3. The Cult of Marketing

If I were to suggest to you that you the reader are a member of a cult, you would be shocked, angered, even enraged. Of course, if you were to approach any religious fundamentalist, Scientologist or Moonie and pose the same question, you would get pretty much the same reaction. The only real difference between their cult and ours is its size - theirs numbers in the thousands, and tens of thousands, while ours number in the millions. Ours is the cult of marketing! It is the veneer over today's variation of the Game.


Selling, Persuasion, and Manipulation

What is selling exactly? It is getting someone to buy something - anything! It can be a radio, a dental procedure, even ourselves. The word "getting" can just as easily be replaced by the words "persuading," "inducing," "coercing," or "manipulating." All of these will get the job done - the word selected depends very much upon our own perspective.

Natural salespersons will choose persuasion as the descriptor. Those of us who are introverts or might be seen by our peers as refusniks, will be more drawn to the darker end of the spectrum, characterizing selling as manipulation or coercion. It is interesting to note that almost any motivational course you are likely to listen to, will, at some point, include a distinction between persuasion and manipulation. The distinction will go something like this: "Persuasion is for the benefit of the consumer, while manipulation is only for the benefit of the seller. Manipulation is only short lived, and will inevitably lead to buyer's remorse; whereas persuasion will lead to a strong relationship between buyer and seller which will yield benefit to both parties, not just now, but in the future as well."

For thousands of years, religious leaders, politicians, entrepreneurs, army generals, and seductresses have used manipulation. It has successfully kept entire populations bamboozled for generations. Therefore, the very notion that it is short lived and doomed to fail is farcical. In fact, only a salesperson would ever buy into such a pitch.

Human beings are driven by emotion, not reason. More can be achieved by a manipulative appeal to an audience's emotional weaknesses than with the most cogent, brilliant argument. Being a master manipulator is the key success factor in being an effective marketer/salesman. Manipulation is the art of managing impressions. It stands to reason then, that through the process of natural selection, those who are the most talented at impression management rise to the top of the selling profession. These are the Players.


Branding

In the Wild West, ranchers commonly herded their cattle together. The best way to identify which cow belonged to whom was to brand the cattle. Can you imagine being one of those cows and willingly, enthusiastically, branding yourself? Well that is exactly what we have done to ourselves.

Everyone is forced to think of themselves as a brand. No matter what your particular gift or expertise happens to be, you have no choice but to play their Game. Our ability to sell our brand becomes the key to success. In a world where the marketer is king, talking a good game, looking good, being likeable, being sexy become the winning traits. Knowledge, integrity, fortitude, kindness, generosity, and graciousness become nothing more than frills, mere anachronisms. They are the traits associated with those on the fringe - the losers, artists, intellectuals, the has-beens. In fact, substance of any kind becomes a burden. It is ballast that holds you down, limiting your creativity in concocting what is to be presented to the client.

If you are a homebuilder, your success is no longer driven by the quality of homes you build, but your ability to project an image of competence and integrity. Similarly, dentists, doctors, and accountants can no longer rely upon excellence and hard work to create a thriving practice.

Talking, rather than doing, becomes the key success factor. In fact, this is so much the case, that to the extent that, anyone is directly involved in the creation of the goods or service they provide rather than its promotion, they are looked down upon. In this way, the talents of the truly gifted are marginalized and the Players are able to steer the Game in their favor. It is no surprise then, to see that professional firms; management consulting, architects, lawyers, are controlled by the "rainmakers" - the partners who are skilled in bring in the clients.

We commonly speak about reinventing ourselves. Using the word reinvent in place of repackage is far more than a benign choice in terminology. It reflects an entire worldview. It is as if, instead of being single unified beings, we are a bundle of interchangeable traits, which could be mixed and matched to suit the demands of the market.

Turning us into "brands" encourages us to see other people as either potential customers we can sell to, or as salesmen who wish to sell us. Seeing each other in this way makes us suspicious of one another as we find ourselves unable to take any statement at face value and must constantly seek some ulterior motivation in all our interactions with others. Associations and alliances, which are entirely motivated by self-interest, crowd out authentic relationship. In place of human beings forming authentic relationships with one another, we are only able to interact with one another within the narrow confines of our own brands.

