[lit-ideas] Re: Heidegger for Sales
- From: Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 2 May 2014 11:37:00 +0100 (BST)
There are many offshoots this article could pursue - including tempting
offshoots that it is another stick with which to beat Heidegger.
But insofar as Red are shown to be coming up with some valid ideas, they are
usually quite simple insights that show up the limitations, even falsity, of
received opinion/common assumptions as to 'the market'. They do not seem
derived from anything specifically Heideggerean.
So Addidas geared its marketing around all the sports covered by the
publicity-soaked Olympics only for Red to point out (a) this ignores a vast
exercise market for 'sportswear' for activities like yoga (b) this ignores that
the vast teenage demographic has very little interest in the Olympics. In the
light of this kind of 'insight', the brand can 'refocus'. Though the article
does not spell it out (and though I am no expert in marketing sportswear), we
might guess the re-focus would be abandoning Olympic-based sportswear that had
marginal sales [e.g. curling] and producing new products geared at the vast
non-sports exercise market and the vast teenage demographic. ['Duh' - Homer
Simpson.]
To bring in Heidegger into this mix may be seen as merely another marketing
strategy on the part of Red: "As an institution it has benefited from its aura
of intellectual exoticism." But there is nothing that intellectually exotic
about the Addidas story. Nor should Heidegger be credited - or blamed - for
this story. It is more a story of better critical thinking replacing less
critical thinking - but I would not credit, or blame, Popper for this story
either. The article even admits: "Heidegger doesn’t come up during the
pattern-recognition sessions, and
it may be that, at least in part, the philosophers and anthropologists
Madsbjerg talks about serve more as a branding mechanism, signifying
intellectual rigor the way Warren Buffett’s modest Omaha home signifies
prudence." What this does not admit is that Heidegger is a doubtful exemplar of
intellectual rigour.
There is a sometimes used legal expression 'Know thy court' which parallels the
marketing manta 'Know thy market'. Among the more interesting things about Red
is that their 'methodology' has more critical assumptions than those used by
others, including their clients and their consumers: Red do not assume (a) the
client knows their consumer well (b) the consumer knows why the consumer buys.
Contrary to these assumptions, Red search for through 'data-sets' for material
that shows up 'discrepancies' that give better insight into the consumer and
why they buy - so that these insights can be exploited by a marketing strategy.
['Duh again' - Homer Simpson].
As 'Know thy court' parallels 'Know thy market', so parallel problems may face
lawyers - though they may have to do their own critical thinking rather than
pay an agency to do so. And there will of course be parallels in many other
fields - 'Know thy publisher', 'Know thy employer', 'Know thy employee', 'Know
thy examiner' [that last is particularly important in gaining high degree
results, and skews the whole system (for example, I seriously think, due what
we might call 'institutional bias', it would be virtually impossible to get a
First Class degree in philosophy from Oxbridge by arguing as Popper would
argue, even though Popper is a far greater philosopher than anyone who gains
such a First Class degree; and this is only one of many examples of
'institutional bias' that might be given). Again neither the philosophy of
Heidegger nor of Popper can be blamed or credited for this.
What we may observe, perhaps truistically but perhaps not, is that the quality
of the results may be attributed to the quality of critical thinking used. But
it is to mystify this to bring in the likes of Heidegger.
A sketch of a legal example might help further illustrate this (though the
actual story is more involved and complicated). In England, pregnant women
receive "special protection" against discrimination: by dint of a special
section, it breachs the law if they are treated "less favourably" on the ground
of pregnancy. What then should happen when a heavily pregnant woman sits her
final university examinations? According to a top legal firm in London who were
consulted on this point, the answer is that there is no discrimination provided
she is allowed to sit the examination in the same conditions as other students
- for then she is not treated "less favourably". The top legal firm may have
felt their advice reinforced by looking at the section dealing with 'general'
discrimination on the grounds of race or gender: for this section uses the
exact same "less favourably" wording, and it is well-established that "less
favourable" treatment there means "less
favourable" by comparison with others of another race or different gender, so
there is never discrimination when a person is treated the same as others.
Better critical thinking would have led to very different reasoning: for it is
also well-established that pregnancy is gender-specific, and so if the "less
favourably" of the pregnancy-related law is to the same effect as the "less
favourably" of the 'general' race- and gender-related law, then the
pregnancy-related law is entirely redundant - and that cannot be right,
especially for a section enacted separately and years after the 'general'
section. It also can hardly be right because it effectivley denies there is any
"special protection" for pregnancy, merely the same standard as in 'general'
protection, yet the courts refer here to pregnancy-related discrimination in
terms of pregnancy having "special protection".
Let us assume wiser counsel prevails as to the law, and it is accepted that
there is "special protection" so that the pregnant student is entitled to
different treatment from that given other students: now we run into something
akin to a marketing problem. For the legal equivalent of market research (which
may be accosting members of the public and getting them involved in a long
conversation), shows that the idea of "special protection" rubs many people up
the wrong way - they don't see the justice of why some person or institution,
in no way responsible for getting a woman pregnant, should be obliged to give
special treatement to that woman because she is pregnant - especially they do
not think she should be treated differently in relation to her university
examinations. And this resistance is important: because while the law is clear
enough that there is "special protection" here, it does not spell out what the
upshot is. So resistance to the justice
of "special protection" tends to lead to resistance to any idea that much is
required, as an upshot, to comply with its demands. In the case in question it
leads to the attitude that, while she may 'technically' have "special
protection", there is nothing to be done but to assess the student in exactly
the same way as other students - anything more would be "positive
discrimination" of the kind that is prohibited in English law.
The details of how a lawyer might develop or present the notion of "special
protection" so as to overcome this resistance may be left aside: but they
depend on something similar to the critical assumptions used by Red - (a) the
decision-making body may not even be aware of their own resistant and false
assumptions about the character of "special protection", especially the idea
that it amounts to some kind of "positive discrimination" in favour of the
pregnant (b) the decision-making body may not be aware that there is a way of
looking at "special protection" where it embodies values that, carefully
explained, it would agree are just. The point is that a lawyer who simply got
the law right (unlike the top legal firm), but did not consider what stood in
the way of the most favourable application of that law for their client, would
likely get a much poorer end-result than one who considered the likely
resistance and then figured out how best to overcome
it. We can, as with Red, consider the better performance as arising from
better critical thinking about the problem(s) at stake - but philosophers, even
a philosopher like Popper who has 'the critical approach' as the linchpin of
his thought, can at best be some background influence to the actual thinking
needed and at worst are a pretentious and mystifying smokescreen.
More than that, we should not be tempted to think that the brilliance of Red
gives an iota of support to the validity of Heidegger's philosophy (or
conversely, if Red were fairly duff (as many marketeers surely are), that this
reflects badly on the philosophy of Heidegger).
Dnl
On Friday, 2 May 2014, 4:26, John McCreery <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Some here may be teased, tickled or upset by this Business Week article.
Cheers,
John--
John McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN
Tel. +81-45-314-9324
jlm@xxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.wordworks.jp/
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