The good kind of marketing

Mar 27, 2006

The good kind of marketing · by Rafi Kam

Last August, about a month before Oh Word went live, I happened to notice two of my favorite blogs both ran the same quote within days of each other.

I saw it first at marketing guru Seth Godin’s blog. Here is what the post said.

What Bootsy said

Here’s some profound marketing thought from Bootsy Collins.

“You have to bring some funk to get some. You just can’t walk in a place and expect to get some funk. If you ain’t bring no funk, then you can’t get no funk… Another thing is, you can’t fake the funk or your nose will grow.”

Later I saw that poet / hip-hop critic Jalylah Burrell of She Real Cool had already posted that quote 2 days earlier.

I thought this was kind of an odd bit of synchronicity and I let both bloggers know about this coincidence. At the time I was already occasionally corresponding with Jalylah after having helped her out with a few html fixes for her blog. In classic poet/scholar mode, she was a little uneasy about the fact that I was regularly reading a marketing blog and trying to relate it to her. After I emailed her this post I saw the next week titled “You ARE a marketer. Deal with it” she confessed that she is one of those who (like Bill Hicks in the previous link) “despises” marketers for their insincerity.

Who can blame her? Bootsy said if you fake the funk your nose will grow. And there is definitely a perception that marketing is faking the funk by doing sheisty business or speaking inauthentically.

But the message hammered home every week on the blogs linked to in the last paragraph is that the old way of marketing isn’t nearly as effective as finding ideas worth spreading and communicating honestly about them.

Marketers have a bad rap for mostly being full of shit. But of course poets have the same stigma attached to them. If you’re practicing one of these spheres, speak openly and get familiar with the common area between the two.

Bring it back to Bootsy … You think Bootsy and George Clinton and them could have caught on if they didn’t believe in the product???

Comments for "The good kind of marketing"

Rafi,

Reflecting back, I wonder if my unease had to do with my lifelong aversion to sales. At 14, I started working seasonally at Nordstrom and eventually chose not to work on commission ‘cause I didn’t want to deal with that pressure. I wanted steady easy money so I took my hourly pay as I observed my bff, also a Nordy employee, rolling in her commission dough.

Now as somebody who writes but wants to write more I have found that a stumbling block has been my inability and unwillingness to sell myself. Shi*t, that’s what pitching is. That’s what life is. We market ourselves in all of our relationships, professional and personal but, for whatever reason, I don’t like to. Providentially for most of my life I didn’t have to. People and opportunities came to me (I mean literally. When I got a coveted internship at Goldman Sachs as sophomore with no interest in Finance it was by virtue of receiving an out of the blue call from a recruiter to whom I nor the college career center I had yet to visit, ever sent a resume). Anyway maybe that was TMI. But I will say that our discussion was a factor in me shifting my perspective on marketing if not yet my relationship to it.

And you are so spot on about that belief in the product? At least in my case. But then again I see a lot of people or organizations who may not be hindered by a lack of faith in their respective products.

In a lot of real life instances, I still can’t reconcile honesty or sincerity with marketing but the other day my friend told me there is no space for sincerity in business only integrity. I feel like there is a difference but I don’t quite know what it is.

I’ll stop cluttering your comments here.~jb

— jb Mar 27, 01:17 PM