An interesting scan at the problems marketers have created in the world!
I would like to give you a few instances on how brilliant
marketers have caused the serious problems we have in the world today. To
a great extent your problems are caused by these same people. I want to
show you how Beyonce lied to the women to sell more copies of her music
when she did "Girls Run the World". Girls don't run the
world, Marketers do & we don't just run it we RULE the world!! Did you read that story of the Chinese boy who sold one of his kidneys to buy an Ipad? Feels sad, right? How did he do it? He fell for Steve Jobs marketing prowess and since the boy couldn't afford the gadget he sold one of his kidneys; he's a brilliant but a 'dumb' guy too since he sells part of his body that he doesn't need!
Wikipedia defines marketing as "the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.These activities include efforts of Public relations, designers, social media specialists like me, experiential marketing agencies, advertising & Media. All these institutions and experts breathe life to a brand so they all fall under one category of people I call "Marketers".
Secondly everyone in the world is a marketer or a promoter of his or her own personal brand .You make a living out of your skills in employment by applying for a job (Selling your expertise) to an employer. On that note I have serious issues with graduates who can't market & sell their skills to companies yet the same firms are in dire need of talent. It's a problem in Kenya, guys are so brilliant but they simply can't package themselves as 'employable'. Before you are hired to represent a brand then you got to prove that you are a good CEO of your own personal brand. Simple!! By the way you can read my articles on How to Get Hired Faster , 7 Reasons why you are unemployed yet you are so brilliant and How to Get Hired on Social Media.
That said here's how we do it!
Fast Food Marketers
How tasty do these burgers and chips look? If you could download this picture and eat it right away and get full then go ahead! Fast food marketers sell convenience, no hustles, no pressure and the fact that you shouldn't do your dishes after eating! That's cool! All you need is to buy, walk out and eat on the go. Nice! All the bachelors don't want to get married because of this industry! Kids cry if daddy doesn't take them out for Pizza over the weekends, any small achievement your daughter does at home she whines "Mummy buy me Chips". You got to buy her fries less she cries all day & hates you forever! When KFC opened in Kenya at the Nakumatt Junction the queues were longer than those at voting centres during elections, I went there too and bought that Chicken since they said it was "So Good". Yes its true,you'll love the bucket of kuku...but you can have something as tasty in the CBD and pay much lesser!
The result of this fast food craze is-
Blame the marketer for the obese kids, If you are plus size and still eating junk blame that guy too!! If you just had 500 bob and bought lunch at Chicken Inn and walked home...don't kill the marketer, just don't pass by that street again! Did all your pals tag you along for Ice cream on a sunny afternoon and you bought it,licked it away happily, had fun, you even tweeted about how the joint so cool and the Ice cream is sweet and tasty, then later you had to ask for a soft loan the following day to get fare to school....!!!? Don't hate your buddies...damn...you know who to curse at!!
These are the real ruthless guys now! They 'lied' to me last weekend too!
They sell the happiness, the fun, the experience, the greatness everything you'd wish to have. Some beer ads want to show us that if you take brand X you look hotter, a diva..everything you wanna be. Some of them have told men that beer makes them taller, wiser and smoother...you know...gives you better vibes,makes you look cooler.Wow...Can we all men drink to that?! The key touch points of men is sports, women, music while women love fashion etc so the beer marketers have created a brand association with almost everything you love so that you can do booze to the grave what is better known in my profession as brand loyalty!!! Recently I wrote an article on how brands are conning off women by calling them divas; you can also check it out here.
Back to beer & partying; locally in Kenya, there's the craze about Naivasha, Westlands, Coasto or wherever you love partying...but after that perfect night or weekend out what happens? A lot goes on during the 'experience' that we don't even want to talk about the next day! Let's not even talk about the impact beer of in our lives! Everyone has a story to tell, it doesn't matter if you are a teetotaler, you've seen or read somewhere about what beer does to its users!! Nyeri men are you here? Hello? "Cate", "Suzie", "Maggie"...Wassup? do you know how you got pregnant? you woke up in Lang'ata? how did you leave that joint C in Westie? You don't know!!! Don't curse your buddies for leaving you alone with a stranger, think of what led to all that!! It's purely the marketing efforts of the club owner, DJ, the stranger and the brand manager of 'King X or brand Y' finally made it easy for one lucky or unlucky guy to have 'fun' while you were dead drunk!!! Finally if you can't breathe well, bend to touch your toes or even perform well in bed because of a beer & Nyama choma pot belly then talk to the guys who said Nyama goes well with beer...they gave you the extra carbs on the all the wrong places!!
