Tyler Durden: Man, I see in fight club the strongest and smartest men who’ve ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.

Listen up, maggots. You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You’re the same decaying organic matter as everything else.

Just a rant from Mary on marketing…

Just a warning, this is a rant on retarded marketers brainwashed by the cult of political correctness.

So, I read an article the other day over on Triiibes.com (so, I can’t link to it) where two hippies/wannabe marketers tried to tell the rest of the members over there that the media has colored our perception of words and shock advertising has made us insensitive and intolerant.  The gist is they want all of us to remove the “lenses” from our vernacular that identify people.  This type of oversensitivity breed by mid 80s “let me water down my point so your feeling isn’t hurt by my feeling” culture is what is killing the marketing minds of today and flooding the media with heterogeneous advertising that never offends and never connects. It is the very reason why even our daily interactions with people are laced with boredom and coma inducing platitudes.

The art of watering down your point so you put a reader in a coma

Snow by any other name is still cold

The article begins with this brilliant assertion, “"If we wanted to call ’snow’ the word ‘fitzel’ instead, it wouldn’t matter at all!” Of course, it does matter. Words have tremendous and far-reaching associations that build as we move through our lives.” WTF? Anyone here actually complete high school English?  I distinctly recall Act II, Scene II of Romeo and Juliet where bad boy, Billy waxed on that “A rose by any other name would still smell as sweet."  Yes, words have meanings, yes, words have power, yes words can cut you deeply, but calling snow something other than snow does not that point make.  Now, calling an African American the N word, makes that point, but these hippies avoided controversy and side stepped offending people to water down their point so much t no longer made sense.  Words can be powerfully hateful and offensive. You call me the C word you a wrath of furies will reign down on you.  You call snow fitzel, and I doubt snow is going to complain.

The changing meanings of words over time

Also, just recalling a little Noam Chomsky (father of modern linguistics for those that are not familiar with that side of the Charles) can’t words take on different meanings over time and in different circumstances and can’t they mean different things to different sub-cultures and can’t and doesn’t all this have something to do with psychology?  But more importantly, if you can’t afford an MIT education to see Noam live, can’t you at least read Wikipedia before writing an article so at least it is founded in research?  I don’t know…. Maybe it’s just me that needs to cling to real freakin’ science.

The far-fetched plan to treat demographics like stereotypes…

Another actual quote from the article:

“The power of words plays an important role in the perpetuation of intolerance. The media use phrases which group our fellow humans (real people!) into large, abstract categories. A few examples, for clarity: The Latino voter. Soccer moms (or now, hockey moms). Nascar dads. Catholics. The Chinese. The gay and lesbian lobby. Men of Middle Eastern descent. African Americans. Pro-Life supporters.”

I’d quote you more, but I am afraid, the rest does not make any freakin’ sense unless you have a dime bag of really good Chronic, a bong and a full bowl of Betty Crocker fudge batter mix (I’m just guessing because Nicole and I grew up in the 80s and always say… “no” to drugs like Nancy Reagan taught us). Essentially, the article goes on to make the following assertions:

1. The media is responsible for making us intolerant by using stereotyping language (be aware they consider both normal demographic information (race and age to fall into this “stereo typical” language) and rudimentary observations (height, weight and nationality fall into this “stereo typical” language).
2. The media has influenced us so heavily that we apply these stereo typical lenses to all people 24/7 and that is offensive and intolerant
3. We should remove the descriptors of psychographics and demographics from our daily lives (treat them as harshly as stereotypes) and describe each persona as a unique snowflake rather than placing them in a group or describing those traits that set them apart from others within our social sphere.

The successful fruition of this master plan devised by these fruit-loops (yes, that is a proper psychoticgraphic term- I read it in a Martin Lindstrom book) is that eventually the media can follow our lead and start treating every human being as special and precious without the constraints of descriptors that might offend anyone sexually, politically, rationally, nationally, hormonally, etc.  Why?  Because the flower power psychology of the 1960s worked so well to bring about social change that we should go down that rabbit hole again.

I mean, Hell be damned if someone should call me a White woman, why I would be spitting mad. Oh, wait, right, I am a white woman.   

Marketers are sociologists that need demographics to effectively deliver a message to their market

Seriously? I don’t get it. If I can’t define people by physical, ethnic, age, gender attributes, or even their hobbies and tastes how can I, as a marketer, successfully market to various demographics/psychographics. Yes, we are all individuals but we are also marketers that need these lenses to segment our targeted audiences. Otherwise what would we have to do, craft individual messages for each person rather than the group as a whole? Labels are useful even on a personal level- if I am meeting someone at a restaurant that I have only ever spoken to over the phone, I am going to describe myself physically - which means I am going to give skin color, height, weight, age, hair color, hair length, etc. I am not going to wax on about my education, philosophies or ideology or those special quirks that make me unique among the human race. As long as things don’t get racist, sexist or some other form of discriminatory language, it’s OK and necessary to describe yourself and others through generalizations in terms of race, weight, height, tastes, religion, etc.

Now, my stance on this is shaped by the fact that I have lived all over the world even in the Middle East and Russia and I was often described as “the short American girl.” It didn’t bother me to be defined by my sex, skin color, height or nationality. It helped people identify me and point me out to others. In fact, it can often be important to describe people from other countries by their nationality because (as a Sociologist) I know that different cultures have different social rituals and it can be helpful to know the nationality so you are not offended by them (example: people in the middle east have a smaller personal space than Americans and can often stand closer than is comfortable for most Americans- backing up to increase the personal space can be seen as offensive).

My conclusion….

What the hell is the point of removing personal descriptors from our personal and business vocabularies and from the media?  If the news reported that a shooting took place in East L.A. you would immediately assume that it was a Latino shooting, possibly gang related, so what is the harm in them clarifying the circumstances through racial descriptors?  Can you really make the world a better place by removing an adjective?  I’d rather buy the world a coke than have to measure every word that flows from my mouth against political correctness, racial sensitivity and sexual harassment policies. Idealism like that is best suited to college co-eds. 

As a marketer I know one thing above all else, I need to connect with the market I am targeting through specifics not generalizations so I can make them specifically connect with my brand.  By removing the demographic information from the market and creating a classless/casteless target audience then not being able to use language that could connect any one of these “individuals” within my hodge podge market to the brand, what am I left with?  An ad for Communism?  I don’t think any Communist leader could have said it better than Cambodian leader, Khmer Rouge whose mottos was: “To keep you is no benefit. To destroy you is no loss."  You cannot make everyone unique by removing what makes them special because now they are all the same and valueless.

As marketers, it is our job to connect with the markets we sell to.  We need to emotionally and viscerally engage them through a true and unfettered vernacular that viscerally connects them with the point, not an over politically correct, sexually aware, racially sensitive castrated version of it.

I think personal identifiers, modifier, adjectives, etc exist in our vernacular for a reason.  They describe us.  They give us special attributes that make us special and different than the person next to us.  Homogenization is not something any of actually want.   Yo, Marketers, HAVE SOME FUCKING BALLS AND SAY WHAT YOU MEAN WITH WORDS THAT MEAN WHAT IS BEING SAID.

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