Can marketing be more meaningful?
Transcript of this video:
My friend, the cartoonist Hugh MacLeod, did a cartoon,15 maybe 20 years ago. The caption for which was, I seem to remember, “the market for something to believe in is infinite,” which was very popular at the time.
I really like that cartoon now. But when it first came out, I had rather mixed feelings about it because certainly then marketing was principally about trying to attach great meaning to the selling of material things.
So I could see people looking at this cartoon and thinking, “oh, this is a great way to shift product.”
But what that cartoon points to for me now is something I noticed about the world a while ago, which is we seem to have operated the world recently as if material things are infinite and spiritual connectedness is finite.
We end up consuming a lot of stuff in, in pursuit of an apparently scarce sense of feeling and connection. Whereas I think the opposite’s the case.
Actually, I think our spiritual potential is actually, well, I dunno if it’s infinite, that it’s very high, but our material resources, it is becoming increasingly clear, are finite.
So perhaps Hugh’s cartoon now is a challenge to invert a marketing model, which was about wasting essentially material resources as if beautiful human connectedness is a difficult thing to achieve without them and flipping it, seeking to create more human connectedness at less material expense.
Photo by Marcos Paulo Prado on Unsplash