As the process continues, selling no longer becomes a choice; it becomes a matter of survival. The market becomes inundated with hustlers. Lacking any objective, reliable criteria upon which to assess competence; likeability and slickness become the key success criteria. In this way, the buyer is steered unwittingly towards the con men. Meanwhile, those who cannot sell are simply invisible.

Placed in this context, the success of investment bankers in conveying an air of success and competence is easy to understand. Their showmanship became a self-fulfilling prophecy; the well-tailored suit, the perfectly coifed hair, the confident, even demeanor- all convey success, competence and authority. This then, forms the backdrop for what they are selling: the opportunity to be rich, successful and popular, like they appear to be. By the time they actually make their pitch, the potential buyer is already sold. Who is the perspective buyer? Anyone in the room!

The very omnipresence of the Game places us all in the position of having to choose between two options, one more repugnant than the other. The first option is to bite the bullet and attempt to sell. Unfortunately, when it comes to mastering bluff and small talk, we are like fish out of water. Not being natural liars, we are no match for those who are naturally inclined to embellishment and hyperbole. Now we are caught between a rock and a hard place. Instead of simply getting on with the business at hand, we spend all our free time going to sales courses, and listening to motivational tapes, in the hope that a few crumbs will fall our way.

If we are not socially skilled, we have to ally ourselves with a rainmaker. To add insult to injury, in the event that we are successful in finding such a hustler, we become the drone, the weaker party in the relationship. Over time, our confidence erodes, and eventually we fall victim to despair, or some form of sedation.

Players are born with an innate understanding of the gullibility of human nature. They know that we all need to be liked, need to feel successful, need to feel that our peers look up to us. They nonchalantly look on as the wheel turns like a giant merry-go-round. They are in no hurry, because they know that the axis, around which this wheel is turning, is fixed. Sometimes they spin the wheel slowly, sometimes quickly, but it is always fixed in one place. It is never going anywhere. Those on the merry-go-round are under the illusion that they are moving rapidly toward their goals, their dreams, and their destinies. Meanwhile, those turning the wheel know that nobody, including themselves, is going anywhere.

Collapse is built into the model. This spinning wheel has to spin faster and faster to maintain its equilibrium. Eventually it has maxed out; terminal velocity is reached. From that point on, it is only a matter of time before it breaks.

As the economy heats up, it reaches saturation, at which point most of us have multiple TVs, cars, a home, as well as the essentials in life. If the wheel were left to turn of its own accord at this point, it would begin to slow down. Those who engineered the Game need to do something to keep increasing the speed of the spin. Now comes the coup de grace - a kind of alchemy that transforms wants into needs, choice into compulsion, and creates a buying frenzy!

By turning us into narcissistic, ravenous junkies, and then enabling our addiction with easy credit, the merry-go-round becomes a kind of self-propelling mechanism, a man-made whirlwind that is perpetually accelerating. Once this process is set in motion, all the Players need do is to sit back and watch the great wheel spin, knowing full well that sooner or later it will fall off its axis - and when it does, they will walk away and let others sort through the wreckage.

Over the last several decades, increasing numbers of products have been foisted upon the public. At first, these addressed real needs. However, over time, as needs gave way to wants, and credit was made readily available, the boundaries of what the market would bear were removed. Consumption became rapacious. Consequently, within the company, while the contributions made by operations and administration remained finite, the potential contribution made by sales became limitless, the inevitable result being that almost all businesses today are marketing/sales driven.

This entire focus upon making the sale, with next to no thought upon delivering the product, is not sustainable in the long run. The current banking crisis is a prime example of the Game run amuck.



What goes up must come down. The enormous bubble created by the sales/marketing driven economy finally burst. On a certain level, this collapse did not come as a complete surprise to any of us. Nonetheless, when it did come, its brutal reality, the chaos and the carnage, was a major shock for us all.

Every culture has its winners and losers - the winners being those who thrive in the system and the losers being those who cannot seem to fit in or get with the program. Who are the winners and losers likely to be in an organizational environment dominated by the Cult of Marketing and the Control-Pressure Paradigm?