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charles bukowski
foster this
power
challenge this
Charles Bukowski
The Marketing Matrix
‘your life is your life’
advertising and
promotion
‘Don’t let it be
clubbed into dank
submission’
ubiquitous distribution
versus
special offers
‘you can beat death
in life sometimes’
new products and
services
‘the more you learn
to do it, the more
light there will be’
multiple shopping
opportunities
marketing is ubiquitous
‘the ‘aggregate marketing system’ in the US employs
over 30 million people, servicing 285m customers
who spent five trillion dollars a year. Just counting
this money would take 150 millennia; longer than the
whole period of human civilisation’
(Wilkie & Moore, 2002, Marketing’s Relationship to Society)
This is having a profound impact every
aspect of our lives, our communities and,
increasingly, our planet
change
‘It requires a social and cultural, or if you
wish, a spiritual transformation of our country’
Jimmy Reid (1976), Inaugural address as Rector of Glasgow University
‘It is my sincere contention that anyone
who can be totally adjusted to our society
is in greater need of psychiatric analysis
and treatment than anyone else’ ibid
The Marketing Matrix:
why I’m not lovin' it, will not just do it,
and, sure as hell, will never be worth it
Gerard Hastings
Who’s Afraid of the Nanny State?
A Charles Perkins Centre and
Sydney Law School Symposium
Monday 28 April, 2014
ISM Institute for Social Marketing
structure
1. Marketing: rhetoric and reality
2. Autonomy, choice and the
human spirit
3. Back to Bukowski: reasserting
our autonomy
The rhetoric of marketing
the customer is always right; consumer
sovereignty; the customer always comes first;
consumer choice; customer satisfaction
producing what you can sell,
not selling what you can produce
‘retail therapy’
it all sounds most agreeable
(particularly for rich folk like us)
But then I remember another story…
negative equity
materialism
damaged lives
shortened lives
The holy trinity of public health: food, alcohol and tobacco
nearly 2/3rds of Australians are
now overweight or obese –
this will take 1 in 5 health $s by 2018
(Lang and Rayner, 2012)
3rd greatest cause of
premature death – even
tho half the world don’t
drink (WHO)
1 in 2 smokers are killed
by their smoking 8 million a year by 2030
(Doll and Peto 1992; WHO)
shortened lives
The holy trinity of public health: food, alcohol and tobacco
The unholy trinity of corporate marketing
The obvious truth that this marketing has an effect
shortened lives
Industrial Epidemics
‘The concept of an epidemic associated with the
commercialization of a dangerous product
….diseases of consumers, workers and
community residents caused by industrial
promotion of consumable products …. In each
instance, public health oriented policies run the
risk of being opposed by industrial corporations
in a health versus profit trade-off.’
(Jahiel and Babor 2007)
all this starts young…
suffer the little children
‘Children are important to marketers for three
fundamental reasons:
1. They represent a large market in themselves
because they have their own money to spend.
88% of smokers
2. They influence their parents’ selection of
as children
products andstart
brands
Surgeon General (2012)
3. They will grow up to be consumers of
everything; hence marketers need to start
building up their brand consciousness and
loyalty as early as possible.’
Foxall and Goldsmith (1994) Consumer Psychology for Marketers p203
http://www.kelloggskrave.com/home.html
play has become just another marketing tool
suffer the little children
The Scandal of Infant Formula
‘I shouldn’t be standing in front of you, on the 25
year anniversary of the Code, telling you so little
has changed and that companies continue to
encourage mothers to spend money they don’t
have on manufactured food most of them don’t
need. I shouldn’t be standing in front of you
because it shouldn’t still be happening. But it is,
because the voluntary code clearly isn’t working,
and children are dying as a result’
Jasmine Whitbread, CEO, Save the Children UK (2007)
but we are educated,
autonomous adults;
we wouldn’t fall for
this trickery…
structure
1. Marketing: rhetoric and reality
2. Autonomy, choice and the
human spirit
3. Back to Bukowski: reasserting
our autonomy
Food
‘After the mid twentieth century there was, for the first
time in world history, enough food in the world to feed
everybody adequately. The problem was that it was very
unequally distributed.’ ….
‘By the late twentieth century the people of the
industrialised countries of western Europe, Japan and
north America ate half the world’s food though they
constituted only a quarter of the world’s population….
…a domestic cat in the US ate more meat than people
living in Africa and Latin America.’
