More on Marketing

My "Director of Communications" ID photo.  Yes, this was posted in public.  For a year. 

Writing the Sweet Pepper Panini post dredged up memories of my year-long stint as Marketing Director for a campus events organization.  There were four of us heading up the organization; three event directors plus me.  We were a great team, obviously.  My job consisted of designing and executing month-long ad campaigns for each of their events.  I managed a team of volunteers who did a lot of the actual production work.  Embarrassing confession:  I didn't create any of the posters we hung.  I didn't even hang them up.  I just oversaw all the people who did that.  Don't judge; you have no idea how astronomically all-consuming management work is.  But I'm digesting.  And digressing. 

Anyways, as Director of Communications, I learned several interesting little things about marketing, and at the end of the year, I transcribed each of those little jewels of wisdom into a handbook for my successor.  It ended up being a 15 page manuscript.  Awesome.  I hope it gets read by at least one person someday.  Maybe I'll pass it on to my children, like an inheritance or something ... sorry, digressing again. 

One of these supposed gems was the concept of "branding," the crafting of a positive image or brand.  Also known as the prompting of subconscious visions of unicorns/Lamborghini's/happiness within the mind of anyone who encounters our logo.  Here's a censored version of what I wrote about "branding" in my book of wisdom: 

Advertising is not just about getting people to attend SAC events; it’s also about building up a good name for SAC on campus.  This is called branding, the crafting of a positive image or brand. 

Ergo, the second goal of SAC advertising is to be so awesome that whenever a student encounters a SAC ad, they immediately RECOGNIZE it as a SAC ad and ASSOCIATE happy things with the SAC ad.

Positive association is accomplished either by the popularity of SAC events or by the popularity of the SAC ads themselves.  As Director of Communications, you don’t have much control over the popularity of the events, but you do have control over the popularity of the ads.  If SAC ads are always clean-cut, graphically appealing, and accurate, then students will begin to view SAC as a clean-cut, appealing, and on-top-of-it organization. Seriously, people, you're reading this blacked-out stuff?

The quality of the product was out of my control.  But the quality of the ad was within my control.  So I  concentrated my positive-association-building efforts on the ads themselves.  In retrospect, I think I was following the Geico model, in which ads resemble SNL sketches more than standard product-based PR.  Essentially, the marketing becomes a product to be "bought" (so to speak) alongside the actual product/service.  This is a very interesting marketing phenomenon, and it's picked up a lot of speed lately, judging by the popularity of the Geico gecko.

My question is:  is this a more honest way to do marketing?  Is it better for marketers to openly acknowledge that they're creating an attractive but essentially fake perception, and therefore abandon any attempt at product-relevance?

Maybe that's being too radical ... but seriously, I would appreciate any commercial that's like, "Hey, pay attention to us!  Not because this cereal is awesome ('cause let's be honest, it's decent stuff but it's not The Most Awesome Oat-Based-Mush Deal of the Millienium, so let's not lie and call it that).  Instead pay attention because we are funny!!  Hahaha!!!  Thank you for giving us your time/attention; here's a clip of a cute kitten, with a sarcastic punchline to boot.  Thank you, come again!  And if you ever can't decide which brand of equally adequate cereal to buy, kindly think of us." 

One more thought:  this whole Random Commercial plot is like watching a DVD in which the audio is off by a few seconds.  It totally calls attention to the fact that you're not actually on the ship with the pirates; you're just watching a movie about pirates.  A pirated movie about pirates, probably.  Film is such a  facade.  Marketing too.

I'm not saying it's all a lie.  I'm just saying that marketing, like a photograph, is never the actual object itself.  It's a recreation of the object.  A representation.  Which means, no matter how honest you are, you're never going to 100% accurately represent the object.  No matter what angle you shoot the photo from, you will always be bound to a singular perspective - the lens frame.  That doesn't mean marketing/photography/representation is inherently evil (contrary to whatever Plato may have said in Book X of The Republic).  It just means that it's limited.  And so "accuracy" is a super nebulous criterion to judge by.  Therefore; crazy piknicked photos (aka random but terribly funny commercials) would seem to be an equally valid advertising technique.

In a way, entertaining commercials provide a free service to the public.  You do something kind for a stranger, hand him your business card at the end and walk away, no pressure.  Maybe he'll look you up later, maybe he won't.  Either way he got a good chuckle and you got exposure.

Oh my goodness.  I just realized that this "new," "revolutionary," "never-before-seen type of advertising" is actually ... just another very sneaky form of PR.  (Public Relations defined as slapping a logo on something - anything - and then giving that something away to the masses.)  No, nonononono...

*internal mental explosion, like in Inception*
*wreckage/debris reigns down*
*hand emerges from beneath the rubble, salesperson crawls out*

Anyone wanna' buy my handbook?

Anyone wanna' read my handbook?