Marketing is Everything and Everything is Marketing
Graphic by The White House, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
I have a marketing degree, and I love the very concept of marketing. It is also a discourse that is rarely done well, largely due to small-minded people who think marketing is glorified brainwashing. It isn’t. Alerting you to the existence of something and making said thing look good ain’t brainwashing. Fatalistic and paternalistic collectivists only think it is. Because marketing has a power that they hate being used against them. “How dare you make this idea or product or service I hate look good!” “STOP HAVING FUN!”
This whole issue of marketing is easy, yet complex.
Marketing is a tool. A tool that is neither evil nor good. It is ethically neutral. Is it used for bad aims? Certainly. Politicians buy ads, don’t they? It is also used for good, even if that good is just alerting you to a new movie that seems cool. Escapism is good! As I may not have driven into y’all’s heads previously, I really hate politics. I mostly keep up with modern current events as a means of retaining some idea as to what’s happening in the world. Policy is what I love. And politics brutally bastardizes policy every time. Name propaganda is such a stupid form of marketing that works so damn well in politics. Calling it the Affordable Care Act doesn’t make the care provided affordable for anyone. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau rarely protects consumers from anything illegal. Such uses of marketing are paternalistic nonsense. And so many people fall for it!
The primary problem that marketing has is people pretend to hate choices. “I have too many options for salad dressing; I can’t possibly make up my mind!” This is the paternalistic and fatalistic idea called Choice Theory, which posits that having too many choices is somehow bad. This spits in the face of the marketing concepts of the evoked set and the consideration set. The evoked set is a group that consists of all the brands a consumer is aware of, so, every salad dressing in the consumer’s local grocery store, to keep the example going. The consideration set is a group of only the brands the consumer would ever actually consider buying. In short, you may be aware of 10,000 different salad dressings, but due to taste, price, and other subjective metrics, you only truly consider buying a very select handful. Every marketing manager wants their product to enter not just the evoked set (which is the easy task) but also the consideration set. Brand loyalty and discounts are in a perpetual battle with each other. Brand switching ain’t easy.
But this leads into other topic that’s been in the news as of late. “Buy American” is the most jingoistic codswallop possible of lazy patriotic marketing. Leaning on people’s love of America to get them to think this marketing idea is worth it. Mostly Boomers who have a profound love of American manufacturing in contrast to all other products. The Biden Administration decided to make it worse recently, requiring goods that get federal taxpayer dollars — which means construction and procurement involving everything from buses to concrete — to be X% manufactured in America. Nothing is gained by making products American taxpayers pay for more expensive. And that’s all this really does; it rewards massive corporations with higher prices for the same goods that does little to grow the American economy. Robbing Peter to pay Paul.
If another country can produce the same quality good for a lower price, why stop them? “But it’s not the same American born and bred quality!”…Of course it is! There is nothing special about where a product is made, as the machinery is virtually identical everywhere. Labor that costs five times more is not inherently five times better. We’re not talking handmade watches here. A T-shirt on the peg at Wal-Mart being made in China or Malaysia or Taiwan shouldn’t bother you. So why does it?
There is an argument to be made that some countries, especially in the EU, hate American products for no reason other than they are American. American cars are ruinously expensive in Europe due to horrendously ridiculous tariffs. But there’s no way an American president, unless they really want to get serious, can ever change that. Trump gave it the ol’ college try, but failed hard, and managed to only piss off our good trading partners like Canada for no real benefit. I hate tariffs. The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act essentially caused the Great Depression. Retaliatory tariffs do nothing, as regimes that will outlive an American president’s grasp on power will just slap their own tariffs on American goods and not relent until a more obsequious president is in the Oval Office. It doesn’t work unless you hit a country where it hurts. And even that only works if the American people and the opposing party are behind you. If not, they’ll just wait you out. They’ll still be in power long after you’re gone, with an easier mark who wants to make a good first impression with them.
See? Easy yet complex.
TL:DR – Buying American means NOT buying Hondas, even though 2/3rds of the Hondas sold in the US in 2019 were built in the US in 2019 by Americans.Report
Any good value will be used to sell stuff. Freedom has been a sweet marketing tool for just about every damn thing. The internet and associated tech has allowed for super precise marketing and tailoring of pitches that everyone thinks the world should be personally tuned to the crap they like to buy and when they buy it really does increase the amount of whatever value the marketer associated it with. Marketing and the tech that goes with it is the biggest cause of what people call polarization in the US.Report
Lifestyle marketing is run by automated bots, and is creating miniature religions all over the place.
“I am a ___ consumer!” (Disney/Avengers/Vaccine — yes, there was vaccine merchandise related to Game of Thrones and Harry Potter. It sold WELL).
