Marketers-The Evil Geniuses
If you're thinking this is about the Netflix series 'Evil Genius', you're wrong. This post is about marketing, the kind unheard of.But before we go there let me talk a little about my background. I have been involved deeply and intricately with marketing all my life be it marketing a product, a startup or worse myself. But I must confess I never appreciated the power marketing has till recently when I read a lot of literature around behavioural psychology and neuro marketing. In fact it has the power to shape perceptions, create ideologies, define sensibilities and altering idiosyncrasies just by planting an idea in the subconscious of human beings. Technically it's called subliminal marketing. Remember this scene from 'Inception'.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ga44ZteAvVs
It talks about how an idea can be planted in someone's psyche which could trigger a revolution or maybe a genocide. Almost a decade back I saw this brilliant yet low profile movie that had likes of Robert De Niro and Dustin Hoffman sweating it out over creating public perceptions that were false in nature. Its called 'Wag the Dog'. Mass media has been the most potent weapon American has deployed for the last 7 decades or so to create a perception in their favour justifying anything they have done over the years. John Perkins too mentioned the same in his controversial book 'Confessions of an Economic Hitman'. Not to mention Noam Chomsky's controversial film 'Manufacturing Consent' which tried to show the evils of populism and the wider role media played in spreading the wild fire.
Anyway to ensure I don't digress to the deep waters of global politics let me come back to the said discussion. The point I am trying to make is that marketing or more specifically marketers have altered the way we think and behave by promoting campaigns and pushing advertisements that push the social fabric. if you think a little deep about it you might be able to catch it. I caught it last week when I was trying to brainstorm something with my team and we ended up discussing the impact of advertising and marketing. Let me take a topic and then present a bunch of use cases to demonstrate my point My Lord :)
All of us have in some way or the other heard India has a patriarchal culture which stops women from indulging in professions. Although it is changing and women had to go through a lot in a bid to try and break the glass ceiling, we still have a long way to go. Even today women are not considered superior or maybe equal to men due to a stereotypical definition of what women should be doing. Even in this 21st century a lot of men still want to get married to educated women who can look after the household and the kids while they make bread for the family. Why is it that this stereotype still persists inspite of the efforts that have been made in the recent past by a lot of social organisations towards creating an egalitarian society? I would hold the Indian culture post Vedic period chiefly responsible for that but I would also hold marketers equally culpable . If you're a marketer and I've hurt your sensibilities I must apologise. I mean Seth Godin tried to show the ugly side of marketing by crossing the line in his cult book 'All marketers are Liars' and mentioning storytellers but the fact remains the same.
In India marketers have acted as catalysts that promoted stereotypes and supported age old notions over the last 4 decades or so. Let me put this ad that would take you down memory lane.Remember our 80s model household woman Lalita ji endorsing Surf in this advertisement
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALxiXkHxqCc
or this iconic ad featuring Sangeeta Bijlani the qunintessential sweetheart back then
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFeI8QJMiuk
Haven't they always shown women the central protagonist. The quintessential choice when it comes to washing clothes. Someone who always had to ensure her family wears clean clothes and it was her fiduciary responsibility to use the best detergent powder or the best detergent soap that would guarantee whiteness of clothes-a symbolism of success, hygiene etc. Now come to the following cooking oil ads
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENRUwnrOV5U
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4O5Q4Z87epo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WI-39Wxd5U8
All the above ads show women cooking for the family. The ads have established the fact that women also need to be responsible for their family's health by cooking with the best oils available(most of which is hogwash created by processed food industry). Each of the above ads show women cooking. Take a look at the following ads
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZIfln_TWf0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yBOFojyEKQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCXWRd-1yLw
All the above ads again show women cooking food for the family. She also has to ensure the food is aligned to the taste buds of the family. Now let us touch base a different category altogether.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5PvYsZSs3g
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHXjebDRhX0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUoCy99z14o
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNuKMjktG3I
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zC4ekq336_w
Likewise if you see ads in various categories that Indian marketers have shown over 5 decades you would always find women as the main protagonist. She is responsible for everything from taking care of the kids, to cook healthy food for the family, to wash their clothes, to being the model wife every man dreams of, to be the idle daughter in law to her in laws.