(Clive Ponting 2000)
We are all implicated in this outrage
Does this feel like an
autonomous decision?
medicines
‘Of the 1,400 new drugs developed between 1975
and 1999, only 13 were designed to treat or prevent
tropical diseases and three to treat tuberculosis. In
the year 2000, no drugs were being developed to
treat tuberculosis, compared to 8 for impotence or
erectile dysfunction and 7 for baldness.’ (Bakan 2004)
Does this feel like an
autonomous decision?
The scandal of HIV/AIDS medication
Between 1998-2003 10 million poor people,
mainly in Africa, died because pharma
companies insisted on protecting their patents
coffee
Does this feel like an
autonomous decision?
Up to £450
per kilo
£185 per kilo
£17 per kilo
£2.26 per kilo
inequalities
The source of so much hardship in our society…
732 times
median worker’s pay*
*Executive Pay Watch: in1980 factor was 32
How do you spend $25 million every year?
Fear not, a friendly marketer will come to the rescue
‘The solution to the
problem appeared
some years ago in the
form of automatic
winders …a box
equipped with an
electric motor and an
“artificial wrist” on
which to mount the
timepiece’
‘the Thesaurus (Euro 86,000) a desk entirely
dedicated to the storage of watches’
the myth of customer choice
A large supermarket has
40,000 lines
Marketing ‘helps’ us
choose: BOGOFs, mood
music, positioning, soil
sprinkled on potatoes..
Moving a product from
side to main isle
increases sales by 400%
Tesco says almost 30,000 tonnes of food 'wasted'
http://www.bbc
.co.uk/news/uk
-24603008
accessed
24 10 2013
industry wide
Does this feel like an
autonomous decision?
Facebook strikes Diageo advertising deal
‘Facebook has struck a multimillion-dollar advertising
partnership with Diageo, owner of drinks brands including
Smirnoff and Guinness, in the latest move by the social
networking website to form closer ties with marketers….
Financial Times, 18 September 2011
Facebook are working
with us to make sure that we are not only
fan collecting but that they are actively
engaged and driving advocacy for our
brands. We are looking for increases in
customer engagement and increases in
sales and share…
Kathy Parker, Diageo’s Senior Vicepresident Global Marketing
Does this feel like an
autonomous decision?
If you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer.
You’re the product being sold
Value or values?
‘Olympism is a
philosophy of life which
places sport at the
service of human kind’
(IOC Olyimpic Charter, 2011)
Does this feel like an
gender stereotyping
autonomous decision?
our planet
http://www.wwf.org.au/our
Unlocked by melting ice-caps, the
great polar oil rush has begun
Independent 6/9/11
the problem in a nutshell
all this is okay
=
Does this feel like an
every increasing
growth
every increasing
consumption
autonomous decision?
marketing
(gets us shopping;
keeps us quiescent)
this is a catastrophe….
structure
1. Marketing: rhetoric and reality
2. Autonomy, choice and the
human spirit
3. Back to Bukowski: reasserting
our autonomy
be critical
tell our own story
only connect
‘military industrial complex’
(Dwight D Eisenhower1961)
‘alert and knowledgeable citizenry’
Back to Bukowski:
reasserting our autonomy
• Be critical:
Question the assumptions underpinning what we think to
be true, to uncover what we can objectively state to be
true. Be an alert and knowledgeable citizen.
• Tell our own stories:
Back to Bukowski:
reasserting our autonomy
• Be critical:
Question the assumptions underpinning what we think to
be true, to uncover what we can objectively state to be
true. Be an alert and knowledgeable citizen.
• Tell our own stories:
Mandela
We enter this world alone, we will leave it alone
And we know we will leave it; we know we will die
We seek a higher purpose; to better ourselves
Self-transcendence: ‘to escape from the tormenting
consciousness of being merely ourselves’ (Aldous Huxley)
Hard work – the danger of ‘bogus transcendence’
The bogus liberation of consumption
‘If he needs a million acres to make him feel rich, seems to
me he needs it ‘cause he feels awful poor inside hisself, and
if he’s poor in hisself, there ain’t no million acres gonna make
him feel rich, an’ maybe he’s disappointed that nothin’ he can
do’ll make him feel rich…’
‘I ain’t trying to preach no sermon, but I
never seen nobody that’s busy as a prairie
dog collectin’ stuff that wasn’t
disappointed’.
Steinbeck, Grapes of Wrath, p.264-5.
The myth of customer satisfaction: in reality we end up
perpetually dissatisfied, otherwise we would stop shopping
The bogus liberation of consumption
Political power
‘user friendly makes a hash of democracy. Democracy
requires that citizens be willing to make some effort to
find out how the world around them works. Few
American proponents of the war in Iraq, wanted to learn
about Iraq (most couldn’t in fact locate it on a map)’
Richard Sennett (2006) The Culture of the New Capitalism
‘a really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which
the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their
managers control an army of slaves who do not need to
be coerced because they love their servitude’.
