Marketing is the process of matching needs or wants with products or services. 

Ethical selling aligns people with what they’re looking for and builds a strong economy in the process. 

Not all selling is ethical. Browbeating, misrepresenting, out-and-out lying, and various forms of manipulation are all too common. Consider: sellers of big ticket items who con the inexperienced into spending more than needful or wise; salespeople who guilt, shame, or harass the timid; flimflammers like Kevin Trudeau; and even your garden variety TV evangelist.

It gets murky when the public demands what’s legal but harmful, such as tobacco products, or what’s legal but doesn’t perform as claimed, such as most MLMs, so-called alternative “medicines” or “therapies,” psychic hotlines, software purporting to predict stock prices ... the list goes on.

Another murky area is organic and natural foods. Though the products are not typically harmful, their marketing tends to depend on the naturalistic fallacy. Indeed, natural products marketers who do not capitalize on it are pretty much doomed to fail.

A marketer with a conscience will end up declining a lot of opportunities to make money.

Now, given that the friendly people at Hammacher Schlemmer know their stuff, a small part of me wonders if they are testing to see if sciencey-sounding nonsense works. But the rest of me has another suspicion. At $30,000 per, it’s doubtful that Hammacher Schlemmer anticipates selling vast quantities of Tranquility Pods. Thus I cannot help wondering if the product is in the catalog only as an anchor. As in, to make their other overpriced stuff look affordable. If that’s the case, the copy would matter little, and the gobbledegook may actually be nothing more than a copywriter winking at us.

Sometimes writing-for-consumption calls for flouting the rules of expository writing that would normally earn an A from a high school English teacher. 

Don’t get me wrong. I am a fan of grammar, usage, syntax, style, and all that. And I had a great high school English teacher who was uncommonly adept at teaching writing. The other English teachers in the school admitted as much, and admired him for it.

Trouble is, he taught expository writing. The kind where you don’t use “you.” Where it’s not OK to use a word like “OK.” Where the first sentence in a paragraph must summarize what the rest of the paragraph is about. Where short paragraphs mean you haven’t developed your case and looooong ones are good provided they stay on-topic. Where a preposition is a terrible thing to end a sentence with. And where you must never start a sentence with a conjunction. And fragments? Verboten.

Here’s the problem. Readers don’t grade your writing using the A through F scale. They resort to more of a pass/fail system. That is, they either read what you wrote, or they don’t.

The odds that they will read it are proportional, not to your skill in expository form, but to your skill in writing for consumption.

That is not to say that knowing the “rules” doesn’t matter. Learning to create sound expository writing provides a great foundation that I cannot recommend highly enough. Professionals break rules not from ignorance, but knowingly and for good reason.

Besides, on the practical side, knowing the rules can help you defend your work to an O.C. client when you choose to break them.

One reason the advertising field mistakes wannabe screenwriters and novelists for marketers is the persistent and indefensible meme that creativity, alone, sells.(1) Wannabes who fail to break into moviemaking or publishing cry out, “I’m creative! If I can’t make films or write books, I’ll make ads!” As a result, we the public have foisted upon us ad after ad that exists solely because someone deemed it creative while managing to convince a client that by virtue of being creative (and nothing more than that) it packed selling power.

The above-shown PETA billboard is an example of an allegedly(2) creative ad that fails to sell. (Set aside your feelings about PETA. We’re talking advertising strategy, not ideology.)

Advertising that hopes to get people to change their ways must provide people a good reason to do so. According to this billboard, the reason to quit hunting is that the animal might get you back. It fails as a good reason. Tables-turning prey have hardly reached epidemic proportions. Moreover, for some, risk is part of the thrill of hunting. 

Besides, risk to your personal safely is not why PETA doesn’t want you to hunt animals. Else, PETA would be all for a payback-free method of killing animals—say, raising and slaughtering them on a farm—and all for hunting critters that pose no retaliatory threat. (Imagine this headline: “PETA says ‘Hands Off’ horned creatures, declares open season on defenseless ones like bunnies.” And this subhead: “Officials undecided about Jackalopes.”)

Message aside, this concept commits a major billboard sin. Few drivers buzzing by at 75 MPH will have the time to read the headline, notice the red-tipped antlers, and put it all together.

The PETA billboard hopes to end hunting by failing to provide one good reason why hunting should end. That’s idiotic enough. Even more idiotic, PETA paid good money to have the concept produced and displayed.
________________________
1. Yes, indefensible. See Chapter 5 of my book.
2. Call me disagreeable, but I don’t find it “creative.” Whatever “creative” means.

•     •     •