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Marketing as a Second Language
By: Jed McKendrick, Mon Mar 20th, 2006
One of the defining features of Western civilization is that
we're all amateur marketers by default. Regardless of what our
mother tongue is, the second language we are most exposed to is
invariably Hype.
By the time a child is five years old he is probably able to
sing more jingles than songs and identify more corporate logos
than letters of the alphabet. No wonder, since it can be very
difficult to tell where a hamburger or a toy or a movie leaves
off, and where a global marketing juggernaut begins.
Consider an average day in your own life. Because the most
precious commodity in our marketing-based society is Consumer
Attention, the fast and furious battle for our awareness
clobbers us during every waking hour.
Rather than list all the places and ways in which marketers grab
our attention, it would be easier and more poignant to list the
places and situations that are free of any marketing message: to
wit, none.
You pretty much have to leave society and head off into nature
to get away from it all, right? Wrong. The average person
dressed and equipped for the great outdoors displays more
corporate emblemry than a nascar racer. If that's not enough,
they're probably imprinting the earth with a shoemaker's logo
with every step.
The point isn't to decry this arguably greed-warped and
spiritually bankrupt situation, but rather to sharpen our own
marketing skills from it. For instance, don't be fooled by the
name - junk mail is a goldmine of marketing intelligentsia.
Collect it. Become a student of it. Ask others to save theirs
for you, especially those items that they like and dislike most.
Then, reverse engineer it.
By reverse engineering, I mean try to figure out the reasoning
behind every decision. Why this envelope? Why this headline? Why
this message to this recipient?
That's the great thing about marketing - there are no secrets.
If it works, it's out there getting in all our faces. If it
doesn't, you won't see it... at least, not twice.
Try to get in the habit of reverse engineering all the marketing
messages that hit you throughout the day. Each of those messages
cost someone money - they weren't taking potshots.
That's not to suggest that it's all good. Actually, you can
learn as much from bad or inept marketing as from the good
stuff, so don't dismiss schlock too quickly.
If marketing is the second language of the Western world, then
speaking it fluently is just a matter of developing some good
listening skills. As with any language, there's a science behind
the art. Master the underlying structure, and all the
power-packed headlines and spiffy taglines will follow.
About the author:
Jed McKendrick is involved with several marketing-related
products and sites, but the one that really pays the bills is:
http://www.ngtools.com/fmain.php?D=omnicomm
