I had a discussion earlier today with a friend who basically does not want anything marketed to him– he finds the experience sleazy and inherently dishonest, likening the experience to a salesman at a store who only cares about making a sale.
It’s a point of view that I bet a lot of people have– there’s a really strong current of mistrust and adversarial emotion regarding the whole concept of advertising and marketing among the general public. It’s not really surprising — a lot of marketing and sales cares only about you making a purchase.
As my friend put it: “I want to find what I need, when I need it, and not have solutions to problems I don’t have shoved in my face.”
It makes me think of user experience design, in a way. I can’t help but think of tutorials, and how people will get upset when a game is too heavy-handed with a tutorial that goes on too long. Similarly, when a user interface or keybinding setup or other interaction method doesn’t feel quite right, or is too cluttered, or not customizable enough, or whatever, people get frustrated. Conversely, when a tutorial is entirely absent, or the UI too sparse or not informative enough, there’s an equal amount of frustration. In the sweet spot, though, where the game explains how to play it at the right pace and with the right amount of thoroughness, and the interface is responsive, informative, and not too cluttered, no one notices.
As many UI designers will say: the best UI is one no one notices. The same, I think, is true of marketing. The very best marketing sells someone on a product without them realizing they’re being advertised to. Most truly successful marketing wouldn’t even be recognized as such by the people receiving it. Blatant advertising frustrates and annoys us, and makes us feel like we’re being disingenuously spoken to, or at worst, scammed.
Over the past couple of years or so, I’ve allowed various social media and social networks access to my browsing and shopping habits, feeding into their data collection for targetted advertising. It’s been interesting and somewhat informative– as I started the experiment the ads quickly became ham-handed and laughably inaccurate. After a little over a year, though, the ads became more and more accurate, until I started legitimately discovering things I wanted to buy that I wouldn’t have heard of otherwise– a specific set of juggling equipment, an appealing sale on miniatures, an introduction to an author I hadn’t read and now quite like, and an incredibly handy set of magnets. I carefully forced the system to curate out anything I was likely to already know about, or things that didn’t apply to me. The end result is that, for a while, I was getting very well-targeted, very accurate ads. Unfortunately, for a while I stopped purchasing anything but gifts for other people, which badly skewed the data and caused my ads to become far less accurate.
What’s interesting to me isn’t having the ads remind me about things I already knew, but the introduction of things I didn’t know existed and quite enjoy.
We are, collectively, very suspicious of marketing, I think because it taps into our latent distaste for having another person manipulate and affect our wants and desires– marketing is in many ways applied psychology, after all. Yet, despite this, we are beholden to marketing for its ability to introduce us to new things that we love and are fascinated by, both because we’d never hear about them otherwise and because for every new thing that’s created and we love, our handy technology, our favorite games, the movies and TV shows we obsess over, someone had to “sell” that idea to someone else.
It’s why I’m hesitant to think of marketing as “evil”, even though there are plenty of things done that are questionably ethical at best.
Difficult situation, and it puts me in mind of how people generally feel about free will. We as humans have far less free will than we like to believe, but the best way to ensure we can exercise it is to accept that we’re not as free-willed as we think.