This past Tuesday (26th of Feb), my local SSA group had a guest speaker from the SIN blog network; the very informative Beth from Incongruent Elements. Her topic? Marketing. While usually not a topic that perks my interest, I found the whole presentation to be fascinating.
Beth’s presentation reminded me about how it seems honesty is always demanded and assumed in personal relations, but how quickly that demand is forgotten when it comes to effective market strategizing. I don’t mean to say that Beth was teaching us how to be dishonest to get what we want, but it struck me as interesting that almost everyone feels at least complacent with the fact that we are targeted daily by savvy advertisers who use subtle and not-so-subtle psychological manipulation, but play a different tune when we discover someone specifically in our personal lives doing the exact same thing.
I want to stress that Beth was simply the messenger at this point, she was sharing marketing strategies that worked and wanted us to have them at our disposal. I couldn’t shake a discomfort I had about appealing to people’s unconscious fears and greed to get a foot in the door. It reminded me of Aristotle’s book on rhetoric where he draws a sharp distinction between the practice of rhetoric and dialectic; the former being the art of persuasion and the latter being a strategy of getting at the truth of the matter between two conflicting viewpoints.
Interestingly enough, Beth had numerous examples of Christian organizations and ministries who artfully ply the trade of psychological manipulation to garner money. Her point wasn’t that these ministries are almost indistinguishable from more secular scam artists trying to sell you their real estate strategies, but that we should been keenly aware of how they operate.
This is where Beth’s talk went beyond being informative for me and started becoming more important. She stressed the importance of doing research, of observing these ministries and organizations to see just how they get their message across and what their selling points are, so you can effectively deal with it when the time comes. This deeply resonated with me because trying to understand the rival worldview on its own terms is something I take seriously, but I think most others in the secular/skeptic “movement” often ignore.
I was quite pleased with Beth’s entire talk, while she probably doesn’t care for my comparison of marketing as psychological manipulation, I found the presentation to be simultaneously informative, entertaining, and important. A hat trick that is hard to hit
