Adventures in Marketing

My dad has been in marketing for as long as I’ve been alive, and as a result, an odd fascination with advertising rubbed off on me at a very young age. I don’t remember my dad’s bringing his work home as something that took him away from me. Instead, as a special treat, when the marketing department would be interviewing new ad agencies, he would bring home the agencies’ demo tapes and ask me what I thought. I was completely smitten with one ad featuring the kid from Jerry Maguire engaged in an earnest conversation about marsupials, and equally horrified by one equating the distribution of Nintendo games in the suburbs to food packs in Africa. Dad agreed on both counts.

Many years into my marketing education, my dad gave me an interesting insight into the nature of the beast itself.

“The goal of marketing is to achieve trial,” he told me, as Brian Williams went on a commercial break one night. “After that, it’s up to the product people to make something that consumers will enjoy and buy again. But the exclusive purpose of marketing is to get the consumer to try it the first time.”

They are strange, self-aware moments in which I experience this phenomenon in action.

Take Apple for example. I think I was actually with my dad the first time I saw the TV ad for the Macbook Air: the manila envelope sitting innocuously in the clean, blank space with vaguely hipster music playing in the background. When the disembodied hand casually reached into the frame and pulled the impossibly slim and sleek laptop from the envelope, I very nearly went into convulsions. I’m a Dell woman myself, but in those few minutes, all reason abandoned me, and the only semi-coherent thought I had was along the lines of, “GIMME GIMME GIMME!”

My dad thought the entire process, from my eyes glazing over to full manifestation of consumerist frenzy, was hilarious. He would point out, though, that ultimately the marketing was not successful, because I never got to the essential trial phase. Nevertheless, any ad that can solicit rapturous effects like these cannot have been entirely off the mark.

What Apple was selling in that ad was not speed or endurance—it was beauty, pure and simple. As I convulsed, I was not concerned with the specs of the hard drive or the coverage of the warranty. Hopefully, if I ever got as far as purchasing, I would concern myself with those details, but what would get me to the store, credit card in hand, was that the thing was so damn pretty.

Armed with this understanding of advertising and how it does (or doesn’t) work, sometimes I eye myself in the mirror, faced with something of a dilemma.

The feminist side of my brain kicks into high gear at the very notion of thinking of myself as a commodity: something to market, to sell, to be consumed, purchased, or owned. I do not, in fact, think of myself as a commodity in the consumerist sense of the word. It's just that, for whatever reason, my brain seems to be hardwired to think in marketing terms: it’s the language by which I understand and conceptualize the phenomenon of desire, of wanting or trying to get someone else to want. I also do not think it is terribly surprising, or troubling, to want to be wanted.

How much, though, do I want to invest in my pursuit of being wanted? To put it another way, how much do I want to invest in (cringe) marketing?

Oddly enough, hair is a good example.

Though it is a non-descript brown, my hair is fairly thick, in good health, and falls midway down my back. However, the damn stuff has a distressing tendency never to stay put, so when it is down, I’m always pushing it back, smoothing it down, and generally fussing with it. Since I have absolutely no desire to deal with my hair constantly throughout the day, I simply circumvent the problem by wrapping it up in a tight twist and clamping it back. A few members of my family, who are female and of a slightly older generation, have actually mourned this in conversation with me: how it’s so lovely, and how I look so much softer with it down. One of them went so far as to tell me that I should leave it down, because men love women with long brown hair. Apparently it makes me look fertile.

Never mind a unique and challenging intellect, a wicked sense of humor, and quirky personality. No: men will be attracted to me because I look like I could really bear them some good, healthy children.

Oh dear God.

My horror was swift and righteous, not to mention loud. However, in all honesty, I think my horror was as loud as it was to cover up the fact that this particular comment had prodded a very troubling strain of insecurity, which I bury close to my spleen in the hope that nobody (not even me) will ever notice it. This unreasoning and embarrassing insecurity runs roughly along the lines of: What if my hair really is the best asset I have to attract a guy?

Like I said: unreasoning, embarrassing, and buried near my spleen.

Hypothetically, in the rare instance when my hair is down, if a man notices me in a bar, I do not think he would be musing to himself, “Wow, that girl looks fertile. I want to buy her a drink.” (At least, I fervently hope a guy would not think that, and if he would, that he would also exhibit other, easily identifiable red flags.) He may just like the way I look, which isn't a bad thing, and he may just be inspired enough to conquer the manifold fears and risks inherent in talking to an attractive stranger. This theoretical guy could potentially prove to have good taste in more important areas than looks, enjoying banter and obscure debates about the place of Fraggles in the Muppet spectrum. The thing he might like most about me at the end of our conversation could in fact be my big sexy brain, rather than my big sexy hair. But the question bothers me: was it the big sexy hair that got him to come over in the first place? Because if it was, my ‘marketing’ did in fact achieve ‘trial.’

By this point, my insecurities are wailing so keenly and my feminism yelling so loudly that the mental din is truly deafening.

My worry essentially comes down to this: if I value and invest uncharacteristic effort in beauty, towards the goal of being wanted, am I simultaneously devaluing everything else about myself?

There comes a point at which “uncharacteristic effort” becomes something a little more troubling. I could, in theory, teeter around on towering heels in tiny, sparkly items of clothing, adhering to some misogynistic fantasy of how an attractive woman should look (not to mention act). I could, but I never would: I'm in no danger of valuing that questionable desirability over who I actually am and the principles I have. I know who I am and who I am not: I don’t wear high heels, I don’t own party clothes, and I have no interest in pretending I do. Nevertheless, back in the gray area in which I perpetually find myself, I’m also a person who doesn’t wear her hair down. So when I spend the better part of an hour coiling my hair into unusual, Rapunzel resplendence, am I prioritizing desirability over reality? How do you determine which truth should be in advertising?

The truth is, I don’t know.

What I do know is that I’m probably over-thinking the entire issue.

I want to be wanted, but I also want to be wanted for who I am in reality (picky, right?). The reality is that I am a woman who wears heavy boots and likes terrible jokes, but also has a pretty good head of hair. And there might just be some discerning guy out there who likes all of those things, so maybe there’s a happy medium in and amongst all my episodes of angst.

To put the shoe on the other foot, I might muster up the courage to cross a bar and talk to a good-looking guy because, on some evolutionary level, his ability to grow a good beard speaks to his skills as a hunter/gatherer (or something). Still, if he’s unkind or idiotic, I have faith that my modern, reasoning brain will override my instinctual leanings and bail out.

But, if by some miracle, he too enjoys terrible jokes, or Battlestar Galactica, or any of the other wonderful, unanticipated weird characteristics that light up my brain and flip my stomach, I hope I would never be so shallow as to hold his having a good head of hair against him.