This post has been composed over a year ago, and the reason I didn’t publish it right away was because I thought it could be improved. After re-reading it today, I decided that it is pretty good for what it is, and I can always expand on the argument later. This is a topic that I’m very passionate about, it’s time I put it out there and join the conversation on sustainable marketing.
This is a story of how I fell in and out of love with marketing.
I’m telling this now knowing I could upset a lot of people, many of whom are dear friends of mine. Therefore, I would like to set things straight from the beginning. First, I love marketing and all of its creative energy. Second, marketing people are really cool and brilliant people. Personally, I am a creative oriented person so these were actually what drew me into marketing in the first place. Anyone who knows me at all knows I chose marketing as a profession, paid good money (through the bank of mom and dad) for a qualification in marketing in the UK, practiced marketing communications in various positions in several companies, and I am currently conducting PhD research in international marketing. Therefore, I think I have earned the right to criticise marketing.
I would also want to disclaim that by marketing, I did not mean to specifically target any marketing function (i.e., marketing communications, market research, product development, etc.), but the marketing driven mindset in general that focuses on growth and profit generation. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t oppose money making. Instead, I think money is an important resource, and people have the right to earn money for themselves and their family. What I oppose is making money at all cost, growing at all cost, and letting greed take over our life.
As always, my approach to this discussion is “a purely personal account of my learning experiences”. It is not because I am a self-obsessed person who only wants to talk about herself (or at least that is not how I see myself), but because I know each person will have a different view based on their own learning experiences. Therefore, I will refrain from making generalised claims which might make me sound like a self-help book, and instead encourage you to reflect on your own experience while engaging in this (I think) meaningful discussion.
What’s wrong with marketing?
Everyone studying marketing knows the story of how marketing began as the sales function of the business which helped to push the products out to the market. Overtime, some brilliant minds in the marketing world realised and somehow convinced the business world to believe that companies would be most profitable when they applied marketing thinking for their business strategies. So the marketing department expanded to get involved in production from start to finish, to be present in other seemingly unrelated departments like human resources or public relations. I’d like to think of marketing as the result of the decades-long evolution of capitalism—it will not be seen prominently in a more primitive economy, and will become the ultimate weapon that any company can hope to possess in a fiercely competitive environment of a high-functioning capitalist economy.
When I got my hands on the first project ever as a summer intern of a big marketing communications agency in Vietnam in 2016, I was mesmerised by the sheer flashiness of marketing power. It was a collaboration project between one of the most luxurious fashion houses and one of the most luxurious wine brands in the world, for which they paid the agency thousands of pounds just to have some “mild” coverage in Vietnam. Additionally, the constant doses of dopamine whenever I saw my copies or my writing published in a renowned media outlet got me pulled into this flashy world so quickly. I decided to pursue marketing communications as a profession in hope of someday being able to step up the fanciness ladder.
There were two potential problems that I didn’t realise back then. First of all, the effects of these dopamine doses wore off as I engaged more with the fast-paced unbalanced lifestyle that is notorious of agency life. Work-life balance in Vietnam is already generally bad without the added pressure of demanding clients and the unstructured nature of creative work. Some people thrive in that environment, but not me. Back then I knew very little about what I wanted, but I knew I didn’t want a life like that. So I steered myself into the other option: working for the brands themselves, because I believed it would give me more focus and more structure in terms of creativity, and ultimately the feeling of being in control of my life. I thought, though, that I might have to sacrifice these constant doses of dopamine, but it’s the trade-off that everyone has to make, right? 🙂 Little did I know that those dopamines were the last thing I would have to worry about.
