Marketing to The Potato
I have a tremendous revulsion and loathing for anything related to ‘marketing’. I find marketing and branding experts to be tedious and arrogant, sort of accredited buffoons. The lords of the boardroom. In some ways they are the ultimate credentialists, their labels and awards comprise the entirety of their value.
For they ultimately do nothing.
While the science of their craft may appear to have material function – to ‘work’, as it were – it only does so within the illusory confines of our backwards, materialist values. It may prove a bottom-line, of sorts, financially speaking, let us say in the risk-free crunching of percentages, for example. But it does not work in the true teleological sense, and indeed works to stultify and block the host it is meant to complement, and not bleed dry. True innovation withers in whatever field the marketing gurus take over. They graft consoomer values onto every trade and common-use item, making of themselves an enemy of risk and invention – and thereby creativity.
For it is incalculable risk and adventurousness which actually provides new culture, or facilitates cultural evolution. Branding and marketing (as a science or vocation) is a managerial process of continuing a present endlessly, and creating a future of cultureless non-innovation and artlessness, by basing culture creation on an estimate of ‘what the average idiot might want next’.
I have had to work in the marketing world professionally in the past (unfortunately). What I learned is that a huge part of our cultural dead-end (the fact that it is the late 1990’s forever) is the result of this cultish science of marketing, which states that no art can be invested in that isn’t market-proven, or (at best) estimated based on the ‘observable trend’.
This puts tremendous cultural power in the hands of the average idiot, who is a miserable potato who needs his art handed to him, with instructions. Otherwise he comes up with precisely nothing, or if not nothing, then the worst incarnation of an art imaginable.
The marketing experts have devolved at this stage into clownish parasites, who with enough bugman swagger and credentialist guffawing, can convince a large company to part with tens of thousands of dollars/pounds/euros to alter the shade of green in their logo by small degrees. This is not an exaggeration, I have seen it. This is all part of the dying functions of a Western world without telos, it’s goals nothing more than to keep it’s shallow citizenry busy with empty, failing routines, as it sinks.
Marketing branding experts create their own bullshit and then they stew in it. While it is functional within constraints, it is ultimately meaningless.
