I recently
posted an innocuous status update on facebook:
“What annoys you most about brands,
marketing, and advertising?” The response was, to put it mildly,
disturbing.
From the
terse “The fact
that they exist” to the amusing “Shahrukh
Khan” to the more deliberated “The
lack of (legally or socially) enforced or voluntarily embraced standards of
authenticity and honesty in branding, marketing and advertising - for instance,
to choose to highlight the best possible differentiators about a product in an
ad, as opposed to saying what is likeliest to make the sale, even if it is
total lies, play on words, or skimpy images....”
The debate
about truth, lies and advertising and the purported irresponsibility of brand
owners in this area has been going on for ages. What really interested me was
the point that by the nature of its task (sell to more people) marketers
searched for the most basic commonality (“the
lowest common denominator”) in a large mass of people. And that, amongst many things, caused “dumbing down of communication”.
As one of
my friends put it so well “marketing, but probably economics in general, promotes the tyranny of
the majority. Marketing creates Himesh Reshammiyas and the R D Burmans die.”
What do you
think?