Post 90s when the liberalisation wave kicked in women were shown in better light going for education and eventually doing jobs. But they still had to be the single dominant force when it came to taking care of the family. Over the years the technological revolution changed the entire landscape and now we had access to gadgets that could simplify the job but even then it was always the woman who was washing clothes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYpk_0VhfjQ
So for almost 5 decades we as a society have ingested whatever was thrown at us without thinking twice. If you read lot of Edward De Bono you'd have read his cult book 'Why so Stupid' ? Bono goes ahead and explains that human civilisation hasn't really done adequate thinking in the last 2000 years. If that be true then the diaspora specifically the Indian diaspora have formed our ideologies based on what mass media showed us. We believed in the products that ad showed us because it came from an average Joe protagonist like Rajni ji or Lalita ji and instilled our faith in an archaic belief system that has almost always subdued and oppressed women thereby creating stereotypes.
Even today when women have made a mark for themselves in almost every field it is still heartbreaking to see traces of such ridiculous notions seeping in through some way or the other. But then coming back to the original discussion ,almost every advertisement over the years has been through storytelling or any other medium has weaved a story, that always revolves around creating stereotypes for women. So if I go by the ads that have appeared on TV over the last 4 decades they have always tried to tell a story where the woman is the person who is responsible for taking care of those house, she needs to ensure the kids are looked after, she needs to ensure everyone in the family is eating well, she is also responsible for taking care of her in laws and also be a model wife to her husband. It might sound easy to write all of that in a single sentence but believe me no job in the world is as complex as the job of a house wife not because of the added complexity but because there is no remuneration. Now I am sure you do agree that the somatic markers imprinted in your psyche over the years about such stereotypes are a result of subliminal ads used by marketers and advertisers. Another equally gobsmacking notion that these ads propagated was that a man just needs to be a man and do the things a fully grown male Homosapien is supposed to do since the cognitive revolution-which is look for food. Today if you compare the role a man plays in the society it hasn't really changed much from the hunter gatherer who'd do the same stuff. Add to it movies like Kabir Singh that tend to show toxic masculinity at play and it drags us back to the same age old archaic and rotten belief system which believes in oppressing women, suppressing their desires and stripping them of anything they ever dreamt of. If you just take a step back and think for a change you'd find how mass media has created an entire stereotype that dictates how women should live and what they should do.
I recently watched a documentary on Netflix called,'The Great Hack' which showed how Cambridge Analytica used psychographics to alter the mindset of an entire country and made them believe they are going through an existential crisis. We know what happened as a result of that and the rest is history. Today almost every marketer on the planet is trying to promote a product by creating a story around it. Most of these stories are lacklustre as the products but some of them are powerful enough to create a series of thoughts in the human psyche that give rise to some of the social evils we have been battling all this while.
If you have ever wanted to buy Calvin Klein because you couldn't stop thinking about the following famous Brooke Shields ad back in the 70s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4Ow_M8kpkg
There are ads that have a tremendous impact on the collective psyche of the nation. Although Robert Cialdini talks about the six principles(exploited by marketers in his bestseller 'Influence', Martin Lindstrom goes a step further in his book 'Buy-ology' and explains how most of the times the subconscious mind behaves differently from how we behave consciously. Like for example it has been found that most anti cigarette campaigns on which governments spent billions of dollars actually activate the nucleus acumbens(part of brain responsible for desires) which requires higher and higher dosage to fulfil the craving. I have mentioned Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky time and again because as pioneers of behavioural psychology they actually proved through their experiments that more than 90% of the decisions that we make on a daily basis are irrational in nature.The cognitive tree that represents our fast thinking or irrational thinking takes into account years and years of somatic markers that help us make decisions that do not have a base in logic. That makes us extremely vulnerable to believing almost anything be it the truth or otherwise. Roger Ailes once said."All business is basically about customers and marketing and making money and capitalism and winning and promoting it and having something someone really wants". If capitalism is about winning and marketing is the secret weapon it uses to unleash consumerism or alter sensibilities or create stereotypes then its high time we need to be wary of marketing and protect ourselves from succumbing to it.