Finally the
moment someone who drives a Subaru WRX takes away your cute girlfriend away then the
next thing you do is pray to God to give you money to buy any car so that you
can also roll & hoot at matatus! Feels good huh! Ladies will now
have you in a list of "eligible" men! That means better chances in the dating game,
right? Cool my guy! Tell us now...You got it , how does that make you a better man? do you know where to buy motor spares? can you tell when the car needs a mechanic and when it runs out of fuel? You need tint on your windows? that 'dark paper' isn't fixed for free!!At that point you'll have understood that a car needs more to move than just fuel...yeah! and if you are not financially stable that NZE will wipe you out clean!! Keep rolling and 'dropping' kina suzie at 3am for 6 months, by mid month you'll be begging the bank for an advance & the cycle repeats itself monthly! Everyone looks at you nicely, you give colleagues a lift to town after work and when you pass by the petrol station no one chips in but when you get them to safely to the CBD they bang your door with a smile and say THANKS!!! Do you feel good? NO!! Did they? YES. Why? You saved them 50 bob to town!!
Wikipedia defines marketing as "the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.These activities include efforts of Public relations, designers, social media specialists like me, experiential marketing agencies, advertising & Media. All these institutions and experts breathe life to a brand so they all fall under one category of people I call "Marketers".
Secondly everyone in the world is a marketer or a promoter of his or her own personal brand .You make a living out of your skills in employment by applying for a job (Selling your expertise) to an employer. On that note I have serious issues with graduates who can't market & sell their skills to companies yet the same firms are in dire need of talent. It's a problem in Kenya, guys are so brilliant but they simply can't package themselves as 'employable'. Before you are hired to represent a brand then you got to prove that you are a good CEO of your own personal brand. Simple!! By the way you can read my articles on How to Get Hired Faster , 7 Reasons why you are unemployed yet you are so brilliant and How to Get Hired on Social Media.
That said here's how we do it!
Fast Food Marketers
The result of this fast food craze is-
Blame the marketer for the obese kids, If you are plus size and still eating junk blame that guy too!! If you just had 500 bob and bought lunch at Chicken Inn and walked home...don't kill the marketer, just don't pass by that street again! Did all your pals tag you along for Ice cream on a sunny afternoon and you bought it,licked it away happily, had fun, you even tweeted about how the joint so cool and the Ice cream is sweet and tasty, then later you had to ask for a soft loan the following day to get fare to school....!!!? Don't hate your buddies...damn...you know who to curse at!!
Beer Marketers
These are the real ruthless guys now! They 'lied' to me last weekend too!They sell the happiness, the fun, the experience, the greatness everything you'd wish to have. Some beer ads want to show us that if you take brand X you look hotter, a diva..everything you wanna be. Some of them have told men that beer makes them taller, wiser and smoother...you know...gives you better vibes,makes you look cooler.Wow...Can we all men drink to that?! The key touch points of men is sports, women, music while women love fashion etc so the beer marketers have created a brand association with almost everything you love so that you can do booze to the grave what is better known in my profession as brand loyalty!!! Recently I wrote an article on how brands are conning off women by calling them divas; you can also check it out here.
Back to beer & partying; locally in Kenya, there's the craze about Naivasha, Westlands, Coasto or wherever you love partying...but after that perfect night or weekend out what happens? A lot goes on during the 'experience' that we don't even want to talk about the next day! Let's not even talk about the impact beer of in our lives! Everyone has a story to tell, it doesn't matter if you are a teetotaler, you've seen or read somewhere about what beer does to its users!! Nyeri men are you here? Hello? "Cate", "Suzie", "Maggie"...Wassup? do you know how you got pregnant? you woke up in Lang'ata? how did you leave that joint C in Westie? You don't know!!! Don't curse your buddies for leaving you alone with a stranger, think of what led to all that!! It's purely the marketing efforts of the club owner, DJ, the stranger and the brand manager of 'King X or brand Y' finally made it easy for one lucky or unlucky guy to have 'fun' while you were dead drunk!!! Finally if you can't breathe well, bend to touch your toes or even perform well in bed because of a beer & Nyama choma pot belly then talk to the guys who said Nyama goes well with beer...they gave you the extra carbs on the all the wrong places!!
Car Marketers
Car marketers sell speed, reliability, masculinity etc etc. Basically the car you drive defines who you are. Men & women feel they deserve to drive these guzzlers to get a certain point home. Why do you feel a car make A is better than B? Broke men can argue all day about which car make is better, cooler and why they'll buy X over Y yet they won't buy that car any soon! How does that happen to them?
One word ....It's the power of Marketing!
