It’s SuperBowl Sunday, but unlike many Americans, I am not watching the fanfare. But as I type away on my keyboard, editing a presentation deck for tomorrow, I notice that the pattern of tweets on Twitter suddenly and overwhelmingly point towards praising the Chrysler Superbowl ad. A couple of clicks, and I’m watching a two-minute masterpiece.
Do you know why this ad is so effective? There are three simple reasons:
- The entire spot is a single provocation. It’s aggressive, in-your-face, and challenges your orthodoxies and beliefs. It takes a stance. It has a point of view.
- It speaks the truth. There is no borrowed interest. No sugarcoating. No corporate imperialism that gets in the way of showing the cold-hard fact that Detroit is not a nice place. It is the simple truth.
- It delivers the truth with emotion. The message speaks to the emotional part of the brain. Watch it carefully and you will see all of the features and benefits of the car that are actually being touted, but it’s all about the emotion.
So many times when I tell people I do marketing for a living, I receive looks or comments that suggest that I am a professional liar. And many marketers fuel the idea that marketing is the same as lying by employing ridiculous hyperbole as a way to differentiate or get noticed. Once I heard the vice president of a large science company address an internal audience and quip “I’m a marketer, I can take liberties on the truth a little bit”. I know he was kidding. But I didn’t like it, anyway. And I beg to differ.
Marketing is not lying. Marketing is the distillation of the truth, packed with an emotional stance from the company’s point of view. Period. Thank you, Chrysler, for a clear, bold demonstration of this.
Let's do a little analysis...
1. A company has a thing it wants to sell. It's one of many such things, or it's something new no one quite knows about yet.
2. Marketers and advertisers, especially since the days of Edward Bernays, have developed focus groups an arsenal of psychological tactics to make people want what they don't need (youtube "The Century of the Self" for a good account of the historical evolution of the legal con).
3. These psychological tricks, involving EMOTION and image, misrepresent the thing as it is. A marketer/advertiser says he's not lying because he never said anything that can be proven false, but that's just the lie underpinning all lies. You don't have to say anything explicitly to lie. all you need is to communicate a falsehood with that intention. Much of communication is nonverbal. Let's have a look...
Definition of "lie": actions which communicate to another a falsehood with the intention of having the other believe the falsehood as true.
So by associating various emotions (fears, desires, etc) with a product, you are manipulating (i.e. lying) the viewer into believing something that is false, that you know is false, for the purpose getting them to buy your product. The product doesn't make you feel like anything. But the advertising has made the viewer believe that it will by creating a false impression of value and of the nature of the thing. The viewer, upon purchasing the product, believes he's purchased the lie, and in fact, after purchasing it, has to rationalize to himself the purchase in order to prevent himself from feeling guilty. And so what inevitably happens is that the consumer ends up blending in his head the truth with the lie.
Now is marketing necessarily lying? No. You can truthfully present a product and its benefits, even comparing it to other products objectively. But let's be honest. No, let's be truthful. This is not what ever really happens. If a picture is worth a thousand words, and a television ad is a thousand pictures, you don't need words to lie. You've got something worth a million words. That's a whole lot of lying. When you don't appeal to the mind with truth, you appeal to the emotions with lies.
Marketing and advertising ARE in the vast majority of cases lying. Period. Have the courage to face that fact.