There's only a very small difference between men and women. ah but vive la difference!
-- French Proverb, according to Pepe Le Peu
I just clicked on a banner ad for a Hyundai automobile. I didn't know it was a Hyundai. It looked luxurious. I'm sure you've made similar mistakes in the past few years. A lot of cars look like Mercedes. Jaguars look more pedestrian than ever. BMW goes into bizarre sharklike directions to distinguish their latest models. I hear that Chinese cars are on their way across the Pacific. (There has got to be a joke in there somewhere). What's going on here?
Not much I think. It's only something we in the advanced consumer class take a great deal of notice in. We are reading extraordinary arcane tea leaves, and we're very good at it. I am brought to mind of a dinner I bought for a cat from Finland in Long Beach a few years back. He told me he was raised on potatoes and soup, basically. So he always loved to come to the US whenever he could, so he could eat at our French and Thai restaurants. I told him that we are very addicted to money and spending, that's why we're an economic superpower. He couldn't believe it when I told him that the waiter in the restaurant would respect me more if I paid with a gold colored piece of plastic instead of a blue colored one. But it's true. We're like that.
Steve Jobs is still ranting about Objective C and the Next Cube computing club has finally called it quits. The PC is only about 20 years old and that's why Gerard is still having nightmares. But already an iPod is an iPod, unless it's a Rio or just some attachement feature in a Treo. There are fashionable computers and fashionable flash music players. That means the basic problem has been solved and now it's all about marketing. We do all the marketing over here in the US, we let our flunkies overseas do the building. That's OK. Without marketing, they're all appliances anyway. I mean, really is there a difference between a Dell desktop and a Compaq? Neither of those two companies do anything but assemble components built elsewhere and market them slickly. It's what America does best.
Marketing is an extraordinarily difficult thing. I really learned that back in 1999 and 2000 when I had one of those crazy Silicon Valley titles and wore blue shirts. Marketing is the art of convincing people that there is value in making a selection between rough commodities. It is the science of putting words in people's mouths and ideas in their heads. It's about selling concepts that contain products. Products are entiities that combine technologies. A good marketer makes people like products before they even exist. That we are capable of such magical mojo is testament to our greatness as a society, or of our credulousness, one. Still, if anybody could be a VP of Marketing, we'd all live in Lido Village.
But what's so special about Lido Village?
I would hope that I maintain a critical distance from certain marketing campaigns such that I can't be bamboozled as a consumer. But the scale of the enterprise of buying and selling is so vast that it's difficult to comprehend. There are whole economies of information out there that are difficult to parse. It's a full-time job just keeping up. And of course there's the whole economy above our heads. I mean, how could a guy like me tell the difference between a good yacht and a cheap one? For the man who cashes his paycheck at the liquor store, how could he ever distinguish between Schwab and Merrill Lynch? And yet there is marketing that I want too, because I like people like me and I want to know what they do. I'd like to know that I can be enticed by something that's good for me. And like other folks keeping up with the Joneses, I occasionally like to make jokes about people who buy goods from certain stores beneath my tastes.
But what if there was no marketing? What if we were only to get functional satisfaction from our consumables? What if products were only utilitarian, like the breakfast sludge eaten by the crew of the Neb in The Matrix? What if there were no sleek and sharklike, nor hooptie, nor mega tired, but only simply functional automobiles? What if everything simply worked and delivered no other kind of pleasure.. kind of like toothbrushes used to be? Blah. Might as well be Soviet, methinks. Furthermore, as loathe as we might be to admit it, there is an extra charge in knowing that there may someday be a new product that liberates us from the clunker we have now. That's why people are shelling out 600 bucks for a vacuum cleaner.
It's an interesting sport to check out the minute differences between products like cigarettes or shoes. There's really not a whole lot of difference between Nikes and Reeboks, but... hey, most of the time it's worth it.
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