Many moons ago, a friend of mine sent me a book entitled, Disciplined Minds, the subtitle of which reads, "A critical look at salaried professionals and the soul-battering system that shapes their lives." I actually read the book straightaway, but my feelings about it were so conflicted that I kept them to myself until now.
The book is really two books in one. Part of it, the best part, is a detailed critique of the process of achieving a doctorate in physics and what happens to doctoral candidates along the way. The other, less convincing, part is a broad critique of the division of labor, capitalist society, and the role that salaried professionals play in maintaining and perpetuating the status quo.
Schmidt views the working world in classically Marxist terms in which there is an inherent, exploitative conflict between employees and managers. The problem for the managers lies in the fact that they cannot tell everyone exactly what to do all the time. Some jobs require independent thinking and creativity. "Beyond a certain point on such a job," Schmidt writes, "the worker faces a blank sheet of paper and th boss can't tell her exactly what to do. Here employers simply expect their creative workers to act in the corporate interest..."
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As everyone knows, "Green" is in. Even car manufacturers and oil companies are green!
If you are a graphic designer and want to get greener, you may be interested in this blog: 101 Things Designers Can Do to Save the World. It covers everything from why you should avoid bleeds to finding inks that don't contain "volatile organic compounds." The site was created by The School of Visual Concepts, with the cooperation of AIGA Seattle and Aquent.
If you are interested in other resources that help designers design more greenishly, aside from the links you'll find on the "101 Things" site, you should also explore re-nourish.com, which has an illuminating "Sustainability Toolkit" section.
Image courtesy of janusz l.
Pete Mortensen, on the Cult of Mac section of Wired's blog, wrote a head-shaking post describing how an academic journal was beaten down by the secrecy surrounding Apple's design group and their ultra-esoteric process for creating great products.
Of course, if you have to write about something, but don't have access to anyone who could tell you anything meaningful or true about it, why not just make it up? Can't get to Steve Jobs? Why not pretend to be Steve Jobs? (Thanks to BL Ochman for tipping me off to the Fake Steve Jobs Blog.)
I know, I know - that's unethical and, frankly, fraudulent. But disinformation is, after all, a kind of information. Just consider the recent debacle concerning the fake Apple internal memo. Apple's stock hit a rough patch after the fake memo was released, though it recovered somewhat when the "fakeness" was eventually established.
Mr. Mortensen implies that this may have been an inside job to "flush out leakers." If that's the case, it would mean that the people running Apple are pretty sneaky, if not downright evil.
So I've started adding photographs to my blog, as you may or may not have noticed. The impetus was Mack Collier's post entitled "Your Company Blog Sucks, Now What?" in which he suggests adding images to make one's post more distinctive.
Because I didn't want to just rip off images from other websites- that didn't seem right on a blog devoted in part to extolling the value and virtues of creative work - I decided to sign up with a stock photography service. After reading this post on sessions.edu's blog, I was intrigued by the "member-generated" business model of iStockphoto and so I signed up.
While I have been able to find some apt and some not-so-apt pictures thus far - our creative director told me that "the perfect stock photo" is a contradiction in terms - the most interesting thing I stumbled across was a strange associative misogyny in my search results.
After writing a post about people lying on their resumes, I went to iStockphoto and searched for "liar," just to see what I would get. I didn't find much except pictures of people lying down and one picture of handcuffs. Then I noticed the following listed under "Common terms in this search:" "Beautiful Beauty Dishonesty Females Friendship Fun Girls."
My guess is that members tag their own work and, when you search on a certain term, the search engine then goes through the tags associated with the images and compiles the list of those terms the images have in common. In other words, the collection of terms is relatively random, made up as it is of tags applied to individual, in principle unrelated images.
Isn't it odd, however, that this "randomness" would reproduce a cultural stereotype, among the testosterone enhanced anyway, that what "beauty" and "women," even in friendship, have in common is "dishonesty"?
(Note: the picture I chose for this post was one that came up when I searched for "liar.")
