Marketing

Marketing should provide factually accurate information that enables people to make informed choices which help to maintain or improve their health and wellbeing, and be socially responsible by marketing only sustainably produced goods and services.

Marketing has an ethical responsibility to promote products that do not degrade the world’s finite resources and that are produced using closed loop energy systems or have an ability to be recycled or reused (see Business Chapter 7.)

Marketing Challenge

A marketing professional once told us that marketing was defined as ‘giving consumers what they need’, We would define it as ‘creating a product then generating a need, without due regard to human health, wellbeing and the long term sustainability of the planet’. Marketing isn’t a bad thing, it alerts us to products and services that we may need and wish to buy, and if done correctly can help us to make informed choices and not buy the products we do not need.

But marketing needs to be much more than selling a product or creating a demand for it. Marketing should explain how healthy the product is if it is food, with clear labels about how much dangerous saturated fat, salt and sugar is within it. It should explain how the product is made, and where the products were sourced from, with a sustainability traffic light giving it a red if it is made in a way that is damaging to the environment.

Marketing could be harnessed as a positive force to help explore what societies really want, not what their leaders think that they want.

Marketing is the thing about your planet that I Brushbail, have most enjoyed. On Zog for example, we had a product that was bad for you as it made our race develop compulsive gaming habits. It was therefore not tolerated in our society. But I have devised a marketing slogan for the gaming machine to while away my evenings ‘Gamebird makes your spirit fly’ (then I add in invisible ink, ‘then it smacks you in the eye’).

Gamebird delivers self restraint, hand eye coordination, improves the right side of the brain, helps you meet people who are fellow gamers, and invisible ‘makes you obese, gives you sores on your ass, sleepless compulsions’, all for only $99.99’.

I think it is great what the marketeers do, as the public know it is mostly bending the truth and that the product they buy will not do what it actually says, so you are really kind to take pity on all those poor producers and buy the stuff anyway. You do say that charity begins at home.

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