Half Truth, Half Lie

In a normal economy every industrial and non-industrial domain has it’s role in the country’s development and progress. Just like the oil industry which is the base foundation of many other industries, the consulting business should be the planning foundation of any new business. Like I said, this should be the case in a normal economy environment, but unfortunately can’t talk about normality these days, at least not in Romania. Consulting services are not that popular on the Romanian Market mostly because entrepreneurs don’t really want to listen to consultants and just want to get the job done. So here as you can see is a young consulting market. People should ask these questions when calling a marketing consulting company: Is your company also offering marketing implementation solutions (advertising, PR, design) or just the planning side of the marketing (marketing plan, marketing mix, marketing and branding strategies)? And if not, do you have partners that you recommend to your customers for the implementation of the marketing and branding strategies? But unfortunately there are few people that understand these concepts.

Lately I’ve been so sick words like Branding, Marketing, Advertising, PR... In my opinion they are not clear notions and are people have chosen then really bad. For the average Joe it’s too confusing... Branding uses Marketing, Marketing uses Advertising and sometimes Advertising uses PR or vice-versa. Sometimes people ask me what I do and I tell them I do Marketing, Branding, Advertising and PR... and in reply the ask me again: "How can you do all these things as once? How can you be good at everything?"... and then I have to make them realize that all these word are related all have something in common with the other. Say you want to do branding, right? You need to make a graphic logo and come up with a message that you want to propagate with that logo... in order to do that you got to have some basic notions of Design and also psychology of course. Marketing is all about research and building up a plan on top of that research using some psychological skills which must guide the customer to buy the given product/services. This is achieved using Advertising and/or PR. Here is the tricky part because you must create a perfect "packaging" for the product/service so the public perception will be a positive one. This is accomplished again using graphics and psychology. A beautiful package will always attract customers but some of them read the message on the box so the message must be a perfect one telling the customers the overrated truth and at the same time hiding the downsides of the product/service. Basically marketing/branding or whatever you want to call it is made of half truth and half lie or sometimes a disproportional balance between these 2 elements. I know... it’s a dirty job but someone’s got to do it, right?

What bothers me is that all these authors write all kind of theoretical books regarding marketing, branding, advertising, pr, and rather than simplifying things they are making them even more complicated when they actually are not. As I see it, and please correct me if I’m wrong, is knowledge in psychology, design and strategy (made using research but in many cases the market research is totally unrealistic so in the end you have to use your intuition and psychology knowledge). It seems like the perfect employee would be an ex-member of the MK-Ultra program with a bit of creativity skills... but from what I’ve heard they were all pretty creative when it came to finding methods of mind controlling people.

I know this is a hard thing to swallow but we got to admit that marketers and the people working in related industries like branding, advertising, pr, are actually mind controllers and some of them are really good… are you one of them???

A BV Business Center article by Cristian Dragos

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