We often talk about politicians as people who play dirty with other people’s minds; as people who would do anything to win and who take advantage of their psychological power over others. But what about business people? What about marketers? Is what a business or marketing person does really that different from a politician’s actions?
Some politicians use and abuse the influence and trust people have in them. How is it different from what marketers do? Marketers must know just how to manage their target market’s minds to make them buy their products, even when people don’t really need such things.
And just like in the case of politicians, even though we may know they have played with our minds, we end up doing just what they want. Marketers and people who work in business have one common goal: to make money. Their methods may vary from person to person, but they are all taught the same thing in business school: to maintain certain margin of profit all the time.
Psychological influence can be an extraordinarily powerful thing. Bankers and marketers can make you think you got great deals when you borrow money when in reality, you could end up paying twice what you borrowed. Some business people would sell you food at absurdly high prices, and then make you think they’re doing you a favor by having “sales”. Or just think about the diamond business in Africa, and how it has destroyed entire nations. Slavery, in all of its forms, and feudalism are great examples of how and at what extent greed can harm society.
Living in such a materialistic society, I’ve come to ask myself how necessary is to sell almost every rock and leaf there is in the planet? Who draws the line of when it has been enough selling and advertising unnecessary things? When does marketing, banking and all of the different branches of business stop being ethical and morphs into a dirty game, just like what happens in politics?
As a business major myself, I’ve realized that I don’t want to spend the rest of my life thinking how to get people’s money more easily. It is just not in my nature. I will study business to have the tools to refrain myself from involving in those messy games.
I am not trying to answer any question here. I am just that. Asking questions that concern me as a business student, and that I would encourage every other business student to ask themselves. This honest and innocent question arose one morning in the classrooms at the Business Department of JBU.
Where is the line? And where are you standing at?
