between me and a giant global corporation is that they have a lot more products and a lot more money to spend on promoting them. I believe that corporations are both reacting to our society’s needs and wants as well as using marketing as a tool for manipulation.

The majority of media producing corporations can be traced back to 5 major companies. These media giants control almost all of what you see in today’s media. In the documentary Merchants of Cool Douglas Rushkoff explores how these media giants try to connect to their audiences. Douglas spends some time looking at how marketers are working for these media giants. He looks at a company called Look Look that helps identify trends that can be sold to the public. This company finds the next cool kids and houses their information and images within a huge data base that major companies can access for a fee. These marketers are reacting to the culture and showing the corporations that buy their service what people think is cool. In that light is marketing is reacting to soceity’s needs and wants. or are they offering up the next big thing for corporations to sink their teeth into? I think both. By seeing what the “cool kid” are wearing they make it easier for the corporations to sell things. They are also finding the things that the society may want and making them more attainable.

I have often wondered if I really wanted those new Nike shoes because I think they are cool or because someone has told me that they are cool. I have never been very good at being cool. In the past I have looked to trends I see on the television ad in media to see what is cool. I was relying on the media to provide me with information about today’s youth culture. I was playing into the messages that these 5 media giants were telling me. For me that message was manipulative. I was being told what to buy and why. I got the new green shoes because girls my age liked them, or at least the girls my age on the commercials liked them. I have grown up a lot since then and have my own idea of what is cool. I make my own choices regardless of what the media is telling me. I no longer take part in the marketing machine. I believe that today’s youth are attacked constantly by media messages that have a profound effect on how they spend their money. That is what it is all about in the end right? Money? In the Merchants of Cool Rushkoff says that today’s teen market spends something like 15 billion dollars a year of their own money and another 7 billion of their parents. That is an attractive market to be sending messages to. It leads me to believe that the messages that are being sent to these teens is manipulative. By creating a need for their products by manipulating the recipients companies can get their hands on a lot more of that money.

If you believe that you will be more attractive to the ladies because you are wearing the new shoes and talking on the cool cell phone you are buying into the manipulation of these media giants. The messages being sent today are never that clear. They are never that easy to decipher. A good example is, again from the Merchants of Cool, when Sprite throws a launch party for their new web site. They paid kids to come to the party. They knew by having the right kids at the party would create the right kind of image. At the same time they had MTV cameras there broadcasting the event across their airwaves, showing the viewers how cool Sprite is, how cool the kids at the party are, and subconsciously telling you that if you drink Sprite you too are as cool as all the kids at this party. Sprite is wildly successful at this. They have changes the way their brand is seen in today’s culture by using tactics like this. They have become the cool soft drink. I keep wondering if because I have been drinking Sprite since way before all this took place… Am I super cool? I doubt it. I am a 30 year old married man with a child. I am defiantly not the target audience Sprite is going after.

So is marketing a tool for manipulation of merely a reaction to consumer wants and needs? I don’t really know. I think that it is a little bit of both. I believe that there is moderation in all things. I believe that this is true in the world of marketing as well. Of course media corporations are going to use the best possible means of advertising their products and that means marketing to specific segments of the population. I also believe that marketing is a reaction to what the culture says they want. When people start seeing the “cool kids” wearing pink shoes and then all of the sudden everyone wants pink shoes marketing reacts to that. A good marketer will look at popular culture and take that “pink shoe” cue. I believe that marketing is not inherently a bad thing, it can just be used badly.