Talking to Myself, #7: Marketing
Marketing: the act of using wordplay to grease your way into a person’s subconscious.
Grease. What a respectful way to enter someone’s head.
Yet, marketing remains a beloved tactic, whether the ends be moral or malicious. Our brains are calibrated to it, juiced by it. It’s in the bloodstream. Every minute of my waking life, someone or something has tried to convince me of the value of someone or something else.
Not with conversation, with manipulation.
Slogans. Catchphrases. Turns of phrase. Rhymes. Those obnoxious acronyms that for some reason must always spell out a word at best borderline relevant to the idea being pushed. We don’t resist this shit. Actually, we love it. We schedule whole big meetings to discuss it. We are convinced that this is key to getting people to listen to us. Are we really that cynical? Maybe.
But of course, in some way it does work. That can’t be ignored. There’s a tragically hip behemoth of an industry devoted to the dark arts. But, must every corner of the universe be graced by its stench? Don’t we deserve to have one thing holy enough to be left alone?
Case in point: Movements.
Movements, particularly radical ones, have the central task of having to convince their neighbors to not just listen to but also agree to a very different approach to solving an old problem. People in any given movement may read that and scoff. They may say that their approach should not be viewed as unconventional because it actually addresses the old problem more organically than do the dusty approaches we seem to never let go of (Hello contractor-to-politician kickbacks). And they’re right. We should absolutely try new approaches. Honestly, we don’t really have a choice. It’s just that all of our neighbors aren’t as immediately convinced of this. Some of those neighbors hear us with our new approach and think we’ve lost our ever-loving minds.
Necessarily, that means we movement people need to (1) know how to use our words and (2) resist the indulgent impulse to condescend with self-important outrage when people don’t see things exactly how we think they ought to.
Sure, slogans and other forms of wordplay are digestible and have communicative power, but no three-to-four-word phrase can ever be clever enough or robust enough to sway the unconvinced. Wrapping ideas in a nice branded package and catapulting it into the side of someone’s head may work for the pro-catapult lobby, but that’s about it. Our slogans vastly under-deliver and over-simplify the layered complexity of our proposed programs, leaving nearly every legitimate question unanswered — and we wonder why it seems to always take some extreme transgression to move the needle.
“Defund The Police” was said to be the big bad slogan of 2020 that nearly jeopardized everything for the Democrats. A little melodramatic to say the least, but what else do we expect from a political party whose idea of progress is fawning over Amazon slapping a Black Lives Matter banner on its homepage while ignoring Jeff Bezos’ willful, persistent, psychopathic crushing of his employees’ basic human dignity. That said, let’s take a step back here. I know a lot of people that have something to say about police brutality. For most, prosecuting brutal cops is a no-brainer. So too is meaningfully addressing the corruption that fosters brutality. But, with “Defund”, we hit a bump in the road. Now, we’re not just asking people to condemn brutality, we’re asking them to condemn the entire institution. While the rhetorical leap to defunding is, for me, excruciatingly obvious, it clearly is not so obvious for whole big swaths of every single demographic in this country.
That, too, should be excruciatingly obvious. What do we expect from people who live in neighborhoods besieged by seemingly endless violence? Or people who’ve experienced family tragedy and felt comforted by the existence of a police investigation into that tragedy? Or people for whom the police force provides stable livable income? Yes, the Defund movement has seriously thoughtful answers to these questions, but providing a thoughtful answer requires first acknowledging the thoughtfulness of the question and, most importantly, that of the questioner. Meeting those questions with dismissiveness or outright derision is laughably counterproductive.
Now, to be fair, the emotion that fuels derision is of course real. It should not have taken watching Derek Chauvin force George Floyd into an early grave for the average person to acknowledge a problem with policing. But for some people, that was the point of realization. Sure, we could lay their lateness entirely at their feet and wax moralistic about privilege, but don’t we have a role in it too? As purported advocates of an alternative approach to public safety? Our slogans and buzzphrases don’t seem to be doing the trick. And of course not. We’re not trying to sell used cars, we’re trying to get people to trust that our drastic redesign of a system they’ve known their entire lives is going to meaningfully improve their lives.
Bit of a harder sell than leather interior.
Defunding the police is a really good idea, but really good ideas die in the brains of really bad communicators. Let’s do humanity a favor and keep our mouths from getting in the way of progress.
