One Thought

I was watching the late comedian Bill Hicks with a friend recently. Hicks has strong opinions, and his audiences love him for them.

In the video we were watching he has a bit on marketing. He begins:

By the way, if anyone here is in advertising or marketing … kill yourself.

The audience laughs. He continues:

Just a little thought. I’m just trying to plant seeds. Maybe one day they’ll take root, I don’t know. You try, you do what you can.

[whispers] Kill yourselves. Seriously though, if you are, do.

More laughter. Then the real rant begins:

No really, there’s no rationalization for what you do, and you are Satan’s little helpers, okay. Kill yourselves, seriously. You’re the ruiner of all things good. Seriously. This is not a joke. There’s no fuckin’ joke coming. You are Satan’s spawn, filling the world with bile and garbage. You are fucked and you are fucking us. Kill yourself. It’s the only way to save your fuckin’ soul. Kill yourself.

At this point, the audience responds with what sounds like a standing ovation. They love Hicks, and they hate marketers.

I was struck by this video for two reasons. First, it reminded me of how much people hate marketing. They really do. Marketers may be hated more than even lawyers.

But more importantly, I was reminded of recent shifts in my own attitude toward marketing. I probably would have been laughing along with everyone else only a year or two ago. I’ve never had an interest in marketing, and in fact, I’ve actively disliked it. I’m just as annoyed as anyone by cynical marketing ploys. I’m sick of being inundated with inane and obnoxious advertising. I’m tired of our materialist culture and the pressure to buy junk we don’t need. I hate being manipulated, and I despise being seen as a means to an end.

But at the same time, I’m coming to realize that marketing isn’t all bad. It’s useful–and even good–when used in the right way.

So I wasn’t laughing at Hicks. Instead, I found myself resenting the lynch mob that seemed to be forming in his audience.

Hicks has a point, of course. (And if you watch the video, he explains it a little more.) Marketing can be bad — very bad. People hate it for good reasons:

• It’s often about manipulation, about getting you to part with your money rather than helping you or providing you with something of value.
• Marketers don’t seem to care about you as a person. They see you only as a guardian of money; they’re interested in your psychology only in so far as it helps them get you to relinquish it.
• Marketers often use cynical tactics. They’ll do what it takes to get your money. They’re unprincipled. As Hicks later points out, they’ll even try to exploit anti-marketing sentiment as a marketing tactic. 

(Incidentally, blogger Chris Guillebeau covers more on marketing-hate in his recent post, Why People Hate Marketers. He talks about internet marketing attitudes he finds disturbing.)

So yes, marketing’s often bad. But is it always bad? Should we just round up all marketers and call in the firing squad?

I’m actually less interested in marketing is a profession than I am in it as a mentality. After all, I’m never going to be a marketer, per se. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a whole lot of marketing I can–and even should–be doing.

Marketing in its most basic form is discovering what people want and giving it to them. It’s not about tricking people into buying what they don’t want, and it’s not about exploiting people’s psychology to get something out of them.

The problem with the anti-marketing mindset is that it’s self-limiting. If you think marketing is bad, you won’t do it. You’ll laugh at Bill Hicks and go back to your no-marketing life.

Here’s why this mindset’s limiting. If you subscribe to it, you probably think:

1. Self-promotion is bad.
2. Defining a target audience and marketing to them is bad.
3. Convincing people to buy something is bad.

These attitudes are okay as long as your only concern is filling a well-defined job role. I’ve been there, and I know what it’s like. Your boss is happy as long as you’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing — no marketing necessary.

But they stop working when you do something creative or risky. If you’re an entrepreneur, an artist, or otherwise self-employed, you need to shed the anti-marketing mindset. If you don’t, it will severely limit you.

Why is marketing necessary for entrepreneurs, artists, and the self-employed? Because if you are one, you’re not filling an already-defined role — you’re creating one. There isn’t already a clear audience for your work. You need to find one, and you need to appeal to that audience.

You can’t succeed on your own if you live on a desert island. Simply creating things and shipping them off to the rest of the world doesn’t work. You need to think about who’ll be interested in what you’re doing and how they’ll use it, why they’ll want it and how they’ll benefit from it. Marketing’s about taking the perspective of other people: What do they want? What gets them excited? It should be about empathy, not manipulation.

Marketing forces you to avoid masturbatory behavior: doing things that are all about you rather than about other people. Masturbatory behavior isn’t wrong in a moral sense, but it’s wrong if you want other people to care about what you’re doing.

If your primary goal is to impress people–whether it be with how smart, clever, funny, or talented you are–you’re engaging in masturbatory behavior. Sure, you might get lucky and hit on something that people do like. But you probably won’t. Other people care far less about how smart, clever, funny, and talented you are than you do.

If you’re just doing what you like and hoping someone else is interested, you’re engaging in masturbatory behavior. Again, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be doing what you like; it just means you may have a hard time making a living from it. Part of marketing is finding the intersection between what you like to do and what others want.

I’m not saying that it’s always best to watch the polls and let public interest decide what you do. That would kill art (and most creative endeavor in general). I am saying that you should take what other people want into account, even if only after the fact. There’s an audience for almost any kind of art — you just need to find it. And once you find your audience, you need to reach it effectively. 

That’s where marketing comes in – and that’s why I’m realizing its value. Marketing’s about finding an audience for what you do and targeting that audience, giving them what they want. It is (or should be) about empathy and relationships, not trickery and manipulation. It’s a necessary part of any independent endeavor.

Thoughts? (And thanks, Ohad, for inspiring this post!)