Huxley, A. (1958) Brave New World Revisited
The bogus liberation of consumption
Political power
91 of the largest 150 economies on our planet are
corporations, not countries, ‘with Wal-Mart larger than
Sweden or Saudi Arabia and Exxon Mobil larger than
Denmark or South Africa. Royal Dutch Shell is larger than
Morocco, Vietnam and Slovakia combined’ (Bendell, 2011)
Our shopping gives
thisover
power
‘Corporations thatthem
are turning
these huge profits can
own everything: the media, the universities, the mines,
the weapons industry, insurance hospitals, drug
companies, non-governmental. They can buy judges,
journalists, politicians, publishing houses, television
stations, bookshops and even activists’ (Arundhati Roy 2011)
The bogus liberation of consumption
Spiritual vacancy
Problems, challenges and overcoming adversity are
vital parts of our humanity
‘Imagine what would have
happened if Adam and Eve had
not lived in a garden but in a smart
building. The divine designer
would probably have arranged that
they never saw apples’
(Ursula Franklin in Morozov 2013)
it is also lonely work
Back to Bukowski:
reasserting our autonomy
• Be critical:
Question the assumptions underpinning what we think
to be true, to uncover what we can objectively state to
be true. An alert and knowledgeable citizenry
• Tell our own stories:
We enter this world alone, we will leave it alone
We all know we are going to die  self-transcendence
• Only connect:
Listen to and link our stories
Societal transcendence
Watch the Canary
The ‘marginalised are like the miner’s canary: their
distress is the first sign of a danger that threatens us all’
Guinier & Torres (2002): The Miner’s Canary, Harvard University Press
(disadvantaged) ‘communities signal problems
with the ways we have structured power and
privilege. These pathologies are not located in
the canary. Indeed we reject the incrementalist
approach that locates complex social and political
problems in the individual. Such an approach
would solve the problems of the mines by
outfitting the canary with a tiny gas mask to
withstand the toxic atmosphere’. Guinier and Torres (2002)
‘if the miners were watching the canary they
would not wait for it to fall off its perch, legs up.
They would notice that it is talking to them. “I
can’t breathe, but you know what? You are being
poisoned too. If you save me you save yourself.
Why is that mine owner sending all of us down
here to be poisoned anyway?” The miners might
then realise that they cannot escape this lifethreatening social arrangement without a strategy
that disrupts the way things are.’ ibid
Indigenous peoples
‘another imagination – an imagination
outside of capitalism as well as communism.
An imagination that has an altogether
different understanding of what constitutes
happiness and fulfilment’.
She goes on to argue for greater recognition
for indigenous peoples, ‘the people who still
know the secrets of sustainable living’ and
‘are not relics of the past, but the guides to
our future’.
Arundhati Roy (2011) The Guardian and New Internationalist
‘Before our white brothers arrived to make us civilized
men, we didn't have any kind of prison. Because of
this, we had no delinquents. Without a prison, there
can be no delinquents.
We had no locks nor keys and therefore among us
there were no thieves. When someone was so poor
that he couldn't afford a horse, a tent or a blanket, he
would, in that case, receive it all as a gift. We were
too uncivilized to give great importance to private
property. We didn't know any kind of money and
consequently, the value of a human being was not
determined by his wealth. We had no written laws laid
down, no lawyers, no politicians, therefore we were
not able to cheat and swindle one another.
John (Fire) Lame Deer Sioux Lakota (1903-1976)
We were really in bad shape before the white
men arrived and I don't know how to explain
how we were able to manage without these
fundamental things that (so they tell us) are so
necessary for a civilized society’
John (Fire) Lame Deer Sioux Lakota (1903-1976)
conclusion
1. Marketers and marketing are very powerful
2. But Bukowski is right we also have power
3. And we are seeking change
I have discussed these issues in many public
meetings in the last two years and I always
ended by asking for suggestions as to how we
can fight back – this is the current top ten…
Current Top Ten Actions
pay attention
self-produce
something you
would have
bought
disloyalty
cards: swap them
regularly
stop wearing
logos
get a
favourite wild
flower
make all
our shopping
choices moral
choices
tell four
friends about
this stuff
list 10 things
that make you happy;
count how many depend
on shopping.
resist much,
obey little
(walt whitman)
calculate your
‘servitude index’ (how
long, after tax, it takes
you to earn $10)
What are your ideas for
bringing about this change?