DailyPost 1702
MARKETING TENOR!
Tenor is ”the course of thought that runs through something written or spoken,” and is present in social media and multimedia presentations of multifarious varieties. Since the time of Adam Smith writing the treatise, Wealth of Nations describing ”a system of market-determined wages and free rather than government constrained enterprise,” marketing has never been done on a scale and with such passion to the level of obsession, that is happening today. All of us know that capitalism is there to stay, and marketing, brand creation, monopolies now being termed as creative monopolies too, have transformed our lives and control us in ways we would not have imagined earlier.
The surreptitious marketing and research-based marketing slowly got into such a predictive mode, that we even with best of our effort not to, fall in that well laid trap. The data generated by our transactions helped them to improve their sales pitch in a phenomenal manner – predictable one. Good or bad, the jury is still out. The challenge is somewhere else, the Cambridge Analytica types who treat the electorate as customers. They have successfully displayed their venom in US Presidential Elections 2016 and Brexit without getting into others, who have been influenced at differential levels. Closer home we have Prashant Kishore, who has established himself as the political or the election marketing guru.
Having been born out of marketing or after having developed immense faith in marketing, in an area which was actually not meant for marketing, they find newer means to sell their personas and their governments in a variety of ways. Marketing was meant for business enterprises and for goods and services they had to offer. Now that the politicians and by extrapolation, the governments got into the trade, the whole complexity of marketing changed. We can call it political marketing. The tax money started getting siphoned off into ads and a variety of other marketing gimmicks. The ever-growing multimedia – mass media was ready to gobble as much as was thrown to them. It was a win-win situation. The hapless taxpayer has to go through the agony of watching the ads for which he has paid.
From the political parties and governments, the next logical entity was the politician. His marketing tenor is the best. Individual branding. Personas being created. Spinning story and looking helpful in ads and what not. Ads are also camouflaged as impact features and all that. Social media provides immense opportunities, and comes cheap as well. Bureaucrats also fell prey to the marketing tenor. Just because the medium is there, you cannot become marketable. Our current marketeers have proved this wrong. Marketing the unmarketable is the challenge and lots are doing it successfully. This goes on further in concentric circles and seems everybody is engulfed. Marketing tenor is the undercurrent of our existence and the mainstream of our social relationship.
MARKETING TENOR HAS A CHALLENGE, IF EVERYONE SELLS, WHO BUYS?
Sanjay Sahay