If you want to know why marketing majors aren’t in high demand… well, look above, I guess.
“You hired NASA engineers for a marketing firm?”
“They’re pretty good at it, after some training.”Report
The problem with Choice Theory is that very rarely is the constrained choice aligned with the choosers preferred choices.
So of the 10K salad dressings, the customer only really wants 10 choices, but they want their 10 choices, and should the options ever actually be limited to just 10, the likelihood that any of their 10 is part of that set is pretty small.Report
“What person needs 30 types of toilet paper?”
“Well, no one person needs all 30. But in a country of 350 million persons, the odds that any one or even ten types would satisfy everyone is exceedingly low.”
“But *I* only need one type!”
Sigh.Report
This is an enormously entertaining post, well done.
Paragraph three is an especially good one. You love marketing and you love policy but you hate politics. This has to be one of the most libertarian paragraphs ever! Of course, you love policy- pure policy is theory and libertarianism flourishes nowhere more than in the realm of pure theory. Your hatred of politics is, likewise, not confusing considering your professed libertarianism. Libertarians hate politics because politics involves people and there’s probably nothing the ship of libertarianism founders on more profoundly than the opinions of the masses*. What got an audible chuckle out of me is that you love marketing but hate politics but this is nonsensical because politics is pretty much marketing all the way down. Also you left out death panels, death taxes, freedom (everything) and other right-wing examples of marke*cough* excuse me, politics from your given examples.
Interestingly enough pure statism/communism has the opposite problem. It can really tickle the masses; good golly the masses (especially young idealists) love them some statism but, of course, once you get into pure statism the whole thing implodes because pure statism doesn’t actually work when the rubber hits the road. The realities of policy shred the whole enterprise to flinders and you end up with an autocracy or mass starvation (or both!). Of course pure libertarianism might have the same policy problem but we don’t really know currently because pure libertarianism is so absolutely awful on its face that no libertarian has ever been able to convince the masses to give a pure libertarian society a shot at it in any existing polity and no libertarian can herd enough cats to get the numbers necessary to form a new libertarian polity.
Now, buy American is an interesting subject. On the one hand you’ve got a pretty strong hand in your criticisms (libertarianism is fan-fishing-tastic as a tool of criticism) but I think you’re neglecting the “why” element of your analysis. As in “why is this old monster of protectionism rising again from its grave?” On the one hand we have our latest right-wing President, one D. Trump, who basically verbally tossed libertarianism into the trash and was awarded with the Republican nomination and then subsequently election to president for his heresies (Libertarianism and people, I tell ya, Libertarians should really consider disposing of the current polity and electing a new one). On the plus side, however, Donny turned out to be really bad at policy so his Republican Administration policy wise basically autopiloted along the well-worn treads of standard Republitarianism which isn’t truly libertarianism but rather is libertarianism for rich people; since plutocrats pay the bills, though, libertarians are mostly at peace with their mutant Republican half-brother (and they kind of have to since, as Trumps election painfully demonstrated, the Republitarians have their libertarian brethren badly outnumbered- marketing..err. politics again).
Still, had Don been the only factor we’d probably be looking at a potential libertarian resurgence on trade and Buy American fronts right now because the Democratic Party, while being arguably more statist than the GOP (or at least more honest about their statism) is still mostly controlled by politicians who prefer policies that work and the argument that free trade works better than protectionism is a pretty strong policy position. So, in the Democratic ranks there’d be at least a shot at rolling back Donny’s protectionism were events unfolding in a vacuum. The vacuum, alas, is not where events are unfolding. Events are unfolding in the shadows of Covid and Covid has given the masses some serious problems with supply chains that stretch out to the cheapest global providers. From masks and medical equipment during 2020 to just in time supply chains right up to today, the Covid fiasco has given a lot of people second thoughts about the prudence of having vital materials sourced in nations that can choose, or be forced, to cut you off from them during global crisis.
I wouldn’t say that I, personally, would count myself in the protectionism camp. Free trade has done an awful lot of good in terms of pricing, global development and humanitarian advancement. This Covid mess, though, is a real head scratcher. If you tell the masses “Free trade will deliver you goods at a tenth of the price when you don’t, strongly, need them and bupkiss when there’s a crisis and you need them badly” the masses are going to stampede in the opposite direction. The pure statists found that one out when they told the masses “Who needs bread? The men and women of the Peoples Soviet can subsist on proletarian virtue alone!”
When arguing for libertarian ideals, though, I think the odds of success improve when one grapples with events as they’ve unfolded in the real world and in the present. We’ve all heard the boilerplate- almost all of us were arguing politics on the internet in the aughts after all. It’s a good post over all, great tone, but I think you failed to grapple with the pertinent questions for our time. It isn’t 1950 and you’re not Friedrich Hayek; It’s 2021 and you’re Russell Michaels.Report
Let me go find my burn cream.