The recent story concerning former MIT Dean of Admissions, Marilee Jones, who was asked to resign after 28 years because she had lied about (misrepresented might be more generous, if less accurate) her educational background, got me thinking about credentials, experience, and lying on your resume.
While it's not clear exactly how many people lie on their resumes --I found numbers ranging from 25% to around 50% to over 70% -- the basic assumption of most recruiters is that resumes are "subjective" rather than "objective" representations of a candidate's work experience. The general sentiment is, "Nobody's perfect - except on their resume."
The tenuous connection between the resume and reality was made eminently clear in the case of Miss Jones. Having started out as an administrative assistant in the admissions department at MIT, a position which, and here's the Hardy-esque irony, did not require a college degree, she steadily rose through the ranks to become dean. Her actual job performance qualified her for the latter post, not her credentials. The veracity of her resume had no bearing whatsoever on her ability to rise to the top of her profession.
Aside from raising the question of why she subsequently had to resign (Barbara Ehrenreich, among others, believes it's because higher education and the veneer of professionalism bestowed by degrees is a farce), this situation also raises the question: Why do hiring managers rely on resumes?
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I'll admit it. Sometimes I find Seth Godin kind of preachy. Indeed it seems that, for him, marketing is preaching, or "evangelizing," as it's more commonly called in the church of the customer. "It's about spreading ideas that you believe in, sharing ideas you're passionate about... and doing it with authenticity." Or so goes the Gospel of Godin.
He's not alone. Back in November, Hugh MacLeod of Gapingvoid published an updated Hughtrain Manifesto, which he kicks off with the proclamation that, "The market for something to believe in is infinite." That the act of marketing is not too different from the Acts of the Apostles becomes more clear towards the end of the Manifesto where we read: "A well-executed marketing campaign is an act of love." And if the point weren't fine enough, we are then told, "Choosing to have a 'smarter conversation' with the market is not a marketing decision; it's a moral decision."
I understand the allure of faith to marketers. On the one hand, people want to feel good about themselves and what they are doing and, since marketing often has an air of disrepute about it, defining it in terms of authenticity and honesty bestows upon it the glow of existential righteousness. On the other hand, if we want to be honest with ourselves as marketers, we must concede that we want people to have a pre-rational devotion to our products and services. In other words, faith in our products and services is the holy grail.
Of course, as good marketers, we're just responding to what consumers want. Part of our sense of self-worth as humans comes from seeing our convictions mirrored in the communities and organizations we associate with. Since many of those associations are economic, people increasingly hope to find themselves reflected in the phantasmagoria of the marketplace. Accordingly, as one blogger put it, many long-established brands "are under threat because they don't believe in the stuff we believe in, indeed they often don't believe in anything."
Maybe it's because I was brought up with a God vs. Mammon mindset, but the rhetoric of faith in the mouths of marketers rubs me the wrong way. I guess I'm more comfortable with marketing based on knowledge - I know what this can do; I know what you need; etc. - than one based on faith. This might make me a bad marketer. But does it make me a bad person, too?
Wars of Words
Mar 24, 2007 @ 11:03 AM · Matthew Grant
"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.
News travels fast these days, so I don't need to tell anyone that, right here in Boston, a guerrilla marketing stunt mobilized the police force and shut down significant parts of the city for several hours. If you don't know what I'm talking about, then you are welcome to read this news story about what happened and the artists that got arrested for doing it.
It happened almost a week ago, so it's basically ancient history at this point, but if anyone is still interested in reading about it, they should check out this engaging post from the blog of John Cass, the Immediate Past President of the Boston chapter of the AMA.
Aside from pulling together a representative sampling of blogospheric responses from the MySpace Generation - most of which were critical of both the guerrillistas as well as the city officials who had in fact overlooked the offending devices for several weeks before responding with overwhelming force - I appreciated that John turned the discussion to a broader consideration of marketing ethics.
