There is a famous saying in The Great Gatsby: "Some people's conduct seems to be built on hard rocks, while others' conduct seems to be built on mud, but beyond a certain limit, I don't care what it is built on." Borrowing this metaphor, it seems that this kind of marketing behavior that occupies the eye and controls the outlet is really built in the quagmire.
1. Advertising. Nowadays, in the overwhelming advertisements, creativity and vulgarity seem to be out of date, which directly opens the mode of "bully" and "liar".
"Bullying" mode: for example, something, a treasure, a tour, a direct employment, a wedding dress ... is repeatedly played, hysterically shouting famous brands, simple, direct and rude. Moreover, this kind of advertisement is often placed in the elevator. Advertisers understand the compulsion of closed media channels!
"liar" mode: for example, "a family of three is sitting around the dining table, no matter how careful you are, you should give your daughter a decent birthday." "I am afraid of my world, only two points and one line." "My treat is my treat, and it will be easy next month." The biggest deception is to construct a false sense of equality, thus destroying the moral value and stability cornerstone of the whole society.
2. promotion. Under the so-called internet business model, "low price", "free" and "post bar" seem to be the necessary skills for promotional activities. First of all, at all costs, cultivate users' buying or using habits; Secondly, it is to change the user's behavior and psychological cognition; Thirdly, destroy the operation mode of the original industry and establish new rules of the game of "winner takes all"; Finally, it's time to witness the miracle. From taxi software, anti-virus software and take-away software in previous years to community group buying of "several bundles of cabbage and several kilograms of fruit", the ultimate goal of their promotion is not to sell goods, but to become a monopolist in the industry. This basic logic is no exception.
3. Public relations. As a process of establishing and managing social relations between enterprises and the public, public relations activities must generally follow the principle of public order and good customs and give consideration to the interests of stakeholders. The public relations activities of Internet giants with huge resources are not only creating gods, but also exporting "values". For example, "996 is a blessing", "2000 yuan is humanitarian" and "Look at the people at the bottom who don't exchange their lives for money" ... This is blatant hypocrisy and naked moral kidnapping. Traditional crisis public relations principles such as "quick response", "correct attitude" and "responding to the public" are pedantic and redundant in the face of the arrogance of capital.
4. sales. The original intention of promotion is to activate customers' needs and meet customers' needs with suitable products, but at present many promotion methods are simply "routines". For example, booking pre-sale, long-term rental, installment, card handling, package ... It is said that some membership organizations, such as beauty salons and gyms, will harvest their membership cards until 2025! Once it explodes, the road for consumers to recover the deposit is far away. 202 1 On the first day, a long-term rental apartment "exploded". Pan Shiyi, founder of SOHO, commented: This is a variant of Ponzi scheme.
It is thought-provoking that the occurrence of the above-mentioned marketing behavior not only lacks the voice of questioning and reflection from the perspective of marketing behavior or brand ethics, but is encouraged by interest forces and advocated by "innovation" in various names.
When there are so many brands that can only be distinguished by color, no one evaluates the cost of steel, rubber and other resources consumed by a large number of low-end manufacturing, and no one questions the pressure on the environment caused by abandoned bicycles. Instead, it advocates the innovation of "time-sharing" mode, and enjoys economic green and environmental protection.
At the peak of nearly 3,500 P2P online lending financial businesses, not only did no one pull the alarm, but it was also packaged as a "self-service" Internet financial innovation. In June, 2020, Guo Shuqing, Chairman of China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission, publicly revealed that the online lending platform "still has more than 800 billion yuan of lenders who have not recovered it". By the end of 2020, the number of online lending platforms in China has completely gone to zero. Behind a chicken feather is a moral lesson and a financial lesson given to hundreds of millions of people in China by the super meat grinder in this investment field.
When precision marketing becomes popular, marketing terms or "hot words" such as big data, user portraits, thousands of faces, knowledge maps and directional matching become the fruits of marketing technicalization (especially compared with traditional marketing "user insight" and "communication concept"), consumers have actually become prey and "streaking" prey with no privacy in Internet space.
However, who cares? As long as the enterprise can rapidly grow into a unicorn with a valuation of more than 1 100 million dollars, as long as the enterprise can successfully IPO until it devours huge resources and expands into a "too big to fail" behemoth, in the discourse system of neoliberal economy, the huge negative externality spillover can be gently erased by the phrase "free trade and spontaneous adjustment".
