Marketing creates Himesh Reshammiyas and the R D Burmans die.

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?