Tag / hammer

by Nathan Coumbe

Marketing isn’t evil. You are.

Okay, so you’re not evil – I just wanted to get your attention.

Our culture is so used to being “sold to”, to being bombarded with advertisements and brand marketing that we’ve been taught to believe that marketing, trying to influence someone to do something or change something or buy something, is evil.

Marketing is a tool. Tools are not evil; they are morally neutral. Their capacity for good or for evil lies in the hands of the wielder.

Would you ever call a hammer evil? Of course not: personifying an inanimate object with morality is preposterous. If you used the hammer to bludgeon someone to death…is the hammer guilty of evil or are you? Did the hammer commit evil?

Likewise, if the hammer is used to put a nail into a wall to hang a picture for a little old lady in a retirement home, the hammer is not good, nor has it done good. The person using the hammer has used it for its intended purpose to do good.

Marketing is not evil, but people doing marketing can be. Using marketing is evil if it is used to persuade people to do bad things or to do things that cause harm to themselves or others. Using marketing for deception is wrong.

Marketing that creates beneficial change in the world is good. Persuading people to do something that helps themselves or creates better circumstances, even if they know they are being influenced by marketing, is good.

Marketing isn’t good or evil, but what and how you market might be.

Go market the right thing in the right way.

(Who determines what the right thing is? That is a discussion for another day.)

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by Nathan Coumbe

No one cares how the hot dog is made

When we create something in which we take great pride, we have a tendency to expound on nitty-gritty details of the work that went into it and how it works.

The people who will use or benefit from your something-or-other rarely care about the what or how: they want to know why.

Why should they use it? Why should they buy it? How does implementing it benefit them? How does it improve their lives?

No one cares how a hot dog is made as long as it is delicious and satisfies hunger.

No one cares about the hammer you built. It doesn’t matter what kind of wood the handle is made of or what sort of rare metal from Mars makes up the head. What the user/buyer/beneficiary wants to know is simple:

Will that hammer put a nail in the wall so that I can hang my picture?

Seek to understand who your widget is for and why they would want to use it: that’s the only thing that matters to the end-user.

(You probably should care how a hot dog is made, but that is a discussion for another day.)

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