mind above marketing

A very brilliant marketing scheme that has millions upon millions of people lapping at its bowl is having the customer market your product/company for you. In fact, I’d bet almost every single person reading this pays a company or two money to help that company advertise.

“Balderdash!” you say? Hardly. 

I don’t even know where to begin with this one, but let’s start with an easy one that most of us contribute to: emails from your cell phone. Phone manufacturers have the default mention of their brand and/or model of phone placed as a tag at the end of emails sent from those phones. “Sent from an iPhone” or “This email was sent from a Blackberry.” Who really cares where it was sent from? What does a brand name have to do at all with an email you sent? Well, nothing, except for product advertisement. The first thing I do with cell phones is to get rid of that default message. Again, the brand name/product has little to do with me as a human, so why do I need to advertise for the company considering I’ve paid for the product? 

Ed Hardy and Louis Vuitton with garish logos all over,   Apple stickers on the backs of cars, the license plate frames from your car dealer…the list literally goes on and on. One thing that can happen is that we are often fooled into believing that displaying these logos/brand names somehow elevates us as people or that they make us belong to a special group or that they make us feel better than others. But if we really examine that phenomenon closely we can see that this is simply marketing that takes advantage of pride. Sometimes catch phrases are added that contribute to the “mystique”, the “power”, the “holier than thou”, and on and on. When these catch phrases become commonplace in everyday talk then the company has succeeded (“Vegas, Baby!” is the most obvious example).

There’s nothing wrong with being proud of something you own in some rare cases (i.e. not just because it makes you feel better or different than others), but in my opinion it can quickly go too far. What happens, again, is that companies like Apple, Louis Vuitton, Lucky jeans, and the immense amount of others, make people feel like they’re part of an  exclusive group when in reality they are not: millions of other people own these products. To either fit in with the crowd or to fancy ourselves unique or elevated, displaying logos is a natural extension of that and is why it’s one of the most ingenious marketing methods out there. It becomes part of our identity, and as I’ve said before: real identity has little if nothing to do with what you own. Mind you, this is most often subconscious. I completely understand why the companies would encourage this — it makes perfect sense from a marketing standpoint! If you don’t care what others may think then a logo need not enter the picture. But if you’re buying something to have other people notice and/or see you in a certain way then you’re much more likely to put the companies on display.

So next time you proudly display your cell phone brand name at the end of emails, put a huge corporation’s logo on your car, buy a shirt with a giant Lucky Brand across the chest, etc., you might just think about what it is you’re actually doing. You’re really not making yourself any more unique (we don’t want to be remembered for the things we owned, right?) and you’re paying a corporation to advertise for them. Personally that doesn’t sit well with me. I’m not whining about corporations and all of that — they exist and that’s how it is; I’m simply talking about steps you can take if you’d like to not so closely walk arm in arm with them.

Most often a product has nothing to do with you nor does it represent you as an actual human — I believe that subscribing to this belief is very freeing. It’s not a statement that you are making; Very simply it is just you paying a company to advertise for that company.