“Marketers don't want to spin us. They want to hold us perfectly still, so they can figure out who we are, what we want, and how to reach us.”
The blog Branding Strategy Insider recently posted an article from contributor and renowned marketing trend philosopher Malcolm Gladwell. Malcolm articulately talks about The Spin Myth. He cites example of historical marketers and brings us to some of the founding models of marketing.
This elegant piece is a perfect example of what Malcolm mentioned in the article... “Marketers don't want to spin us. They want to hold us perfectly still, so they can figure out who we are, what we want, and how to reach us.” Malcolm holds us perfectly still and explains spin and direct marketing like he is guiding youngsters out of danger without alarming them. I love his writing style and his dead on perspectives. This is also a great example of calm, knowledgeable writing that should reflect the calm knowledgeable marketing and branding that companies should engage in. Even though it looks like this was written during the Clinton administration, it is even more relevant now. Social marketing is confirming much of what Malcolm discusses here. Thanks Malcolm for being that voice of reason in a sales driven and spin engineered world.
Following is the first one third of the article, click here for the whole thing
The Spin Myth February 09, 2007
Are our spin meisters just spinning one another?
On Easter Sunday, 1929, the legendary public-relations man Edward L. Bernays rounded up ten carefully chosen women, put cigarettes in their hands,and sent them down Fifth Avenue in what was billed as the Torches of Freedom march. The marchers were given detailed instructions, including when and how their cigarettes should be lit. Spokeswomen were enlisted to describe the protest as an advance for feminism. Photographers were hired to take pictures. It was an entirely contrived event that nonetheless looked so "real" that the next day it made front-page headlines across the country, prompting a debate over whether women should be allowed to smoke as freely as men, and--some historians believe--forever changing the social context of cigarettes. What Bernays never told anyone was that he was working for the American Tobacco Company.
It is difficult to appreciate how brazen Bernays's ruse was at the time. In the twenties, the expectation was that if you were trying to sell people something--even if you were planning to deceive them in the process--you had at least to admit that you were trying to sell them something. Bernays was guided by the principle that this wasn't true: that sometimes the best way to sell something (cigarettes, say) was to pretend to be selling something else (freedom, say).
Bernays helped the brewing industry establish beer as "the beverage of moderation." For Dixie cups, he founded the Committee for the Study and Promotion of the Sanitary Dispensing of Food and Drink. For the Mack truck company, he drummed up national support for highway construction through front groups called the Trucking Information Service, the Trucking Service Bureau, and Better Living Through Increased Highway Transportation. In a torrent of books and articles (including one book, "Crystallizing Public Opinion," that was found in Joseph Goebbels's library) he argued that the P.R. professional could "continuously and systematically" perform the task of "regimenting the public mind." He wasn't talking about lying. He was talking about artful, staged half- truth. It's the kind of sly deception that we've come to associate with the Reagan Administration's intricately scripted photo ops (the cowboy hats, the flannel shirts, the horse), with the choreographed folksiness of Clinton's Town Hall meetings, with the "Wag the Dog" world of political operatives, and with the Dilbertian byways of boardroom euphemism, in which firing is "rightsizing" and dismembering companies becomes "unlocking shareholder value." Edward L. Bernays invented spin.
Today, we're told, Bernays's touch is everywhere. The advertising critic Randall Rothenberg has suggested that there is something called a Media-Spindustrial Complex, which encompasses advertising, P.R., lobbying, polling, direct mail, investor relations, focus groups, jury consulting, speechwriting, radio and television stations, and newspapers--all in the business of twisting and turning and gyrating. Argument now masquerades as conversation. Spin, the political columnist E.J. Dionne wrote recently, "obliterates the distinction between persuasion and deception." Should P.R. people tell "the whole truth about our clients? No sirree!" Thomas Madden, the chairman of one of the largest P.R. firms in the country, declares in his recent memoir, entitled "Spin Man." In the best-seller "Spin Cycle: Inside the Clinton Propaganda Machine," Howard Kurtz,the media critic for the Washington Post, even describes as spin the White House's decision in the spring of 1997 to release thousands of pages of documents relating to the Democratic fund-raising scandal.
This was the documentation that the press had been clamoring for. You might have thought that it was full disclosure. Not so, says Kurtz, who dubs the diabolical plan Operation Candor. In playing the honesty card, he argues, the White House preëmpted embarrassing leaks by congressional investigators and buried incriminating documents under an avalanche of paper. Of course, not releasing any documents at all would also have been spin (Stonewall Spin), and so would releasing only a handful of unrepresentative documents (Selection Spin). But, if you think that calling everything "spin" renders the term meaningless (if this is all spin, then what is not spin?), you've missed the point. The notion that this is the age of spin rests on the premise that everything, including the truth, is potentially an instrument of manipulation.
In "P.R. A Social History of Spin," the media critic Stuart Ewen describes how, in 1990, he went to visit Bernays at his home near Harvard Square, in Cambridge. He was ushered in by a maid and waited in the library, looking, awestruck, at the shelves. "It was a remarkable collection of books, thousands of them: about public opinion, individual and social psychology, survey research, propaganda, psychological warfare, and so forth--a comprehensive library spanning matters of human motivation and strategies of influence, scanning a period of more than one hundred years," he writes. "These were not the bookshelves of some shallow huckster, but the arsenal of an intellectual. The cross- hairs of nearly every volume were trained on the target of forging public attitudes. Here--in a large white room in Cambridge, Massachusetts--was the constellation of ideas that had inspired and informed a twentieth century preoccupation: the systematic molding of public opinion."
To finish the story (it’s worth it) go to http://www.brandingstrategyinsider.com/2007/02/the_spin_myth.html
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