More seriously, marketing in the quagmire has brought two far-reaching consequences to society:
1. Language corruption
There is no doubt that advertising language has an important influence on daily language, and the current advertising language has caused more harm to Chinese: it has dispelled the original meaning of the established text; Make sentences and change words; A twisted grammatical structure. Moreover, this kind of destruction is also rape without consent, that is, advertisers/advertisers, as a special role in contemporary culture, have the privilege of publishing new languages and expressions without consulting their peers.
More importantly, the words of public figures are empty, simple and rude, lacking sincerity and even hypocritical fraud, which will lead to "language corruption." In other words, once language becomes a pure word game, its purpose is to manipulate people's hearts or realize business, that is, it loses its original communication function, which eventually leads to the destruction of people's logical thinking ability, the decline of moral level and the distortion of values. Language has become an evil marketing tool of pragmatism. Such as "cash", a speculative word, has been inadvertently integrated into daily language and become a neutral expression. People have lost the consciousness of reflection and criticism when using such words.
2. Digital imprisonment
In the circle of digital marketing and social media marketing, there is a buzzword called "feeding", which means accurately distributing the content that the target audience likes, just like feeding pets in captivity. In fact, as early as the appearance of the Internet, nicholas negroponte predicted the appearance of "the Daily Me", a completely personalized newspaper. Keith Sunstein, an American law professor, agrees with My Daily very much, and further refines it into the concept of "information cocoon room" in the book "Information Utopia" to warn the consequences of information partial eclipse and information closure caused by personalization of communication system.
If commercial enterprises use big data and information technology to try to control all the information that consumers can see and hear, and then control consumers' thoughts and concepts, then consumers will unconsciously fall into a designed "information cocoon room" and be deprived of the right to know, the right to choose and the possibility of development, which is undoubtedly equivalent to giving consumers a digital imprisonment.
There are two ways to expand the market: one is extension expansion, which occupies more market space and competes for more consumers through market penetration; The second is connotative expansion, which guides and manipulates fashion through technological innovation, artificially maintains or expands the market demand of a certain commodity, forces "old" products to be "outdated" and shortens the "social life" of products, thus forcibly eliminating "old products" and forcing consumers to buy "new products" that meet fashion standards.
People who get rich do not have a correct view of wealth and have a strong desire for expression, which provides a suitable soil for the popularity of consumerism. However, in addition to productivity improvement and national psychological factors, the deeper reason lies in the market expansion impulse of enterprises under the condition of oversupply.
The harm of consumerism is obvious:
First, waste due to lack of resources. Consumerism advocates unrestrained consumption, one-time consumption and "one-time use" consumption, which is a great waste of natural resources and overdraws the living space of mankind in the future.
Second, replace the means of realization with the name of happiness. In modern society, it is understandable to pursue personal happiness, but after reckless consumption, it is often not happiness but disaster. For example, in recent years, college students frequently buy famous brands through online loans, resulting in high debts.
Third, replace long-term vision with short-term perspective. Individuals and society need a long-term vision if they want to achieve lasting, balanced and all-round development. Consumerism, a short-sighted behavior that only cares about eating and drinking, will make some people eager to enjoy and multiply inertia.
Fourth, the autonomy of individual behavior is weakened and the controllability is enhanced. Under the wave of consumerism, blindly catching up with the so-called "fashion" and "trend" has lost the ability to think independently. And some enterprises that ignore social responsibility will do everything possible to induce consumers to meet the needs of stimulating, comparing and generating for the sake of "eyeball", thus earning high profits.
In this sense, consumerism, especially extreme consumerism advocating "fashion", is a consumption exploitation mechanism manipulated by capital. Moreover, this exploitation mechanism is carried out on the basis of "voluntary" and "cooperation" of consumers, so it is a more concealed exploitation. Zygmunt bauman, a British thinker who put forward the concept of "new poor", pointed out in The Besieged Society: "Capitalism has found that once consumers, not producers, are exploited, morbid entertainment impulses may become the biggest or even inexhaustible source of profits."
In the information age where the Internet is ubiquitous, we should reflect rationally: Who let us entertain to death?
Sales & Market has a profound understanding of "good marketing" and puts forward "three questions about beauty": Why can't you make a good product? How should those beautiful products (services) with a sense of the future be described? How can China's products, brands and cultures undertake the mission of building the same body of human destiny? The author refines it as "the truth, goodness and beauty of marketing".
1. Seeking truth from products
Good products are people-centered and serve people. It is instructive to trace the history of Bauhaus design in Germany. After industrial revolution in europe, the "design-manufacturing-sales" integrated system of handicraft production was broken. The separation of design, manufacturing and sales has caused the disadvantages of indulging in the application of new technologies and materials, shoddy products and lack of aesthetic standards. In order to correct the flashy, complex and vulgar fashion of industrial products, the Bauhaus concept emphasizes: 1. Life is more important than art; 2. Less is more; 3. Design serves function. This people-centered design concept makes the economy (efficiency), practicality (function) and artistry (aesthetics) of industrial products perfectly integrated, and art is involved in modern human life comprehensively and integrally. Bauhaus's thoughts and aesthetic tastes have profoundly influenced many brands, including Muji and Apple.
