My Ride is Tougher than Yours

Quote of the day:
"Both the cockroach and the bird could get along very well without us, although the cockroach would miss us most."
--Joseph Wood Krutch

Yesterday Ford announced it is manufacturing a new limited edition of the Shelby-modified Mustang that Steve McQueen drove in “Bullitt.” They are calling it the "Bullitt."

As much as I love the amazing chase scene in that movie, I will not be buying one of the cars. Thank you very much.

Ford is burnishing its cool-muscle-car image with baby boomers, and I guess it expects that image to bleed over into other products and age groups. Dodge will soon do the same with a nostalgia-inducing Challenger.

In the 1980s I owned a 1965 Mustang for a while. I loved the way it looked, but it drove like a tank and could be loosely classified as a piece of junk. It was a very good day when I traded it in for a small fun-driving Nissan with AC and a radio that worked.

“Mustang” is a terrific car name. So are “Barracuda” and “Cougar.”

These days, non-alphanumeric car names can be a tad ridiculous (so can the letters and numbers, but that’s a different story). I especially love the “biggest and strongest” names that car makers give their vehicles: “Armada,” “Titan,” “Avenger,” “Magnum,” “Nitro,” “Avalanche,” “Tundra,” and “Sequoia.”

Now, that’s what I want. To drive a large tree. Or a vast frozen wilderness.

Abuse of Marketing

Quote of the day:
"An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all."
--Oscar Wilde

Here’s a follow-up to my screeds on marketing and conformity.

It seems that everyone knows something about marketing. Example: does anyone not know what a focus group is?

The use of focus groups used to be part of the mysterious and revealing magic of marketing. Now everyone has one or is in one.

Some people have boasted of being able to tip the process toward their point of view, which would defeat the purpose of market research.

Focus groups and research techniques have certainly been abused. Sometimes it is by companies trying to selling us something.

Most notoriously it is by unscrupulous political campaigns who conduct seemingly-benign surveys or assemble seemingly normal focus groups, for the purpose of deceitfully pushing a candidate or point of view.

Conformity and Marketing, Part Three

Quote of the day:
“A committee is a group that keeps minutes and loses hours.”
--Milton Berle

The growth in emphasis on the precision science of marketing has made it increasingly difficult for those who are eccentric, even if only slightly.

With conformity becoming both more necessary and more difficult, and these people unable or unwilling to keep up, they have become outcasts.

To manage in our world, the eccentric person must either tolerate lots of misery, put their loved ones through constant misery, or submit to isolation or, in extreme cases, institutionalization or medication.

In a way, this is what Thoreau meant by “lives of quiet desperation.” It is a sort of grinding unhappiness that tears at one’s humanity and neutralizes the best characteristics of human nature.

These characteristics include intense longing, the creative impulse, and openness to joy and pain. They enable us to know real fulfillment and realize that life is very, very good indeed.

It is through these characteristics that we rise to our fullest and best selves.

Marketing Patriotism

Quote of the day:
“Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them.”
--Leo Tolstoy

The American flag has come to symbolize not just America, but a particular vision of America. Or a specific characteristic of America that the flag-bearer or wearer (in the case of flag lapel pins) wishes to emphasize.

That some people are much quicker than others to display the flag indicates one of three things.

They may feel an especially strong attachment to what they perceive as the values of America.

They may feel that America is fragile or weak and needs to be bolstered through their display of the flag.

Or they may think that others do not feel as strongly as they do about America’s sovereignty, and so need to be persuaded through seeing the flag.

The value of America that gets mentioned more than any other is “freedom.” Because most Americans have no experience with political oppression, the kind of freedom referred to is primarily economic.

Being a happy patriot is part of, and secondary to, the producing/consuming paradigm. The statement that a nation or an individual is acting “in the national interest” refers ultimately to an interest in producing and consuming with no restriction.

The producing/consumption paradigm often leads to excess and to pointlessness. For example, the desire of a childless couple for a five-bedroom home. When they live in such a home, they likely discover that most of the home is simply not used or very under-used.

More important, joy or happiness does not result. Instead, a process of home improvement and fix-up begins. The delusion is that satisfaction or happiness is at the end. But there is no end, just occasional pauses in an endless loop.

Conformity and Marketing, Part Two

Quote of the day:
“The more you find out about the world, the more opportunities there are to laugh at it.”
--Bill Nye

Among consumers, the need for increasing precision in marketing creates an obsessive anxiety, centered on always needing to be better and needing to have more. This feeds our perfectionism--our vague but strong sense that there is a special, joyous place we are heading for.

Of course, this perfectionism can never be satisfied, resulting in an infinite loop of distraction, dissatisfaction, anger, depression and other illness.

Among producers, the need for increasing precision in marketing results in an ongoing stream of increasingly-specific and disposable research and consulting, conducted by young, finely-tuned, highly-paid MBAs.

Some brands are able to succeed marvelously at precision marketing. We can think of the exemplars of both consumer and producer conformity, and how they are held up as idols, with extraordinary value beyond the intended purpose of what they represent.

Hummer, Bose, Abercrombie and Fitch, Viking, and Rolex are a few examples. So is a particular vision of America.

Conformity and Marketing, Part One

Quote of the day:
"I don't write about victims. They just bore me to death. I prefer to write about somebody who can pick themselves back up and get on with their lives."
--Terry McMillan

The pressure to conform has vastly increased over the last 40 years. Each of us must fit in to an ever-more-specific mold of a productive consumer and, secondarily, happy patriot. It has become a required identity.

We all both produce and consume, and extremely well-funded market science enables us to do both with increasing precision and for increasingly-sophisticated ends.

We “produce” into ever-narrower psychographic niches. Efficiency is pushed and pushed to levels where slight, unnecessary head or hand movements become the obsession of the day.

We also consume to fit into more- and more-specific psychographic groups. Because, after all, we really don’t want to belong to any group that would have us as a member.

Daily, we claim both unique individuality and membership in the most-vital marketing target of the moment.

The marketing goal from the consumer point of view has become how to be a consumer and fit into an unbelievably cool niche without appearing to.

And the “not-appearing-to-be-in-a-niche” is a niche into which we are all fitting.