What is Marketing

What is marketing? I am studying it and I am not sure what it really is. A lot of people try to tell me that marketing is just manipulating the general public into buying stuff they don’t need. That is 100% true, but people need to stop making it out to be such a villainous thing. I have a close friend who tried to tell me that I was a bad person for studying marketing. He told me that marketers made people buy stuff they didn’t need and couldn’t afford and that they were the cause of the rampant plagues of commercialism and consumer debt.

Despite my friend’s claim, pretty much everything that a person buys is something they don’t need. As long as I am not walking around naked and I have a little food in my belly, I will undoubtedly blow money on things that nobody should ever claim to “need”. In fact, if it came down to it, I might even sacrifice clothing myself if there was a good enough deal on Steven Segal flavored energy drinks, that’s just how I choose to divide up the slices of my economic pie.

To understand marketing further let us examine the fundamental laws of economics which state that if I have a supply of money I will demand to spend it. What I spend it on depends completely on my personal tastes and preferences. My individual tastes and preferences are as follows: priority one, that which is absolutely essential to survival; priority two, that which is utterly absurd and ridiculous. The sad and glorious truth of marketing is that my tastes and preferences are strikingly similar to everyone else’s tastes and preferences. Why is that? Not because marketers told me so. Please, give me more credit than that. I am not a pawn of Madison Avenue. Rather, my tastes and preferences are instinctual, and have been since the dawn of time.


Back when we were cave men I have no doubts that as soon as the hunting and gathering was done men chose to spend their time collecting useless shiny things, staring mindlessly at cave paintings of beautiful stick women, and scratching themselves. Women fell for this trick because they felt that in order for a man to be able to spend so much time staring at cave paintings he had to be a great hunter/gatherer. And if that was the case, they wanted in, and they wanted to pass those skills on to their children. That’s why men spend so much time trying to get shiny things and why women spend so much time trying to look like the stick figures on cave walls. If men weren’t so busy uselessly spending their time and money it wouldn’t have taken us so long to come up with important societal advances such as plasma screen TV’s and titanium anything. My sneaking suspicion is that these advances came only after women stopped falling for the original “cave paintings and shiny objects” trick and demanded newer and better useless stuff to command their attention.


Therefore, it is evident that saving money or putting it towards constructive purposes is just plain idiocy. I need to buy stuff because if I don’t I will look like a little nerd who cannot provide for a family, and as a result I will never ever get any girls. I know I may sound like a genius for figuring this all out, but it’s nothing more than science, common sense and shiny stuff.
So yeah, of course I will spend $100 dollars on jeans that are more worn out than the $20 dollar pair I could buy at Wal-Mart. You better believe I will buy a Ronco food dehydrator for 7 easy payments of $99.99 because making my own jerky sounds like an amazing idea. And good Lord, you know I will buy a Steven Segal Energy drink for $2.99 when water is free and is probably much healthier for me. Why? Because these things make me look tough, they impress women, and all of them are a whole heck of a lot cooler than saving my money, giving it to charities, or putting it towards any asset of any kind that appreciates in value.

Is it some marketer’s fault that I choose to spend my money this way? No. It is the fault of cavemen who were so good at hunting and gathering that they had plenty of time to spend their resources to buy shiny things that impressed cave-women. Secondly, it was the fault of those cave-women who fell for the “shiny object” trick and in turn perpetuated the world’s problems by passing their genes on to me. I can’t fight nature, and neither can the world’s most heartless marketer. It’s just the way things are. Marketers don’t create demand, cavemen create demand, and there is nothing you can do about that buddy.

When you look at marketing from that standpoint, you come to understand that marketers are not trying to force you to buy anything that you wouldn’t buy in the first place; however, they are just trying to get you to buy more useless junk from them than from some other dude who is also trying to get you to buy completely useless junk.