You asked me to do an essay on advertising. "A sitting duck..." -you said-
"...bring along the beef". OK, I'll put a cartridge in my multi-barreled
shotgun.
Let's hope the ducks are too busy browsing on the Lemnae (Lemna minor,
I suppose) of
the lake to take notice of me when I fire.
But they must get a little closer first. My shots are small -designed for birds- and their range is short. So the aim must be good. Hence the delay.
I can't guarantee beef in this situation. I could mistake oxen from cows, but not ducks 8--\ Hopefully what comes out of the hunt will be some hard-to-identify mincemeat of sorts. OK, let's call it beef. Beef is OK. If you make a hamburger, then put it on a slice of Dr Kneipp's marvellous bread together with some fried onion and serve it with a glass of real Czech Pilsener beer. Undoubtedly the best.
After writing the main portion and the main thoughts of this paper I got to read +ORC's essay for +HCU 1998. I think that one is his best. It takes me to my entry point of your site, the .pdf cracking, that I found only weeks after discovering your site, so one of my circles is closed.
In the essay I will, as you requested, take a look at marketing -
hopefully
with little emotion and some analysis. No propaganda, only hard and cold
Ice. I edit this final version with Netscape. I need footnotes in the
document
so that my digressions will not disturb the flow of the text. But you
can't
do that with an ASCII editor 8:--[ Then I gotta use Word, which I
believe common
netiquette has now explicitly forbidden 8::-[
Public advertising is relatively easy to identify and see through. Everybody recognises it at a glance. But let's try a crack. The real point of advertising is
- to make you buy something you don't need, or
- a particular brand of what you need, or
- a more expensive variety than you need of a commodity you
definitely
do need.
I will dwell only a little more on the tricks; +ORC has done it well enough. Read him. I would only add Thorstein B. Veblen's analysis with the keyword "Conspicuous consumption". There are only a few English links to be found on Altavista (http://qed.econ.queensu.ca/walras/bios/veblen.html is the best), but Amazon has the books: (this time spam could have been useful, but I had thought of them anyway)
- Theory of the Leisure Class (Penguin Classics) -- Thorstein B.
Veblen;
Paperback
- The Theory of the Leisure Class (Dover Thrift Editions) --
Thorstein
B. Veblen; Paperback
- The Instinct of Workmanship and the State of the Industrial Arts
-- Thorstein B. Veblen; Paperback
In very short: There is a great market appeal in goods that makes the customer look or feel (or believe they are sort of) rich.
Advertising on this level is easy to crack. No need for Zen cracking
here. But
it is bloody hard to reverse because it is completely open.
The cracker goes for the Administrator privileges. The more
sophisticated
industries go for the higher level where each customer represents a
higher
share of the market.
Then for the really interesting part:
I saith: We have all heard about sildenafil recently. Lots. Every
day.
You reply: No, not me!
I persist: You have. I have only been witholding the trade name: Viagra. (This touches another strategy: the building of trade name identities. So a generic sildenafil pill will be of no interest to those who burgle the pharmacies in search of the Sex Pill.)
- Viagra - the sex drug. "Only approved for impotence, not for
healthy
persons - say the drug regulators on the front pages!" Which makes
everybody
believe that it makes a man able to perform better than his normal best
(which must be
more than a non-medicated man according to Balzac (late 1700), who
made only eleven, plus a dry one, and avoided execution by it). Who pays
the regulators to do this exercise? Is payment in naturals?
- Viagra as THE sex drug for women. Haven't you read it? If it had been advertisement, all civilised countries would crack down on an advertisement claiming that sildenafil was a sex drug for women. Because there is NO scientific proof. "The results of clinical trials are promising." This is purely a rumour, it is a news story with a poorly identified source - so it is protected by the laws of free speach. But it's a lie at the present state of scientific development. When will a journalist ask for the scientific proof?
Again: No scientific proof - because the formal testing has been done in selected persons with a perceived problem and who have produced sufficient physical proof.
But to penetrate society with the marketing: "Viagra blue" has been launched as a fashion colour for women. Dressed so unsexily that a man will need a pill? Or is the message "Eat me first?"
And more: The sildenafil exhibited (!) in the Israeli Parliament was stolen. An exhibition of a drug to be approved by the parliament? Outrageous.
And this is all news stories. Because Pfizer officially states that they are worried by all this press. You may believe it if you like, sucker!
