QUESTION: Without looking it up, who can tell me what powerful marketing lesson is in this quote? And extra points if you know who said it!
Let me know in your comments below please:
“A healthy society must go to any lengths to eradicate evil”
Note: I’ve paraphrased the quote to make it more difficult to look up, so no cheating!
{ 17 comments… read them below or add one }
I think Hitler said something similar to that. Not sure if this is his exact quote or not.
The marketing lesson I suppose would be to bond with your market by identifying a common enemy.
Blair Warren said it best:
“People will do anything for those who encourage their dreams, justify their failures, allay their fears, confirm their suspicions and help them throw rocks at their enemies.”
An entire book could be written on each of those 5 keys to persuasion, and probably have.
I don’t know who said it [without googling it, and you said that was cheating] … however personally I believe it applies directly to market verticals.
In order to have a healthy market (any market, even weight loss) the good guys need to do everything they can to eradicate the bad guys. After all if we are [truly] good guys, don’t we want the best for our customers and that means not allowing our customers to be taken advantage of by the bad guys.
Sorry for the rambling Dr. Glenn, that quote just got me started this morning
-Joe
a healthy site (society) must go to any length to eliminate (evil) wasted PPC $$, lost opportunities (missed keywords/markets/networks) that the competition is utilizing, any waste of resources or lack of efficiency.
how’s that work for ya Glenn?
Glenn, my guess would be Hitler too.
A marketing lesson from it can be that the market (in this case, the “society”) must be in general agreement about what is “evil” in order for the assumed evil thing to be banned. In other words, a marketer must market to the existing beliefs of that market.
Marketing lesson would be pick the parts of your campaign that work best and then get rid of the rest. Or focus on your most profitable customers.
Sounds like Winston Churchill or maybe even Roosevelt, but then again maybe I’m picking the wrong side since everyone else is saying Hitler lol.
Lesson – stirs up emotion, gains agreement, curiosity and a desire to read more. The reader would stick longer to read more of the copy.
No idea who said that quote.
Since we’re talking about evil… I’ll drop the usual barriers of discussing religion for this conversation:
Recent videos of terrorists beheading innocent captives have perhaps forever sickened us… but yet we celebrate Christ as a being from the City of David – who in battle did not kill Goliath with his sling as many tell the story, but knocked him down with the rock and then drew his sword and cut off his head.
I am a devout Christian, so this is not meant in anyway to be an attack on Christianity or religious belief in general. I am a Mormon, and get verbally abused by street preachers shouting at me that I am being blinded by a cult every time I go to our Church’s General Conference in Salt Lake City.
Jesus and later his Apostles were killed largely because of the potential threat of his rapidly expanding followers/cult. David Koresh, Jim Jones, and Marshall Applewhite’s followers/cult were killed for a different reason – the insanity and grotesque egoism of their chosen leader.
The quote – which is Hitler – is most meaningful to me in that it points out that wheat and tares are often sewn together and not distinguishable until the harvest. When you’re a wheat marketing among tares – pressure mounts to tame the edge on your promises, to tone down your USP out of fear of being mistaken for a tare, or perhaps mistaking yourself for one.
When so many people in certain industries are having horrible experiences when they bite on similar sounding promises from competitors… confusion sets in – and in one’s own mind, it becomes tough to tell which YOU are.
“Can I really deliver what my copy says I can?”
“Am I pompous enough to believe that I can decipher what is evil and teach others how to eradicate it?”
“Perhaps relativism truly is the highest form of human consciousness?”
Perhaps it is if your a Professor, but if you’re a marketer, it’s death. I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how often… from technical gurus to copywriters, to traffic kings… marketing lesson number 1 is most often to stand up and be somebody. To take a side. Sound the clarion call and command your followers to heed it.
The current trend in American media and politics is to brand that as extremism and we’re warned against it… all in the cause of enlightenment and acceptance.
That’s probably enough for this arena, but that is what came to mind for me ruminating on your question.
The rock SUNK into his forehead (the rock killed him) he cut off Goliath’s head because he said he would before the fight started.
Now on to the question, er uh, the answer;
You have to be willing to go to any lengths (morally of course) to serve your customer : ” A Healthy Business must go to any lengths to server thier customer” becuase if you don’t someone else will and your business won’t be “healthy” any more. It will be sick.
Since I am not aware of any modern “healthy societies” it is impossible for them to eliminate evil. Normal appears to most to be whatever they have been raised within and what they are conditioned to accept.
Just how unhealthy American society has become is obvious to anyone whose eyes are open. Prime time television shows nightly what would have been considered at least R rated when I was younger. Advertising, movies and TV portray violence and perversion as the norm.
