Inside OutMarketing set to plague us for a while yet - but the protagonists are changing
Defending yourself against those telling you what you need, rather than what you want, is now down to the winners of cyber battle between ‘botnets’ and ‘blockers’
I reserve a small but particularly venomous part of my spleen for marketing people. They have always seemed to represent and encourage the worst things in the world around us.
Before I get too “tired and emotional” I should emphasise that it is not just marketing people who make me feel this way. Lawyers come a close second. And if I see – as I have over the past week – evidence of pain among them, it is hard to hide a quiet pleasure.
Part of my distaste for marketing folks is well founded, I believe. But I confess too that part is sheer envy. This began when I was a young journalist in the Financial Times, when I was literally sweating 13-hour days to hit 8pm or 9pm news deadlines.
At that time, everyone on the marketing and advertising side of the paper (all males of course) took Friday off on the golf course, arguing that contracts could not be secured without entertaining clients on the fairways.
The brazen audacity took my breath away. The fact they succeeded outraged me, and made me deeply jealous. The fact that my venerable employer gave them a four-day week, paid their golf club memberships, covered their green fees and then paid for them to entertain their golf-playing clients, struck me as a scandalous con.
But putting this unalloyed envy on one side, I have good reasons for my spite. It is marketing people that take all of our “wants” and on behalf of mainly big-brand companies spin those wants into indispensable “needs”.