I hate marketing. 

Despite being a second-year student in an International Business degree, I find my personality and interests lie elsewhere. Though, I am fortunate that expertise does not discriminate against those who lack passion. Thus, might I share a personal reflection – perhaps limitedly, with a strong bias from my part; that Marketing destroys human rationality and behaviour. Continue reading to see whether I’m right > <

Have you ever been attracted by a “buy one free one” promotion that stimulates your desire to buy certain unnecessary products?  Or perhaps you have interacted with a publication or an article for its appealing nature; be it through the form of a question or some word manipulation (as per the title of my article)?

On a serious note, marketing is never merely advertisements plastered on different social platforms, it also consists of relative strategies in designing products and services that serve different purposes. 

Marketing in itself can be described as the action of conducting business or economic activities in the market driven by consumer demand. Etymologically speaking, the conception of Marketing uses the prefix ‘ing’ which in the English language is used to explain a present, continuous action, signifying thus that the project of Marketing is one that is constantly evolving. However, I would argue that we have reached the end of Marketing. Market-ing is dead. It is now the Market-end.

To begin with, the criticism about the rise in marketing became an ethical concern emerged because consumers are, to some large extent, “seduced” by different marketing strategies to purchase the goods, which eventually bring profit to the company.

To better illustrate my argument, here’s an example: I watched numerous Thailand films during my leisure time and surprisingly, I discovered that in Thailand film/entertainment industry, sponsored products are implicitly shown throughout the movie or series, in which actors will know the products beforehand, and naturally act in a given circumstance with the product shown and logo facing the camera. In this way, film consumers will notice the products throughout their film experience, which indirectly influences their consumer behaviour to perhaps purchase the displayed product. Of course, this might be prevalent in other countries, as well as this millennium where videos and any source of information can be viral with a single touch.

On top of that, marketing is pushed to “market-end” due to the “end of rational thinking”. Accompanied with the era where information is constantly bombarded at a global scale. Everything has to be made fast and efficiently, which causes people to have less time to filter  the information provided. As a fatal consequence, people tend to capture the mere superficial meaning of the information and provide judgements and criticism based on that. This triggers marketing strategies to shift and evolve in this trend, and that’s why “click bait” contents are conquering the social media platform. Likes, shares, retweets, comments seem to be the most significant component, more than the resources of information, than the credibility of information, than everything!! As a result, users that normalise such situations might receive information as given at face-value, without conducting any deep analysis or consideration, thus fostering an environment of misinformation even in supposedly-credible news centres.

Market is moving and evolving, but people/consumers in the market are dead: they stopped criticising the content, they stopped critically analysing the data, and they began to voice out based on limited and superficial knowledge on the topic, just like how spoon-fed and examination-based educational system ruined Malaysia and other Asian countries.The problem I feel, is severe, but what impact must my writings make to induce such mindset change at a societal scale? Note that such major shifts of marketing strategies are mainly due to people’s wants to be “brilliant” and gain tons of information at once after technological advancement.

Even so, might I offer guidance; of what I usually do when I encounter potentially misleading information :

–   Understand that data are biassed and marketing strategies (ex. Click bait) exists according to different social media platforms.

–   Take my time to process and filter information by reading the full context of the information from a credible body.

–   Discuss with friends (or other connections) regarding this issue, you will never know what you may expect > < and it helps in having a deeper grasp of the topic though

–   Share your thoughts on any platform that seems suitable, just like what I did here 😉 

Hope these small tips might make you more aware of the “trap” in marketing. Let’s revive marketing! 

Thank you for reading, I hope you enjoyed it.