Have you ever noticed that marketing is annoyingly bland?
Even companies that follow the political mainstream and pay homage to political correctness manage to do so in a stomach-churningly dull way.
When you go to marketing school, one of the first things you learn is that you should never include hot potato topics in your marketing campaigns.
Such things are outside the realm of business, you learn, and can lead to PR disasters.
The world, unfortunately, is changing. And businesses are no longer politically neutral.
Today we have major brands using their advertising clout to patronize people about the unconscious biases. And it’s all perfectly acceptable, it seems.
It’s essential to understand what’s going on here. Society is becoming more dialectic.
The narrative is becoming more adversarial. And the economic system is, for the first time, dividing along political lines.
We have outright liberal organizations – including some social media platforms.
And outright right-wing companies – mainly in the survival market, but spreading elsewhere.
The reasons for this are simple: political lines are becoming so important, some companies only want to cater to people who share their beliefs about the world. It’s getting that serious.
A man called Mark of Freedom summarises perfectly the battle going on in the current world. There are people who want freedom, and there are those who want to take it away. And the market is slowly reflecting this.
Some companies use their advertising to promise consumers genuine freedom in the classical liberal tradition. And others are using their corporate resources as a platform to enslave people with dreadful ideas.
What Does This Have To Do With Marketing?
For marketers, this raises some important questions.
Namely, is it time to finally begin incorporating hot potato topics in marketing campaigns?
We already see this in several areas.
Cosmetics companies are no longer willing to feature beautiful women in their advertising for fear of offending. Models have put on a lot of weight.
Likewise, we see companies taking the line of certain racial activist groups, showing solidarity in their marketing materials.
It’s a political as well as marketing move, alienating those who have objections.
The time, however, may be coming when this sort of thing becomes more prevalent.
Holding the middle ground is going to become more difficult for advertisers. More to the point, firms may not want to if taking a position on a hot potato topic provides a financial advantage.
We’re likely to see bifurcation along political lines among companies that traditionally serve particular ideologies.
Survivalist brands, for instance, typically cater to right-wingers worried about the prospect of pandemics and nuclear war.
On the other hand, social media caters to people on the left who want to talk about the problems in their lives. These companies are already beginning to reflect the politics of their audiences.
The likely outcome is that this will continue for some time yet. And that’s going to change how we do marketing fundamentally. It’s kind of scary.
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