Kant taught that people are ends in themselves and never means. Although I am convinced that individual consciousness is influenced by social conditions and not the other way around, I can’t help but be disgusted by the way many people intend and do marketing.
Aside from the real scams like “How to get rich in 30 days” or “Do this and you will earn 2000 Pounds/Dollars/Euros per week,” I keep seeing very long articles that repeat the same things, so disgustingly stuffed with useless words instead of immediately coming to the point. This is made to offer content of 1500 or even many more words hoping to earn the top positions on Google, according to the mantra that a very long post ranks higher than a short one.
Then there are those stupid clickbait posts like
” After this mother looked at a photo of her daughter that she had just taken, she froze with fear…“
Inanity of this level published on sites of the lowest quality whose articles are distributed on several pages in order to keep the reader on site so that he or she can be inundated with advertisements and more obscenity.
Moralism is not the point
I find this content and this way of producing marketing offensive. I think it is offensive because it considers that there are people with such a low intellectual level that they are easy preys. And these people must also be millions to give these sites a way to gather a lot of consensus and to do good business.
No moralistic tirade, that’s not what I’m stressing here. It annoys me that there are still too many of these sites around and that all this contributes to generating the idea that marketing is but a trivial vulgarity.
On the other hand, even apparently serious marketers fall into stupid topics like “Marketing is science“
Marketing is not a science and never will be!
Marketing can be a kind of art, when done right; yet, not a science. There is nothing that remotely brings it closer to science.
The funniest thing about all of this is that these self-styled experts believe that marketing is science because they give it qualities that are completely unscientific. In other words, according to their shaky knowledge, science is unequivocal, universal, and unalterable in time. Science is therefore dogma. Poor Karl Popper, enough to make him turn in his grave!
For sure, if marketing is considered the highest form of communication in a society, then this society is seriously ill!
Well, although this world is governed by the harsh law of profit, which certainly does not help make us wise individuals, my opinion is that there is an ethics to be respected, at least those of us who manage to maintain a bit of rationality.
In my experience of over 35 years in this sector, I have learned that there are fixed points and that is what I always say to all my customers
- Never lie
- Always be yourself
- Never make fun of your customers because you can cheat some of them but your plan is doomed to fail along with your whole business and yourself.
Which in sum drives us back to the so-called Kant’s “Formula of Humanity” as it states:
So act that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means.
(Kant, Immanuel, 1785, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten. Translated as Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals)
