How to Make Marketing More Humane
October 19, 2008
Speaking as someone who's spent hours in the emergency room waiting for them to sew my fingertip back on, I'd like to salute the simple, marvelous attention to detail that makes our lives better.
You probably can't tell by a casual glance, but one of my goals in life is to make marketing more humane. When an object or a service improves the quality of life, then it's worth communicating, and the quality of that communication had better live up to the quality of the thing being marketed. Clarity, convenience, nutritional information, and entertainment are all message ingredients that serve the human being at the other end of the conversation.
So what brought on these philosophical musings about life and marketing? One of my favorite journalists, iMomus (Nick Currie), recently wrote a tribute to a deceased friend who shared his devotion to "making humane things with technology. Teaching code to help us live." Technology and marketing are both often accused of destroying the quality of life. We have to work hard to make sure that isn't so.
References:
iMomus/Nick Currie's Click Opera journal: http://imomus.livejournal.com
Tribute to Jip de Kort: http://imomus.livejournal.com/2008/10/18/
Jip de Kort's photographs: http://www.kwark.org/x/lsgfx