Stock market pundits and Wall Street hucksters are the worst. Some poor schmuck has just lost 50% of his life savings and their response is ‘keep in there for the long term’. What jackasses… and that’s not the term I’m really thinking of… it begins with mother.
They nearly bankrupt the country, do bankrupt millions of Americans, take money from the government to bail themselves out, then say “all is well with Wall Street, this is just a temporary correction, invest again.” Bull – you know it, I know it.
Things will never be the same for Wall Street – never, which is why large corporations and mom and pops are holding onto cash. “But there’s opportunity,” some TV stock market shill will say.
I’ll repeat what my rich (for my family) uncle told me many years ago. He was a professional gambler and bookmaker… I asked him why he didn’t invest in stocks (I was a 16-year-old know-it-all at the time). “There are thousands of stocks out there and you expect me to pick a winner, when I can go to the track and all I have to do is pick a winner from nine horses.” “But uncle,” I stupidly said, “the races are fixed!” He looked at me as if he was ashamed of our shared heritage. “I still have a one in nine chance to win a fixed race.” His loving disgust was at my assumption that stocks weren’t fixed.
Let’s move to marketing… things have changed and will never, listen to me, NEVER be the same, in part because our economy and our attitudes about money and buying things and consumption of goods have changed. All the old tried and true tricks of the trade are dead and the only ones who don’t see it are the agency types who once made a good living from old school marketing. They have nothing new to sell clients, so they continue to run their mouths about how ‘nothing has really changed,’ ‘just hang in there,’ etc. These jackasses (again, not the word I prefer to use) are protecting their own skin and don’t give a rat’s about their clients. Sorry, that’s the truth. They are too scared, too lazy or too stupid to see the marketing landscape and the economic reality for what it is.
My pitiful analogy. Around 1908, blacksmiths see the first Model-T and watch their businesses tank. There are three possible reactions:
1. The world can’t do without horses, we’ll always be in demand, just let the fad pass (most people);
2. What we need is a better horse shoe, that’s all… maybe one that glows in the dark (so-called entrepreneurs, the guys who always seem to have a ‘great’ idea based on yesterday’s information);
3. Screw horseshoes, I’m going to learn how to make metal rims for the Model-T (the few, the smart, the successful).
There aren’t many marketers or marketing managers in category #3.
I hate to quote Zimmerman (as Lennon called him) because it’s a dead giveaway of my age, but his 1960’s lyrics are perhaps more appropriate today… replace ‘senators and congressmen’ with marketers and agency execs.
Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don’t stand in the doorway
Don’t block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There’s a battle outside and it is ragin’
It’ll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin’
