Why people who work in marketing aren’t all bad

At some point, we've all thought of marketeers / advertisers as patronising, calculating, cruel, manipulative, cold, hypocritical, money-grabbing or just downright evil... perhaps all of these. And at first glance you wouldn't be wrong. But I feel I am in a good position to talk about this because, having previously worked in the PR department of a consumer goods giant, I have experienced both sides of the marketing industry. That is, I’ve been both a consumer and a charlatan.

My reasons for leaving this job were multi-fold, but a large contributing factor was the level of deception that I felt uncomfortable with peddling. Of course, my former employers are not the only ones to embark on this trickery, but I want to (eventually) give you an insight into that world.

(Also, before I get into things properly, I want to apologise for my blurring of the worlds of P.R., advertising and marketing. I know they are different. But this is in a way that is a little too complicated to explore fully within a coherent argument on a Sunday afternoon. So I'm going with a slight amalgamation under the theme of "the promotion of brands" that I hope isn't too offensive to anybody.)

Mmmmm, delicious raspberry parfait...

Recently, I had a revelation when undertaking one of my favourite pastimes - picking apart the flaws in adverts. Waitrose’s Christmas Ad was next under fire. It starts with some pornographic shots of puddings – some of which definitely look like breasts – before zooming in on Heston’s tasty Basked Alaska, which contains “a smooth raspberry parfait encased in a crisp chocolate glaze”. My dribbling was swiftly cut short by a sharp zoom out to Heston and Delia, claiming that instead of a fancy Christmas advert, Waitrose would be donating their marketing money to their charity scheme. Now, whilst a small part of my brain remained sceptical about them using charitable work as a promotional tool to essentially help them make more profit, and that it wasn't really generosity since they would be donating money that they would have spent anyway, at least they are giving something back to the community. And I remembered reading how Mr Blumenthal and Ms Smith had chosen to waive their fees for the advert too: how lovely, I thought.

But then I remembered, thanks to a horrendous assessment centre experience involving building a bridge out of Meccano in my quest for a graduate job, that Waitrose and John Lewis are essentially the same company. ‘Outrage!’ I bellowed. ‘Hypocrisy!’ I roared. According to the Daily Mail (as reliable a source as any), John Lewis’ Christmas ad cost £6 million to produce, before we even get into the dosh shoved at repeatedly airing the bloody thing.

The media seem to see the funny side in this – that, “Ha ha ha, Waitrose is ‘taking the mickey’ out of its sister company – isn’t this jolly nice and self-referential of them?” (eg: http://tinyurl.com/c4c5rmh). But I don’t think there’s anything jolly nice about one half of a company pretending to be charitable, and the other half wasting millions of pounds on a snowman going to buy a scarf for his missus.

A great Christmas blouse, and a fabulous nonchalant pose

But this isn’t where my revelation ends. I have quite a soft spot for crazy Heston. And also for Delia and her lovely blouses (she always looks so comfortable). And I genuinely believe that they genuinely believed in the genuine cause they were promoting. It’s not their fault that the John Lewis lot decided to squander their cash on giving a pretend lump of ice a personality.

And this takes me back to my former employer. You see, most people I knew in marketing genuinely believed that the products they were pushing were genuinely amazing. In the space of under a year, I watched cynical young graduates turn into sincere advocates of five-bladed razors, gel washing ‘powder’ and hickory-smoked anti-wrinkle cream. Even when criticised for air-brushed advertisements, or testing chemical compounds on animals, these people really did believe in the benefits of their products. And that word ‘their’ is key: they began to love these products as if they were their own children - they become defensive of them, and wanted everybody else to worship them too.

And it’s because of this that not everybody that works in marketing is bad. The majority of them are naively swept along by the P.R. of their employer: the real deception takes place within companies themselves, not in their advertisements. Whether that’s flattering you through exclusive evenings at Chessington World of Adventures, indulging you in lavish Christmas Hampers, or buttering you up by depositing a free epilator on your desk every few months, the big bosses swiftly make you believe that their products / brands are to be cherished.

They just want to share the love...

