En Passant: Guess who’s alive and well?

MANY, many, many years ago when I was a lot younger, when there was more testosterone in my system than Hansa Pilsner (although in them days, my child, it was Lion Ale), and before ambition had been tempered by reality, I thought I might quite like to be a marketing manager.

I don’t, even now, know exactly what a marketing manager does (does anybody? do marketing managers themselves know?), but I’m pretty sure that there’s more to it than organising photo-shoots in Mauritius, featuring bikini-clad Miss World contenders “staying as they are for the rest of their lives or changing to Mainstay”.

At the time I was working for Adams in Eshowe, the large departmental store selling anything and everything from carrots to carats, but as far as I know Adams had never sponsored a photo-shoot anywhere, not even at Mtunzini, let alone Mauritius. So how I thought my diploma from the Institute of Marketing Management would catapult me up Adams’ managerial ladder, I don’t now know. I was studying by correspondence, failed my first exams miserably (except for Introduction to Communication), and then gave up.

But I did learn some things about marketing, and it was the advertising side of the business that I found particularly interesting, and about which I have had opinions ever since.

This is because every single day, whether we like it or not (and some people do, can you believe it?), we are exposed to advertising. Someone, somewhere, will try to persuade you to “adopt a favourable attitude to an identified organisation, product or service”. In our consumer-driven society, they’ll want you to buy their product or service, spend your hard-earned money buying what they say you should buy.

Advertising initiatives are called “campaigns”, and campaigns can take many forms. They might want you to buy a new or improved product – a new or improved toothpaste; they might simply want to remind you of an existing product – Coca Cola; they might want to stimulate enquiries – R400 if we can’t beat your insurance premium; they might want to advise you of a special offer – Lamb chops at R49.99/k; they might want to build a company’s image – “look how wonderful we are, how caring, we’ve given something to an orphanage”. And there are a lot more campaign types.

Then, the marketing people have to decide who their target market is, who is most likely to want to buy the product or service, and another aspect of a campaign to be decided is which media to use – newspapers, magazines, television, radio, billboards and posters, and nowadays the world wide web. And having decided that, the frequency that the advert is to appear must be decided, and this is probably determined by the advertising budget.

There is very little difference that I can see between advertising and propaganda, and one of the arch propagandists of the past 100 years was a chap called Joseph Goebbels, Reich Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945. Now ol’ Joseph (“Shorty” to his pals down at the Frog & Jackboot), is said to have said that if you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it.

Now, in actual fact, Joseph apparently did NOT say this, but it is repeated so often that he did, that now people believe he did, so there is evidentially some truth in the saying regardless of who said it first. And if it is true for lies, it must be more true for truths, and equally true for claims that toothpaste “A” will freshen your breath, whiten your teeth, stop tooth decay and take stubborn stains out of your underpants. Say it often enough and people will believe it.

But there must surely, within the advertising industry, be an acknowledged saturation point, a point at which the potential customer is so sick of seeing your advert, so gatvol, that he or she says, “Stuff it, I WON’T buy your stupid product!”

I have reached that point with the now irritating New Omo Auto Liquid advert on television. I have forbidden Doris from buying it.

If you watch SABC channels you must have seen it, you cannot escape having seen it, you’d have to be blind not to see it, and then you’d still hear the stupid lines:

“Girls, what are these stains?”

“Hug me stains!”

The ad starts with a school bell – when I hear it I change channels, I’m like Pavlov’s Dog in that regard. It’s been on for months, you can see the ad four, five, six times an evening, sometimes in consecutive ad breaks, it is so irritating now, that I’d really rather go to a Bles Bridges concert… oh, sorry, he’s dead, I’d rather have all my teeth out without any anaesthetic, than listen and watch this nagging and irksome advert.

There is only one conclusion:

Joseph Gobbels is alive and well (although very old) and is the marketing manager at Unilever.