It was early January, the second day of Winter term @ Middlebury College in VT. I was at a reception in an old building on campus with creaking hard-wood floors under my feet and a local micro-brew in my hand. I struck up a conversation with a fellow visiting faculty member. “What are you teaching this January?” “I’m teaching an environmentally interactive course for students through the Geology department. How about you?”
“Interesting. I’m teaching a course called Emotion and Rationality. It’s about how humans make decisions. It explores the contrasting notions of whether we should “listen to our gut” or “not let our heart cloud our mind”. Whenever I tell people about that course, I get a lot of ‘ooh’s and ‘ahh’s, and ‘wow-that-sounds-interesting’s. People are inherently fascinated by human decision-making. But this conversation was different…
We quickly began discussing the business of behavioral insight, and I got the impression that my colleague was fascinated, if not disturbed, by the notion that people get paid to predict what other people will do.
This ultimately lead to the question: “How do you feel about the ethics of marketing? You know, basically trying to convince people to consume more.”
These types of questions usually raise my heart rate and cause my palms to sweat, as my body’s evolutionary structures prepare for confrontation through the instigation of my “fight” mechanisms. Keeping my voice from wavering in reply is a challenge. “Marketing, itself, is something that is fundamentally human. It is in all of us. We all do it naturally. You may not agree with the values behind a specific marketing campaign, but the argument is about values, not about the ethics of marketing itself.”
“Ah, I see. Well, that’s interesting. We better join the rest of the group before the reception is over” my colleague politely replied.
I smiled and agreed, at this point my beer was getting warm from all the heat being produced in my palms anyway.
Little did I know this conversation was just beginning. A week later, I was sitting at my desk watching the snow fall heavy on the roof tops, preparing a lecture on consumer irrationality for the next day, when my inbox pinged me with the arrival of a new message…
“conversation in the hall…” I read on, “Aaron, I enjoyed our conversation at the reception the other night. There were some issues I skirted around that I’d like to dive into here.” She went on to argue how marketing might not be “fundamentally human” by detailing examples of people who do not market themselves. Native American shamans, the Dalai Lama, and Yoda were the human and Jedi examples that topped her list. The argument was that these people exude a humility and power in their self that needs no “marketing”. The shamans, she argued, have a humbleness in their bearing that carries a natural power which other people often don’t recognize. If many humans do market themselves, the shamans were an example of an “anti-marketing” force, in her opinion. Even the Dalai Lama has achieved fame as a side effect, she argued, and then expressed certainty in the notion that he does not spend time thinking about how to sell himself. And the Yoda example? Self explanatory, it is, hmm? Yeesssss.
My colleague went on and made several other interesting points, and as I finished the email, I stepped back from the computer, felt my moist palms, observed the hair raised on my arms, noticed my nostrils slightly flared as I took in increasing amounts of oxygen, and became conscious again of my “fight” response. This was hitting home –  I thought, “this must be something I care about if I am feeling this much emotion”.
What do you think, does she have a point? Is marketing not fundamentally human? What do you think of the examples? There is much more to this conversation, and I will continue in the next chapter…