One of our first lessons this year in Marketing 296 was the marketing adds value. In the context of the holiday seasons, this should be a statement about Christmas spirit fuelled by the engines of consumerism, but the forces that be (i.e. the ones mentioned in my previous blog post) do not seem to be generating better Christmas spirit. I would argue in fact, that somehow, instead of increasing the glory and appreciation of festivity, markets have conventionalized them. The classic argument against Hallmark and their holiday greeting cards being part of the capitalistic machine is an old one, and while I do plan on drawing on some of its merits, this post is about summations.

Doing a video project on Rogers (in which we analyzed the market environment and made recommendations accordingly) inescapably drew my attention to the constant difficulty of identifying target markets; a task that an old marketing instructor in high school said in his one substitute lesson with my class was the real key to marketing strategy; namely, that a plethora of factors, events, and information is constant, but the only real tool a marketer has in analysis is people. Marketing is just as much about analyzing the world and deciding how to paint a picture as it is about identifying which parts of the world to analyze, and where the next significant theoretical analysis will arise. On a whole, with Christmas celibacy in the back of our minds, I find it increasingly important that the 21st century consumer and marketer alike be trained to focus; turning off our cellphones at appropriate times and being generally dedicated to what’s at hand scales with exponential benefits. This apparently holds true at any stage in a life cycle of fulfillment: even if we choose to, as a contemporary god of marketing Steve Jobs suggests, never look at marketing research again in our lives, this fundamental takeaway of focusing on the right essentials has been an obvious part of doing well in any marketing textbook or success story.

Eminem’s iconic album “Curtain Call” is an intriguing example of defying conventionality; as the curtain on this term is drawn, and reflecting like this artist here on how I have tried to break the mold, I’ve noticed myself doing best when I un-divide my attention. Maybe it gets more complicated (I wouldn’t doubt it), but it’s the best I have now!

My obligatory video game post comes at an interesting segue from studying; what better way to spend scant study break time than on stress-relieving video games? Or alternatively, we can analyze it: how much do we enjoy, say, embodying the adventurous life of a story from the comfort of our couch? It’s easy to get absorbed in games (usually, that’s the point), and although the discussion around the influence of gaming’s violent themes has died down in recent years, it’s important not to forget what our influences become when we do become absorbed.

Meet “Call of Duty: Ghosts”; a first-person shooter game that I will use for a simple case analysis. Featuring a number of psychologically thrilling, mentally challenging, aesthetically provoking, and thematically violent experiences, the game’s campaign mode (single-player, story mode) not only portrayed war as the ultimate stage for heroics, but more disturbingly inundated players in a patriarchal paradigm. Subtle ideas like male dominance are readily accepted by younger audiences, or uneducated players (who for our purpose, can be male) cruising through the game feeling purposeful, influential, and bound to settle “dad’s score” with the evil murderer wreaking havoc to the United States. Here, I’ll save Bandura’s bobo doll experiment another citation, and simply ask why girls should play with dolls, and boys, guns? History tells us that that is not the way people naturally behave; I believe that people with bigger muscles are not naturally more violent. We can see that the same ingenuity fuelling the proliferation of diamond engagement rings in the latter half of the 20^th century is at work; the same forces behind successful marketing campaigns.

21^st century, value marketing has resolvable roots in recognizing the power of involvement. If you readily subscribe to a belief (a broken paradigm, for example), it can become part of your unquestioned status quo. The danger is when this bias erodes our grasp on reality; perhaps this status quo is the reason we have so much constant, impenetrable clutter, vying for our divided attention in our lives.

Although the scenery is spectacular and mesmerizing in-game, is it really fair to experience it as a young man killing men with my brother and my dog, for my country and my father? Sounds like a bit of a… vulgar success, wrought with distractions. Humans were not designed to stand alone against a constant barrage of everything coming at once; or is that what we call heroic?