>Meanwhile, Sprint PCS, to take one example, runs TV ads claiming its cell
>phone service has the best quality. Its cell phone survey actually has the
>worst quality, according to _Consumer Reports_. Some hundreds of thousands
>of people buy Sprint phones due to the ads. The ads are manipulation. No
>God involved or needed to make this observation of a fact.
As I wrote you yesterday, at my reading at Bluestockings on Thursday night, an MCI product manager who'd heard our interview came up to me and said that most marketing sucks and doesn't work. His guess, which I suppose was just a guess and not backed up by elaborate research, was that 80% of marketing budgets are wasted. He said people are too savvy to fall for the bullshit they see in ads. I'm reminded of Harry Cleaver's critique of the Frankfurters - the old glomsters thought that the masses were far more passive & manipulable than they really are. From reading the biz press, it seems that marketers are constantly frustrated by how difficult their job is - tastes are fickle, and it's hard to keep up with them. Companies that market to young people are especially frustrated - they spend lots of time trying to figure out what kids think is cool, and once they do, the definition of cool has changed. So aren't you overestimating the success of all the targeting?
Doug