Destroying Happiness – The Pursuit of Marketers
I’ve heard this message before – just never from someone within the marketing profession.
Today, I journeyed over to Seth Godin’s blog as read a different post about his book Purple Cow and realized my RSS feed was in need of good marketing advice.
What I found was rather startling coming from a marketing guru:
A journalist asked me, Most people have a better standard of living today than Louis XIV did in his day. So why are so many people unhappy?
What you have doesn’t make you unhappy. What you want does.
And want is created by us, the marketers.
Marketers trying to grow market share will always work to make their non-customers unhappy.
It’s interesting to note that marketers trying to maintain market share have a lot of work to do in reminding us that we’re happy.
Such “happiness” I’ve found to be fleeting. Yet we’ve all fallen into the trap of believing the acquisition of certain material things – the latest tech gizmos, (how many iPod users were still happy after Apple came out with a bigger iPhone and slashed the price on the model you paid $400 for!?), cars (that new car smell quickly fades – at least to the owner’s nose!), and even homes (often because the staged beauty that we fell in love with is then filled with all our junk that we bought to make us happy and then doesn’t look nearly as nice!) – will give us that peace, satisfaction, and joy which we long for, right?
Or am I the only idiot whose gullibility led to stupid purchases that I would later regret!?
What do you think? What’s the most vivid example you can recall?
Looking forward to your comments!
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Mr WordPress
August 13, 2008