So by 2017, I was ready to wrap up the short-lived agency chapter of my life, flew to England for my MSc in Branding and Advertising, thinking I would come back with wonderful new knowledge and start working for some good brands with good pay. Well, that did not work out quite well. As I immersed myself in the home of capitalism, I learned nothing of substantial newness to me in terms of marketing communications, which at first might seem counterproductive. I came back to Vietnam after a year feeling like nothing has changed except the thickness (or thinness) of my pocket. Yet there was something that stick with me through all those lectures and assignments: the concept of sustainability and how over-production and over-consumption create such disaster to the world that we live in. How I might apply that to my profession, I had no idea. So as a way to naively exercise sustainability, I decided that I would only apply for jobs that did not play a part in driving over-production nor over-consumption. There was no such job for me at that moment. I spent months applying for positions in NGOs, but I did not have the skill package that they looked for, and those accepted me paid me nothing (it was an unpaid internship), which might be fine for when I was still in uni, but not so nice when I had just paid dozens of thousands of pounds for a qualification. I also applied for a handful of available positions in education establishments—private schools, universities, etc. I got nowhere and started to fall into a career crisis. Fortunately, after all the struggles, I got a job at a publishing agency, and it has opened up a plethora of opportunities for me, which I might go into detail in another post.
My own experience made me realise one thing: I have stepped into a profession where money creates this black-and-white division of the world of work. I will always have to choose between making profits for the big companies (and by that making money for myself) by participating in their network of marketing activities, and caring about sustainability and getting nowhere at all, professionally and financially. While I respect my colleagues who work for big brands and agencies—they are just doing a job that they are really good at, and earn money for them and their families—my passion for sustainability is too strong for me to do that. Furthermore, even though I like money, I’d prefer to hold on to my morals and ethics, because I have seen what money could do to people. I was clinging onto this ideology so dearly that I have become more or less an anti-capitalism anti-consumerism kind of a person. In Vietnam, understandably, I became like an outcast, unable to voice out my thoughts without being laughed in the face or called “naive”. People always joke about “selling their souls to capitalism” without knowing what that actually means anyway. It means for me, in the profession that I have chosen, to help give the most evil corporations the biggest voices in the market that creates all sort of troubles for modern society.
So who is doing marketing? The answer is, only big companies and corporations that have a budget for marketing communication campaigns can do proper marketing. Where do they get that money from? From exploitation of their workforce, their consumer base, the environment, and the government systems. And to maximise the profits, they’re always trying to “hack” the system, lying to everyone, and destroying everything that gets in the way. Ever wonder why the concept of sustainability is in the political agenda of all western countries? Because it is, ironically, a product of capitalism. Because in the pursuit of growth and profits, corporations have destroyed our environment and out health to the point and at a speed that sustainability was developed and forced onto them to attempt to balance out the harm or at least minimise it. Sustainability never is a thing in primitive societies because human has not managed to produce mass-destruction like that.
Who’s potentially harmed because of marketing?
Those who have this free market ideology would argue with me, quite rightfully, that capitalism drives competition that is good for the economy and for everyone, as investors, employers, employees, or consumers. Well, really? Because I’m living now in the UK, and I don’t see those good things.
Most of the things that are marketed to us nowadays are unnecessary and even harmful to us. Most of the topics that are being discussed in the public space are not important and distractive. Most of the information presented to us is not truthful and messes up with our minds. It is because the people who produce what we consume, discuss, and read/watch do so for their own benefits. Marketers and media play a critical role in delivering such messages.
Because I have had firsthand experience being the voice of brands, it sickens me to think of the things we have to do to manipulate people, conversations, and information to play to the benefit of a certain group of people. I’ve developed this special sensitivity to lies, and whenever presented with a new product or information, I could easily detect what is true, what is lies, what is there to manipulate, and what is there to educate. Trust me, at first it was a whole new level of anxiety to see how many lies people are willing to say. But now it’s become more like a weirdly entertaining and slightly depressing game.
What’s next?
I always joke with my husband that I have this activist blood that runs in me. But activism can only work when I can offer a solution. I haven’t had that yet. So the mini-activist in me is manifesting in the form of my own consumption behaviour. I develop a strong immune system from effects of marketing communications efforts, abstain myself from unnecessary consumption, and refuse, whenever I can, to give money to big corporations. In a bigger picture, my PhD research is an opportunity for me to build up skills and expertise to start to create an impact.
To do that is not an easy job. I know I have a long way to go. But I’d like to raise a voice, however small, rather than not saying anything at all.
tracemyPhD 
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