In addition to making some very practical and reasonable recommendations regarding the proper conduct of guerrilla marketers, such as asking property owners for permission if you are going to put things on their property, he also quotes from a number of ethical codes, including that of the AMA itself. The particular passage of that code which he cites begins, "Marketers must foster trust in the marketing system."
Why don't people trust the marketing system? Because they understand that the purpose of marketing is to influence their behavior. Given that, can any kind of marketing that goes beyond the straight-forward communication of unbiased and objective information about the benefits and risks of particular products and services ever be entirely trustworthy?
To put it another way, would it be unreasonable to amend the AMA's code slightly to read in the following way? "Marketers must foster trust in the marketing system by simultaneously fostering a healthy skepticism towards all marketing efforts."
Repeat after me: I am my network.
When a company recruits an entire team or group from another company, it's called a "lift-out," according to this article from Business Week. (Of course, sometimes its referred to as "employee raiding," and in certain circumstances it might even be illegal, so it's not necessarily the best approach if you are trying to quickly build a department or add a new function to your company.)
Now the chances of losing a whole department in such a raid may seem fairly remote to most employers, but what if that "department" consists of one person? While speaking with Anne Holland several weeks ago (a conversation which resulted in this post), she mentioned that for a growing number of companies, particularly in the b-to-b space, this is exactly the case.
Instead of departments fully stocked with full-time employees covering the full range of traditional marketing functions, we now find a single person serving as a marketing director, who calls on a coterie of contractors to execute particular aspects of the marketing plan: an email marketing specialist to handle this promotion; an SEO specialist to tune up the website; an event coordinator to run that trade show; not to mention the copywriter and designer used to create collateral, ads, or mailers. If the marketing director leaves, in effect, the department leaves with her.
Aside from encouraging companies to reconsider their employee retention strategies with an eye to staving off the "lift-out" plunderers, this situation should also remind marketing professionals that their "portfolio" contains more than just the companies they've worked for and the brands they've handled. It also contains the network of practitioners they rely on to get things done.
(Thanks to Josh Fertik for the Business Week tip.)
A colleague of mine once opined that it was for the best that she was not blogging for Aquent because she had very strong opinions about the ethics of marketing. For example, she didn't think it ethical to market to children and would feel compelled to voice her views on this subject and others.
I was reminded of her comments whilst reading this list of resolutions for marketers. I was struck by their ethical nature beginning with first: "You will not market anything that doesn't warrant it." And while most of the following resolutions focus on things like keeping an open mind, seeking out direct experience (such as speaking with consumers rather than surveying them with questionnaires), and avoiding jargon, they end on a call for "honesty." You can read the last two for yourself: "11) You will not deny the negative impacts of your business," and, "12) You will market in a style predicated on honest information and conversation enhancement rather than selling and hype."
This emphasis on honesty stands in marked contrast to the words of Barry Ornstein of Hill Holiday Connors Cosmopoulos which can be found in the article on marketing to children invoked above, "We are in the business of manipulating people, and the question is, are we going to manipulate them in a good way or a bad way?"
Reading that quotation, I was stuck by at least two questions. First, is there really a good way to manipulate people? "Manipulation" is generally considered "coercive" and "coercion" is usually considered "bad." If marketing and advertising are by nature manipulative, then they are always already ethically suspect or lead to ethical conundrums such as "honest manipulation."
Which brings me to my second question: Are marketers really in the business of manipulating people? I think that resolution #12 answers this question for us. There would be no need to call for honesty over hype if marketing weren't frequently full of the latter. At the same time, if it weren't possible to market with honesty and accountability, resolving to do so would be pointless.
Ethics only make sense when people have choices. Marketers have choices because, Mr. Ornstein's views notwithstanding, they are primarily in the business of influencing behavior. Although that can certainly take the form of manipulation, it can just as easily take the form of persuasion. If the latter consists of making people aware of their options, objectively presenting the pros and cons of each, and inviting them to make a decision based on their particular needs and interests, then we're about as far from manipulation as we can get.
Of course this raises a third question: Is that still marketing?