If we take this into consideration, even the John Lewis splash-your-cash lot aren't in the wrong. One thing I learned from my Meccano experience was how much people who work at John Lewis love John Lewis. They don't see the hypocrisy because they are blinded by adoration: they probably all believe that £6 million on a heart-warming Christmas advert is a good investment, since it will make you love their baby too. And it seems to have worked, because they reported weekly sales figures of £147 million on the 15th December, up a mere £14 million on the same week last year. I just wonder how much of that obscene profit will make it into Waitrose's charity campaign?

But back to me - why was I any different? Well, firstly, because I didn’t work on a specific brand. I never had the quality time, and therefore the chance to form a bond, with a box of nappies.  Secondly, I had to deal with the outside world. Having to answer calls from livid local journalists about the closing of a manufacturing plant in the middle of a recession soon breaks the spell cast by a bottle of discount-price washing-up liquid from the staff shop. In contrast, most marketeers are kept locked firmly at their desks, only being allowed outside to liaise with their advertising agency, who are equally complicit in the con.

Thus, the point of this post is that I want you to know that your average marketeer isn’t trying to deceive you. They’re trying to help you. They want you to share their baby. To have cuddles with it, to play with it.

So please remember that it isn’t their fault when it craps on you. It’s their employer’s.

Why 3021 characters are better than 140

I read something today. Something that caused me to take the momentous decision to start a blog. 

That something was a relatively simple idea, but something that I think is easily forgotten in our modern world:

“People are capable of revealing rich patterns of thought and feeling through language.” 

Now of course, you probably all knew that, unless you are emotionally stunted in some way. But it really got me thinking about how little I use language to its full capabilities. And as an English Teacher, that worried me.

I have, for some time, possessed a hatred of Twitter, and those of you who know me relatively well have probably realised I’m pretty useless at replying to text messages. I have previously blamed this on the useless heap of crap the Orange Shop (or is it now EE?) insist on calling a phone. Other excuses have been a lack of time, my general derision for people that spend their lives refreshing a screen for the latest sneak-peak into Giles Coren or Grace Dent’s life, along with those of you who refer to things that happened “on Twitter” as if it was the real world. But today, I hit on the real reason. It’s the limited length; that horrendous pressure to say something witty / life-affirming / sufficiently impressive in only 140 characters.

Now I know this isn’t ground-breaking, but it turns out that our world is full of limitations on language, and I didn’t even notice it happening. Everything has got shorter – we don’t write letters, we email; we don’t email, we text; we don’t text, we tweet. I realise that this isn’t exactly how it works, but that list does capture a general chain of (d?)evolution over the last fifteen or so years. On top of this, newspapers are physically smaller (The Independent even shortened its bloody name to ‘i’), my school reports are limited to 160 characters (in which you must comment on a pupil’s entire term of work), and even the blessed BBC offers news snippets between programmes for those of us that won’t engage in a full news item (I sound snide, but I’m one of them). 

Whereas some folks claim this is to do with the short attention spans of the younger generation, I think this is doing all of us a disservice. The teenagers I know (admittedly, they are all terribly middle class and pay for their education) are perfectly capable of sitting and concentrating in a 90 minute lesson. Furthermore, they will all sit and read a book for 45 minutes in a library class. And I regularly see less privileged children out and about, fully engaged in an activity for more than a minute at a time (even if that is the persistent tormenting of a Chinese man on the bus, like I witnessed last week).

The problem is that we have lowered our expectations of ourselves when it comes to language. We’re too willing to accept the shortened version, whether that’s for genuine time constraints or just pure laziness. But what I’m saying is that we need to make more time for words – not just to read something longer than a 'Daily Mail Online' article every so often (I know you do it, we all do), but to use more words to express ourselves. And by this I don’t just mean verbally, but on the page / screen. This is the important part. By limiting yourself to 140 characters, you’re essentially limiting your emotions to about thirty words.  

You see, if I’d written this post as a tweet, I probably would have come across as either angry, bitter or saddened. Hopefully, after reading this, you’ll realise I’m all three. And possibly slightly optimistic that, by setting an example through this blog, I can encourage other people to spend a little more time each day using language to its full potential.