[concordia commerce]
[looking for stuff?]
[comparison]
[marketing and society]
[mornings]

I'm a marketing student. Now there's a paradox for you.

I'm a marketing student who rants and raves about how marketing has killed music and the horrible phenomenon of packaged music. I'm a marketing student who throws away junk mail and channel-surfs right by commercials. I'm a marketing student who rudely hangs up on telemarketers. I'm a marketing student who's 99% cynical but has still retained that 1% idealism that refuses to go away no matter how deep I try to bury it.

What the hell is wrong with me?

I've been told constantly that I have no soul. My instinct is to deny this but maybe it's true. Maybe I'm partly responsible for the corruption of society. Well, not yet, but I will be when I get my degree and go out into the workforce. So is it true? Am I evil?

Oh sure, I could defend my position. I could talk about the contribution of business to society, about how we would all be out of work without it, how marketers are the only people in a business who care about the consumers. I could go on about how advertising mirrors and sometimes even shapes our culture. All that is all very well and true but in the end it's nothing more than a lame excuse.

So that brings me back to the initial question: is marketing evil? Are marketers bottom-feeding scum out to manipulate people to make a buck? Yes, in most cases, they are. Despite all the justifications above, it comes down to one simple fact: marketing uses consumer behaviour tactics to convince people that they absolutely "need" a product, and to encourage them to spend their hard-earned dollars on something they probably could have lived perfectly well without. It's this creation of false needs in consumers that's the real evil part, because it cheapens every value that we have ever held as a society to nothing more than a sales strategy for a product. A healthy lifestyle? Kellogg's ad. Keeping in touch with your family? That's for Bell long-distance. Being motivated to succeed at sports? Nike's got that one. If everything is reduced to marketing, is there anything left that's real?

How do I justify studying marketing, then? The simple answer is I enjoy the classes and if I'm going to spend three years of my life studying something, I'd better enjoy it. Furthermore, companies need marketing strategies and I think I would be good at doing that sort of work. Marketing is an exciting field and working on ad campaigns has got to be more interesting than doing financial audits or conducting research, at least in my opinion.

What about betterment of mankind? What about doing something to bring the world forward? Well, nothing is carved in stone. If working in marketing doesn't satisfy me I can always change my mind and do something more altruistic later on. In the meantime, a job is not a life. Just because I want to work in marketing does not make me necessarily a bad person, right? Right? Oh, who am I trying to kid, anyway? All right, I admit it: I'm the cause of all evil in society. There, are you artsies satisfied now?