Time for Marketing 2.0?

It's a truism that the point of "classic" marketing is to make you unhappy. Unhappy enough to fork over your hard-earned gelt for whatever snake oil makes you believe that the unhappiness will stop. And if the marketing is particularly clever, you can pass on your unhappiness by flaunting your snake oil in the face of The Joneses so that they will rush out to own their very own bottle of anti-unhappiness.

Key term: "Anti-unhappiness." I don't mean "bottle of happiness." The opposite of "unhappy" is not always "happy." The no-man's-land between the two can be miles in breadth--and I think that it tends to widen if one does not have clear and concrete definitions of both terms.

But (radical thought) what if marketing made you happy? Not just an artificial injection of feel-good: Kittens and American Flag and cute guys/girls smiling Just For You. No, not the usual schtick. That's been done to death, too. What about marketing that treated the interaction as more of an ongoing consultation rather than a one-off slam-bam-why-are-you-still-here transaction? The closest thing I've seen so far is President Obama's 2008 campaign and subsequent "policy support" campaigns. You don't have to like the guy to recognize that he's a game-changer on a number of levels. That's merely one of them.

I'm old enough to remember Reagan, a.k.a. The Great Communicator. Particularly the feeling of turning to our national paternal figure for explanation and comfort after the Challenger explosion--and knowing, even as it was happening, what a pastmaster that man was at it. I also remember watching Clinton's State of the Union address as the Monica Lewinsky scandal was breaking and thinking, "Dang, you're good at this."

But the new guy at 1600 Pennsylvania? Those moves I haven't seen before. But you can bet that my inner consumer and I are certainly on the lookout for them now. Because not all marketers are Least Common Denominator troglodytes. Specifically, we're looking for the gap between those who grok the new rules and the warranty-scam or akai berry or wrinkle eraser sleaze-balls to form. If the bottom-feeders slither back under their rocks and more or less leave the field to the peddlers of actual happy, well, I can think of worse legacies for a President to have...