Making sens of these turbulent times

The Listening Up Manifesto by Umair Haque

“If I wanted to put it a little less nicely, I’d say this. Marketing as we know it - and as we practice it - is based on the premise that a handful of imperious companies could, from the misty heights, talk down. That they could - if they invested enough cash in the black arts of persuasion - order, control, subjugate, command, and dominate. Companies spent the last century talking down because the fundamental assumption of the industrial age paradigm of marketing was Skinnerian: given enough messages, you’d be conditioned to buy, buy, buy on eternal autorepeat - like a mouse eternally chasing a sugarcube perched just off the edge of a wheel. See? There’s that assumption that I’m a rube again.

Except, of course, I’m not. Today, I’ve got more than enough information, knowledge, and relationships at my fingertips to figure out that most of these messages are - let me put this bluntly - Big Fat Lies. Conversely, what I don’t have, in the teeth of a Great Stagnation, is money to spend on useless, toxic junk, or time, in my harried life, for overweening, self-indulgent bullsh*t artistry,
Hence, marketing as we know it is obsolete, kaput. All the above is why most campaigns are brand-destroyers, money-losers; it’s why “brands” are a devalued asset, whose returns are dwindling; it’s why the half-life of companies is shrinking; it’s why people and communities exact steeper and steeper discounts, price-cuts, and margin-crushing concessions from the companies once known as the masters of the universe”.