Thursday 31 December 2009

2009 wrap-up.


This is it! 2009 is almost over. I remember I wondered this time last year, how the hell am I going to beat 2008!? After all, not every year one gets to meet Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, wins in a business plan contest and gets a job at Apple’s flagship retail store. How was 2009 then? Hit “Read more” for the highlights.

Sunday 6 December 2009

Is marketing evil?

Often these days I hear people say that companies exploit us by introducing products that we don’t need, creating the culture of consumerism. It makes sense, but is it really so?

The definition of marketing is something along the lines of “identifying consumer needs and creating solutions to them in a profitable way”, the key word being “identifying”. You see, on the individual basis we don’t know as much as companies do. These companies commit huge resources to consumer research and so by default must know more than each of us does. With so much information at hand, they will be in a much better position to understand and see through our collective thoughts, while we have only our own heads, with their limited “processing power”. Caught up in the struggles of daily life, we simply have no time to analyse every single issue that comes in our way. What follows is that we often have a need but simply don’t realise that it’s there. Businesses on the other hand have the advantage of looking at us from the distance, in the sort of big picture way. It should then not come as a surprise that they know things before each of us does. And this is where all the confusion comes from: we don’t realise any of that, and so when companies bring out new products, it appears that they do it out of nowhere and then make us buy it.

Now, with that said, the real question is not whether we need those products, because we obviously do. The real question is, whether we really need to lead that sort of lifestyle that makes us want all those things. Hmmmm...... this is getting deeper and deeper!