Marketing gets a lot of shade thrown its way for being manipulative. And…you know…sometimes that is fair enough.
There were and are bad companies out there doing bad things with their ads - trying to mislead and manipulate you - wasting money on outlandish, ecologically harmful promotions. Oiling the wheels of insatiable capitalist consumerism by making you…anyway, you get it.
HOWEVER, there is a lot of non-evil marketing and branding. These are things we have to do every day of every week:
Restaurant owners take fancy photos to make their food look delicious.
Airbnb hosts stage their New York apartment to look cosmopolitan and *not* tiny.
Jake (below) goes the extra mile to get matches on Tinder
If you are brave enough to run your own business, then basically everything you do - naming your company, hiring new people, building your website - involves some kind of marketing and branding.
Marketing can be good, or bad, or ugly. Jess and I take the view, though, that there’s almost always some insight about humans to be gleaned from any ad you see, even if the marketer has totally missed the mark. And boy do she and I enjoy gleaning.
Understanding how we’re being marketed to is an increasingly essential skill amid an ever-increasing deluge of information and misinformation. Awareness helps us stay grounded and mentally healthy.
Also...appreciating excellent craft in marketing can be really fun, and very satisfying once you start to take things apart.
Why BBB.B
We made BlogBlogBrand.Blog because we personally find this stuff interesting, and we wanted to make it fun and enlightening for other people.
We both have marketing backgrounds, but do our best to speak plainly and avoid jargon.
Most of the time you’ll see some marketing-y words like ‘positioning’ and ‘value proposition’ in our posts, but generally only when we want to explain the thought process of a brand or marketing person when putting together their brief, or the ad itself.
If this sounds interesting to you, here’s a couple of posts about marketing we love to get you started:
Craft beer in color - the post-coronavirus Cambrian explosion (Ben)
We've also started a server on Discord to talk about this stuff. If you want to nerd out with us about marketing or branding, get updates when we post something new, or just say 👋 then go ahead and join.
Ben & Jess
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