Tag Archives: Marketing

Flock Cameras vs. Foucault: How to Market the Surveillance State, Smile You’re on Camera!

What does the French philosopher Michel Foucault have in common with Flock cameras, those increasingly ubiquitous “automated license plate readers” that record license plates on American roads?

And don’t worry. Just because a computer system may know where your car was last Tuesday at 5 p.m., there’s absolutely nothing to worry about. Absolutely nothing to worry about your trip to the strip club, the Cannabis dispensary, to visit that lively friend from work while your partner was away on a business trip, or that the police and Flock cameras did not mistake your vehicle for one stolen by a criminal, or that police officers might access the database to use them to conduct surveillance on friends or family. Nothing to worry about. Continue reading →

How to Evaluate an SEO / AEO Agency – Tips from René Descartes | Marketing Philosophy

Hiring an SEO or AEO consultant, a Google Ads agency, or an AI marketing firm can require a “leap of faith.” You’re paying someone to do something that, almost by definition, you don’t know how to do yourself. If you already understood search engine optimizationm, AEO (Answer Agent Optimization), or AI optimization as well as the consultant or ads agency, you probably wouldn’t need to hire one in the first place. That creates an uncomfortable imbalance. The agency knows more than you do. You have to trust them. But how much trust is healthy, and when does trust become blind faith? More than four hundred years ago, the French philosopher René Descartes asked a remarkably similar question—not about marketing, of course, but about knowledge itself. How do we know what is true? More importantly, how do we protect ourselves from being deceived? Continue reading →

Your Business is Having an Existential Crisis – Writing a Business Value Proposition with Sartre as Your Guide | Marketing Philosophy

The connections between French existentialism and marketing seem absurd. Well… “absurd” is an existentialist concept, so we’re off to a pretty good start.

Bear with me. In this video I’m going to explain what the existentialist philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre meant by his famous phrase, “existence precedes essence,” and why that idea has everything to do with writing a Business Value Proposition for your company. Continue reading →

Digital Marketing: Strategy, Skills, & Attitude

That “marketing has gone digital” is pretty much a platitude by 2022. Yes, there still exists “traditional” marketing, especially “word of mouth,” and to a greatly diminished extent since the Pandemic, trade shows. But traditional print media – magazines, trade press, and daily newspapers… are all but extinct, reaching only the most “traditional” and “elderly” of consumers. Billboards? OK, yes, they still exist. Direct mail – not dead (yet), and so on and so forth. Some of the traditional venues and methodologies are “hanging on” but they’re more like a 99 year old woman in a nursing home, than a young vibrant lad of just 16. Continue reading →

Personal Branding: Step-by-step to Your Own Personal Brand

It used to be that only the famous had a “personal brand.” I’m a huge fan of Andy Warhol, for example, and one of the tenets of his art was that the “brand” of the person and the person him/herself aren’t the same thing.  For example, one of his most famous paintings is “Double Elvis,” which you can see today at MOMA in New York City. I won’t take credit for this idea, but I heard it somewhere in the ether (so it must be true). The point of the painting – or at least one take-away – is that there’s the “Brand” of Elvis, the Elvis we all know from TV, movies, and music, and then there is (somewhere) the “real” Elvis. Not to mention there’s the “brand” of a cowboy (like we see on TV or movies in Westerns) and then there were real live cowboys. “Double Elvis” asks us to question whether we truly know Elvis at all, or just know the brand-projection of Elvis that was “created” by Hollywood and record labels. Elvis is nothing if not a brand – a brand so famous he lives on even after death. Continue reading →