We all have dream cars...Yeah! When you start dreaming of owning a Range Rover at 25 and all you have done in college is CPA, just know that the marketer's job is already done there. All the brand is waiting for you to do is; To work terribly hard, fast, play lotteries and do anything that will get you cash to buy the machine!! Once in a while they'll advertise to keep you saving all you earn, if you can't wait, to save enough, you can walk into a bank, they'll top up your savings. Banks love savers and you'll get a loan approved in hours; with cash in your account, you are the BOSS now. You can walk into a car yard on Ngong road and off you leave with your favourite BEAST of the road!! Who pays the loan? Who will fuel it? Ask a few Omondi's who own them, our brothers from the lakeside love the Mercedes.It has to be!! Be it the doctor OJ who drives a KBR the latest S class and Omosh the hustler who drives a KXC 048 both cars have to be a Mercedes...but do we saaaay!! One sleeps hungry because he had to fuel his car to go watch a Gor Mahia game in a car while the other is in serious debt, confused & not so well paid to buy an expensive suit to match his newly found status but he will definitely never sell it off to buy a cheaper model that's easier to maintain. Why? So that the students he lectures in campus take him serious in class!! Both guys are unhappily stuck in a Mercedes!! But do they say? NO!
At this point the oil marketers take over and charge you anything they want for fuel. They are so ruthless; they work as an industry to con you off simply because if Daktari has to roll in his guzzler he needs to fuel it. With fuel in it we get global warming and thus the hunger in Kenya during the dry seasons and floods in the rainy season. Both are problems and since every every Nairobian wants a car or has one we are stuck in traffic for hours tweeting about it using #TrafficWatch. Do the car brands build more roads? No, will they keep selling? YES! Thus we blame the government and ask for more roads!! If you still feel the government should do something about it then tell the Roads minister now!!
The Global Economic Meltdown
The world's most brilliant but dumbest marketers with the help of greedy financial managers & the not so qualified risk analysts gave the US & thus the world the most recent economic recession, better known as the meltdown!! How did the marketers do it? Here's how we contributed to the meltdown too!
Marketers sold mortgages to a very aspirational middle class who always want instant gratification with little or no effort. Locally what's the craze about living upmarket in Runda, Lavington, Karen and Kileleshwa just to name but a few? It's because we all tend to think only the rich stay in such addresses.Well no!! We have a lot of guys in these upmarket areas who live hand to mouth just so that their 'business partners' know they lives in Kileleshwa. Right? So they struggles all month to get cash to pay the rent and tweets happily about how traffic is tight on Riverside drive in the morning? What do you do to the tweet? You give it an instant RT asap to alert others that there's traffic on route X but that guys is simply telling the world he lives somewhere in Lavington or he is heading to a 'posh office' in Riverside!! Thank the almighty God for Twitter it gave everyone a voice to project an image which in most cases isn't what's actually there!
The developers get a few other rich guys to buy land in an area, then the marketers and real estate analysts push demand of land in that area. The not so rich middle class come in droves and buy houses & land at exorbitant rates from the super rich in Kenya. They sell & exit stinking rich, the new owner is stuck with mortgage installments because he/she can't rent out the apartment for as much as the installments are.
The marketers gave the lazy guys with jobs on average salaries credit cards whose limits were so high. What will one do with a credit card? Go spend! Get into a plane, go to S.A and shop everything you can carry out of a mall. Feels good..right? You got all the designer labels in your wardrobe now? Cool. Come back to Kenya or wherever you live now; The bank calls you because you aren't paying back, what happens next? You are rocking a Gucci suit, Prada shoes and driving a Prado.....Wow! but on the downside you are stuck in debt. So stressed, then it gets into depression, blood pressure yet you look so 'rich' in the eyes of your buddies. The bank can't kill you to get their money back so they downsize, a few hardworking employees lose their jobs, see how you cause more problems in the world? If you don't pay your mortgage installments then the house is repossessed by the bank, you are then left homeless and with the depression already in, you get blood pressure and as the Nigerian comedian Basket Mouth said last in his signature comedy act YOU DIE!
Just before you leave so annoyed about me, I have some good news for you. The same marketers who have caused all these problems in the world have also SOLVED all of them somehow. It's an ecosystem, one man's poison is another man's food! Kindly check my blog on Monday morning and I will give you a part two of this story. Follow me on twitter @KenyanMarketer and share some of the problems you face that you think are caused by marketers! Lets take the vibe there!!
Have a great weekend...Go party...Go chill out...Its so cool! We can roll together by the way!!! In as much I am a marketer I need a life. I too suffer from the brutal brilliance of my learned friends (Marketers) in the beer & fun industry!
we can refer to it as the emerging breasted market.
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