Wars of Words
"Marketing isn't about us VS them - it is about us AND them. It is not something you do TO a person, but rather something you do FOR them," writes Greg Verdino in a recent post on the bellicose rhetoric of marketing. Drawing attention to the words marketers use - "target," "campaign," "penetrate" - he insists that they belie an adversarial mindset when the "new" world of marketing calls for a collaborative one. Accordingly, "partner," "service," and "invite," should be our watchwords.
The world of business is dominated by the vocabulary of war - I work in Aquent's "headquarters" from which we support "the field," for example - and that's not just a function of the defense budget. I think it's a function of the competitive nature of what we do (which is why combat metaphors are followed closely by sports metaphors in popularity among the business folk, isn't that right, "team"?).
For this reason, the idea that marketing is something we do "for" people, rather than "to" them, smacks to me of, well, marketing. If we are talking about "enlisting" the aid of customers to help us market to other potential customers, "virally" or whatever, then I could see us saying that it's something that we do "with" them, at times. But as long as marketing "aims" to influence people, particularly influencing them to give us, instead of our competitors, money in exchange for goods or services, we are "camouflaging" our intentions if we tell them we're doing it "for" them.