In recent years, in the most competitive and representative home appliance industry in China, a new generation of smart manufacturers, represented by Midea Group, have launched COLMO high-end brand home appliances that highlight Bauhaus design concept and balance and integrate product functions with rational aesthetics, which represents the new possibility of product innovation and truth-seeking for China enterprises.
Spread good things.
In a submissive world, marketing spreads goodwill between people and between people and society, not the other way around. On the one hand, the policy guidance from the competent authorities shows that the supervision of brand content will become increasingly standardized and strict; On the other hand, the awakening of the circle has also strengthened the spontaneous power of public supervision. This requires enterprise marketing to strengthen self-discipline and self-supervision in content output, such as observing public order and good customs in the creation of related topics such as region, gender, income, patriotism and heroes. In short, content communication must be people-oriented, take into account the concerns of stakeholders and the public, and improve management from the aspects of corporate culture construction and institutional mechanism design.
3. Enterprises seek beauty
Peter drucker pointed out in his classic book Management that enterprises are the organs of society. Enterprises do not exist for themselves, but to achieve specific social goals and meet the specific needs of society, communities and individuals. He emphasized that as an enterprise organ, there are only three management functions: economic performance, employee development and sense of accomplishment, managing social influence and social responsibility. As a social cell, an enterprise must be benign, not a malignant cell that harms the social body. A higher moral standard requires that a great enterprise must have the mission and initial intention of serving the national economy and people's livelihood on the basis of pursuing profits.
Zhang Jian, a patriotic entrepreneur in the late Qing Dynasty, was a model when the country was in danger. 1895, Zhang Jian founded Sheng Da cotton mill. The word "great destiny" comes from the Book of Changes, which embodies Zhang Jian's ideal that "the greatest politics between heaven and earth is the national economy and the people's livelihood", and it is China's commercial road that "only seeks its own interests and knows its way without considering its merits"
1. Social cost view
Social cost refers to the extra cost that "products" overflow due to externalities other than the operating costs of enterprises (private sector) and are borne by society. The most typical, such as the social cost of environment and governance. At the same time, social cost can also be regarded as an opportunity cost, that is, using social and economic resources for a certain purpose and giving up other opportunities with the most profitable economic resources, such as steel and rubber, which are not consumed in the production of bicycles, but used for other purposes. For a long time, the excessive social cost of enterprises in the name of "innovation" has been greatly ignored.
2. Secret protection
A few years ago, Li Yanhong's controversial theory of "privacy for convenience" reflected the huge asymmetric position of large enterprises and users in data disposal rights. Today, when we are highly alert to the disorderly expansion of corporate public power, "privacy protection" will become a key issue for Internet platform enterprises. Admittedly, users can't control their private data, and social network providers can have full access to user data, which is technically inevitable. However, as an enterprise, we can't take the weak concept of privacy and the lack of means to protect rights and interests as business opportunities, let alone the so-called "inferiority" of human nature as an excuse to do evil. At the end of 2020, the General Administration of Market Supervision issued the Anti-monopoly Guide in the Field of Platform Economy (Draft for Comment), pointing out the disadvantages of the Internet platform, such as "killing big data", which means that consumer privacy protection and fair competition are placed in an important position in the development of the network economy from the legal level. It can be predicted that the new regulatory policy will definitely promote the standardization and innovation of large-scale Internet platforms in corporate culture, strategy and mechanism design.
3. Human dignity
According to the latest data released by the National Bureau of Statistics, in 2020, the average working hours of employees in enterprises nationwide will reach 46.9 hours per week, and the working hours of employees in enterprises implementing the 996 working system will be nearly twice that of Japan. Generally speaking, if the development of enterprises is on the rise, overtime is inevitable. However, this does not mean that enterprises can touch the legal bottom line or play "edge ball". What's more, bad corporate culture prevails, such as taking overtime as KPI assessment and taking overtime as a "loyal" attitude. Overtime, as a corporate culture, is publicly advocated, not because of work needs, but because enterprises or capital ignore "people" as a value.
About the author: Doctor of Economics, postdoctoral fellow, Executive Dean of New Retail and Brand Research Institute of Nanjing University of Technology.
Proofreading: Zhang Ke
Person in charge of second instance: Wang Shenzhen