That was an excellent response.Report
Just as a random note, man are the supply chains still overloaded.
That’s why I find the predictable inflation hawkery hilarious.
The PS5 has been out a year. I can’t get one. Heck, I finally got around to asking — I’ve noticed that caffeine free diet sodas have just disappeared off shelves. I went googling, and nobody within 100 miles has any in stock (or at least didn’t last week) so I did some digging.
Aluminum shortages due to supply chain issues. Soda makers had a choice between raise prices OR cut production of their niche products to use their limited amounts of aluminum to make cans solely for their biggest sellers.
Everything has an 18 month backlog, and it shows up in the weirdest places.
Caffeine free diet sodas are niche, unimportant (I guess except for the people that really want them), and you can live without a PS5 (although I understand the chip shortage has driven car manufacturers to ALSO focus solely on their most popular models, and their production is still insufficient!), but it’s just emblematic of the whole thing coming to a grind halt in the face of the oldest, most common of disasters — illness.
We’re barely limping along, even as COVID cases rise again.Report
If Efficiency is one’s god, it makes sense to have a Just In Time system that relies on stuff made overseas for cheap.
You just have to hope that there isn’t something like a global pandemic that creates a shock to this JIT system.
Or, I suppose, hope that others don’t have different gods.Report
There really is only one good use of “buy american”-that’s to keep the industrial base for the pentagon on certain products/capabilities. Other than that it’s a waste of $.Report
Oh, jeez. Jabberwocky is the 3 Gorges person?
I apologize guys.
This is on me.Report
It really seems like you are framing Trump as a friend of Free Trade and lower tariffs, but he wasn’t. He was the most mercantilist, protectionist, president we’ve had in the last 100 years. Maybe more.
And it was politically popular. You know, as if people wanted it.
On theoretical grounds I kind of agree, actually. I think Free Trade, in the long run, is probably good.
What I object to is that these arguments only seem to show up when a Democratic president does something contrary to Free Trade. It really makes it seem insincere.
I mean, with Trump it probably *was* insincere.Report
“It really seems like you are framing Trump as a friend of Free Trade and lower tariffs, but he wasn’t. He was the most mercantilist, protectionist, president we’ve had in the last 100 years. Maybe more.”
I mean he did impose tariffs on what appeared to be several dozen countries he picked by throwing darts at a map. He got us into trade wars with China, Canada, and the EU for starts.
it’s a weird thing to forget when trying to frame Trump as a big free trader. (Let us not forget his bumblings around Brexit, trying to use tariffs and trade deals to further split the EU for whatever reason tickled his fancy)Report
It’s okay when you are Republican is a mantra for a reason.Report
I took his argument to be that Trump took about as big a swing as politically possible for a trade war with the EU to try and open their market to American manufacturing and came up far short. Which I think is a reasonable take, although the Trump approach was als too scattershot to be effective so you can conceive a more compently done approach that could get further. There’s a broad mood in the Western alliance structure that China plays the game unfairly so a coalitions against them might be viable for example. Or a concerted effort against the EU as a whole might get concessions (Trump famously didn’t understand that the EU trades as a bloc and thought he could do deals individual countries). Most of that isn’t going to work when you’re abandoning your Pacific partners who wanted an anti-Chinese bloc and wasting energy putting tariffs on Canadian metals as a favour to an inefficient aluminium producer that managed to get your ear.Report
I dunno – having some means to defect from the marketing game ( to some limit – we can’t defect altogether ) is waaay too much fun.
The gentle fascism of a pharma ad promising to lung cancer patients “you’ll have more time to spend with your grandkids” while attractive seniors do “commercial fun things” is faaaaar to much fun to rant about. I mean – good for them for developing this ( I think ) but the whole thing is utterly fakatka in a banal, offensively-innofensive way.
FWIW, my primary use of “careerist social networking” is to send fake Spanish Prisoner emails to people I know well enough to know they’ll get the joke.
Market this, mellonfarmers.Report
Commenting to express my sincere appreciation to you for putting “fakatka” onto my linguistic horizon.Report
FakaktaReport
Even better! Thank you.Report
a) because those are made by workers that are often little more than slaves, and even the ones that are not essentially slaves have very little worker protection…
b) …and this then results in the wealthier getting even wealthier, able to skim even more money of the system. And, no, the money being also distributed to the _Chinese_ wealthy, instead of just the American wealthy, does not make it better…
c) …it is in fact worse because that helps prop up the entire Chinese regime and their authoritarian government.
This seems to be yet another example of the ‘I Don’t Know How To Explain To You That You Should Care About Other People’ concept.Report