The main product of Pfizer, the manufacturer, is marketing. It has
been
strengthening its American sales force hugely, and have got themselves
a new PR agency recently. They acquire co-marketing projects by showing
potential collaborators their success record in previous projects. (Some
of this information could be read on the Web side of the marketing
analyst
bureau Scott-Levin (www.scottlevin.com). Unfortunately, the page appears
to have been removed. )
The pharmaceutical industry boasts of its high research budgets. Up to 15 percent of turnover - same as marketing - (and 20 percent profits). All this comes from sales.
Now, how do you win the opinion leaders who can do the really effective marketing for you? You wine them and dine them. You flatter them by inviting them to hold lectures. But most of all you flatter them by admitting them into your research and marketing their invaluable contribution. But it often is reverse research. The answers are all there already. What is needed is documentation to persuade the regulators (like the FDA of the US of A) to approve it (grant marketing authorisation). So they start huge clinical trials projects. Thousands of patients may be included. Like the 4s (4444 Scandinavian patients) for the cholesterol lowering drug simvastatin (oh, sorry, Zocor).
This exercise has an international set of rules. For instance you may within the legal rules discontinue the drug the patient already uses and put them on yours. And when the trial is over, you will most often have the State reimbursement system paying for the patients the rest of their lives, unless another clinical trial comes along.
But if you have a "research project", you can wine and dine the doctors, you can pay them for their efforts, you can send them for congresses on the Maldives or Seychelles or Australia, and you can give out all the test medication for free (otherwise strictly forbidden).
This is all legal. No rules against it, at least not in the European Union, Fravia+ (and +ORC). (BTW: I have noticed the marketeer trick of using your name time and again, Fravia+)
But what is the value of this "science"? Most often it is only the
documentation
that the test drug is similar to other well-known drugs on the market.
Who needs another? Only the manufacturer.
You have made a new drug. There are no real competitors. This enables you to put an outrageous price, say 15 Euro per tablet, on your product. Nobody will pay. What do you do?
You mobilise the potential users. You sponsor the establishment of the headache society, or the osteoporosis society. And then you let the chairwoman of the society go to the women of the Health Committee of the Parliament and persuade them that this drug is witheld from state subsidies because of sexism in the Ministry of Health.
Guess what happens!
This was the cracking bit. How about reversing?
I think we must know our limitations.
THE MASS MARKET, I think is beyond reach
if we use the bottom up approach. We can all do our small things, like
bicycling instead of driving a car, not following clothes fashions,
preparing
one's own food instead of buying
factory-made - and a lot of other (but this makes jobs insecure for
others). In my rather well-to-do neighbourhood people buy a lot of used
clothes and furniture; the poorer areas of the city do less of the sort.
"My baby must have new clothes". As usual the poor ones are the most abused ones...
some time ago appeared a quite interesting english film about this stuff: "Raining stones".
I perform a private boycott - like Fravia+ - of commercial TV (and most
other TVs as well, come to think of it). It amuses me when the market
analyst firm interviews
me about the knowledge of current advertising and finally asks me about
my family income, which is more than I deserve. There you lost a good
customer.
But I think the uneducated and/or poor are more helpless victims than I.
And they are the ones that can less afford it, a sad (and cruel) reality.
The name was identified by old Karl (amazing how many things that guy identified!).
Profit. Advertising, and
production
of unnecessary goods, is profitable. So we must make the profits from
any undesirable
activity (from our point of view :-) ZERO or NEGATIVE. I can think of some ways of doing that, but
that belongs among the hidden pages of Fravia+' reality
reversing section...
He could do this, because nobody would suspect him of being a socialist. Similarly, Richard Nixon could open the communication with China because nobody could accuse him of being a sympathiser with Communism.
So if you really mean it: Keep reasonably quiet - and work yourself into a position where you can reverse within your field. The effect of one highly placed reverser will be far more important (and effective) than a handful of us "ordinary people". Imagine it's like in a LeCarrČ roman. You work slowly your way to the top (slowly!) -helped by the very fact that you know how to reverse the hell out of everything that confronts you- and then you act! Man! Minesweeper games in the administrations of the EU, UN, Pentagon, KGB, whatever!!
If you don't mean it - if you'r here in order to use these reversing techniques
just in order to show off, simply to get hold of some attractive
(and hopefully still braless) radical girl -
then I guess any real reverser will know how to deal with you... you better
be careful
-H.Cioff