Marketing: the promise versus the reality

On my way grocery shopping today, I passed by the Nathan's hot dog restaurant that has recently opened.  I was a little hungry for a mid-afternoon snack, so I decided to try a nice, piping hot serving of the Queens french fries I had heard so much about.  When the clerk gave me my order this is what it looked like.

Compare the real Queens french fries to the adjacent picture of the idealized ones that the marketers provided for the unsuspecting customer.  Trust me, the real Queens french fries tasted as bad as they looked.  What happened?  Where, where could those ideal Queens french fries be?

Luckily I was only out about a dollar and before I set foot inside Nathan's I had had a pretty strong suspicion that the Kyrgyzstan Nathan's would not be a good place to eat, so my experience wasn't really a shock.  The great thing was, for the modest price of a dollar, I received a wonderful reminder that the world of marketing can be an ugly place.  The promise of Queens french fries versus the reality…that's a lesson that can be translated to almost any product that is mass marketed.  The reality seldom matches the promise.  It is a truism we forget too easily in modern society.

Think about it in another way.  Think about the best hidden little restaurant in the back woods that you've eaten at.  I bet it wasn't mass marketed.  You probably stumbled across it by mistake.  I am pretty sure that virtually all of the most memorable meals I have eaten in restaurants were at places that I am confident did little or no marketing at all.  Almost all of the lovely local inns and B&Bs I've stayed in, were not ones that had been marketed to me, but were places that I had uncovered through serendipity, just by wandering. The best of almost everything I've experienced in my life were things that were not mass marketed, probably not marketed at all.  And much of what is awesome and meaningful, probably aren't even tangible items.

If one could chart this on a graph, it would almost be a straight line, a strong inverse relationship that describes this feature of the universe: the less something is mass marketed the better it probably is. Cosmetics, cars, beer, jewelry, prescription drugs.  All of these are products where the promise of marketing and the reality of what is delivered don't always line up.  If you have a reasonably good life, but somehow feel like something is missing, maybe it's this gap between the promise and the reality of our marketing-dominated world that happens a hundred times a day, without us even noticing, that creates this subtle feeling of emptiness.  It's that nothing is exactly quite as good as we expect it will be.

It might be a crazy thought on my part, but I've spoken with so many people who tell me of this moderately-sized, yet persistent, discontent that seems to manifest itself for no reason and, after hearing it described to me many times, it feels like people are describing trying to eat a serving of Queens french fries after having stared at the lovely picture.

I have no reason to ever step foot inside Nathan's again.  My lesson was received in the form of lousy fast food.  Instead, I will be going up into the remote mountains this summer where few marketers ever travel.  That will be where I will live for a time.  A couple dozen other faculty and staff members from many nations will be joining me there.  It will be interesting to see which of the two feelings will overtake us:  a longing for the items we've habitually used in our lives that have been marketed to us or the freedom and joy that comes from not worrying about any of that.  All I know is, when I am sitting in my apartment on a frigid winter's night at the Naryn campus, I will not be craving soggy french fries, smothered in artificial cheese and tasteless mushroom bits.