Each individual makes their own choices. (Failure to choose is STILL a choice.) The few who think influence the many who do not. I’ll paraphrase a favorite quote: “Two percent of people think, 3% THINK they think, and 95% would rather DIE than think”.
That seems fairly accurate to me based on actual results obtained by percentages of the population. Let’s take this further. Of the 2% that actually think, it is likely that almost all of them are selfish. (This I base on their actions.)
That leaves only a small percentage of 1% of all people who are interested in and act on what is best for the greater good of all. While we CAN influence others in that group and possibly other thinkers who choose to set aside their selfish ways, those are the only people who truly care to eliminate evil and recognize it when they see it.
Everything from politics to the stock market to the economy to the current advertising based model of business celebrates and encourages selfishness. Those who aspire to succeed on the backs of others ARE evil even though few would recognize them as such.
The few who are selfless need to work together to build a subset of Society where they can survive the inevitable continued economic decline. There is an alternative to the advertising based business model that benefits only the already rich. It is to support quality small and online businesses through Word of Mouth Marketing and promoting them freely instead of charging them for advertising.
There are posts in my blog that elaborate on all I have shared here. I will use one in the link from this comment. I will write more about why the current advertising model doesn’t work, who it benefits and what the solution is in my blog soon.
Sounds like Glenn from the first comment was right.
I would only add that Hitler not only created a common enemy (Jews and other minorities). But he also made it morally and ethically wrong not to want to fight the enemy. If you wanted to belong to the group, if you wanted to be a ’sane’ person, a ‘healthy’ person, you had to fight ‘evil’. Who in their right mind wouldn’t?
The man was a brilliant marketer. Which also goes to show us that marketing and persuasion principals can serve good and evil.
Some other answers have hinted at this, but there\’s an embedded assumption: You\’re healthy, aren\’t you? Or you want to be? Then clearly, you\’ll go to any lengths, <i>any</i> lengths, to eliminate evil. Or are you an unhealthy evil-non-eliminator? I didn\’t think so.
So the marketing lesson is, encourage people to put themselves in a positive category of people who would naturally do what you want them to do, and convince them that such people will, indeed, naturally do that.
Glenn,
1. Just by virtue of you offering this as a challenge to be solved, it is both a problem and challenge to the reader.
2. The marketing lesson, I suggest, is that of a problem, which is universal and common to those of us which dwell in such a society – all of us; therefore it is my problem. It creates a need that must be solved; it acts as an imperative and bolsters the responsible individual to action to indeed play his part in solving that problem. It also contains a certain amount of curiosity, because it appears, to the individual as an open-ended problem. How does one identify evil? Once identified, how does one individual in a collective society play his part in eradicating that evil?
3. It raises another problem for me: agency and structure (or institution). Society is a collective; I am an individual. How am I to go about eradicating evil?
4. As a Christian, I have a reasonably clear idea, but this proposition contains terms that could be filled with any content labelled ‘evil’. One party to this could be a righteous person; another party could be a euthanasiast (who feels rightly justified in dispatching the weak, orphans, infirmed, etc. and believes that he is doing ’society’ a good turn!).
5. I have not got a clue who wrote it.
Troy.
I’ll take the high road:
Be relentless in rooting out lies, false promises, and hollow language from your life and your business. If you can under-promise and over-deliver, be a mensch in your business dealings, and ring true in all that you do, you will have a healthy business.
Pope LEO XIII said it.
Marketing message -
Joining a positive result with a specific action. A good way to move people to do something.
I am guessing…
I agree with Ron W.
And we are not related, do not know each other, and are not participating in an evil conspiracy to answer the question.
Except that I’m being lazy and just voting for his answer. Is that make evil conspiracy?
Thanks for mentorship, Glenn!
Eliminate evil, got to be Sergey and Larry. Not really sure the marketing lesson although the use of the word lengths is interesting. Don’t really think a healthy society has anything to do with eradicating evil. Evil in many cases is good, but if you can sell it like that to accomplish your mission then you must be a pretty good marketer.
“A healthy society must go to any lengths to eradicate evil”
I don’t know who said it, but it sounds a bit extremist to me. As a marketing message, I’d say it conveys the idea of shared responsibility.
Reminds me of the another quote who’s author I’ve forgotten, which is that for evil to triumph, it only requires that the good do nothing.
So – in any market, there are no passive bystanders. You have to stand for something, or you’ll fall for anything. (I’m quoting everyone and anyone now.)
In addition, as a marketer, you have a responsibility to do your best to care for your customers and promote what’s best for them in the long term.
And upsell! (that’s a joke by the way.)