“There’s no rationalisation for what you do and you are Satan’s little helpers. Okay – kill yourself. Seriously. You are the ruiner of all things good.” - Bill Hicks
Walk through the ur-markets that are the night markets of Asia or the Istanbul Grand Bazaar and you see marketing at the most pure level as vendors promote their goods above others.
Marketing is basic to human interaction right back to Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
I don’t believe that marketers are Satan’s little helpers. But, like anything, marketing can be applied with ethical or unethical consequences.
During the Covid-19 crisis there wasn't a moment of any day that I was not reminded that ultimately I had a duty to the people I represented around the world, both to communicate to them, and to market well enough that the business wasn’t too badly knocked by events.
In some ways there was more opportunity for tech. But we had to deliver, pulling together truthful, complete and workable responses to quite speculative interest about what would be needed in a post-crisis society. Working in the metaverse? Post-car-ownership models for transportation? Revolutions in robotics and AI? How big would the change to society be? More than ever, expertise, authority, and credibility were the most important marketing deliverables.
When it was over there was a huge sigh of relief but I wondered: what will persist and what will go back to the way it was before? As global recession loomed and the tech world entered a long lasting downtown I was glad to see that, for the most part, ethics prevailed. Not always, not everywhere, but there was a sense of being in it together.
Yes, the various chip acts around the world have an element of de-globalisation to them; but they also show large parts of the tech ecosystem coming together to grow the bounds of the world we all inhabit.
Under pressure, the lines joining us have never been clearer.
Hello out there. Nice to see you.
(Still love Bill.)