How Marketing Can Save The World

"The Greatest Story Never Told: How Marketing Could Save the World" is the actual cover theme headline of Ode Magazine this month (issue 32).

I literally did a double-take when I saw it tucked neatly in the stand as I'd been corresponding lately with Dave Rogers on his "how marketers, particularly meta-marketers, are destroying the world" posts.

Within the pages of "Stories that Shake the World", Seth Godin writes: "Anyone who wants to save the world must understand the power of marketing to make things better—or worse."

Hmmm, Seth's better is another person's worse, witness Dave and Shelley for starters.

With Easter around the corner, this sentence from this inspiring "Practice Resurrection" talk resonated: “Instead of seeing stones rolled away,” Johann Christoph Arnold wrote, “we throw stones at each other.”

In How to Tell a Great Story, Seth advises: "The best stories don’t teach people anything new. Instead, the best stories agree with what the audience already believes and makes the members of the audience feel smart and secure when reminded how right they were in the first place."

I beg to differ. I believe our longing for an innate harmony runs deeper than our longing for righteousness. (Besides, being right never made me - dunno about you - fulfilled, loved, and at ease. In other words, feeling right kept me isolated.) I agree that the best stories don't really teach anything new - but what one always sensed somehow they knew all along.

In that same Easter sermon, Rev Gary Smith shares an insight: What if we reframed the question from “what do you believe?” (more of a question of the head), to “what do you care about?” (more of a question of the heart).

In preparation for a sermon, I will often take a word or a poem or a story or an idea, and I try to let it live in me. I dream it, I daydream it, I let thoughts surface and I try not to push them down and away. I let my fingers type, sometimes ahead of my brain, and then I wonder where all that came from. - Rev Smith, "Practicing Resurrection", First Parish in Concord church

What do you care about? I'm trying to let that live in me. Marinate in it. Seems subtle - but it's not. It's radical. What if you approached your life and work from there? Hmmm, even marketing? What if you were curious about what your customers, co-workers, neighbors, friends, family cared about?

Bonus: Here's the complete poem Rev Smith quotes in his talk.

From Blossoms
by Li-Young Lee

From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the joy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

[Hmmm, that reminded me of Aldous Huxley's little infamous LSD trip mystic experience striving to awakeness. His 1954 booklet, Doors of Perception, was wildly influentual to the Beats and beyond:]

I continued to look at the flowers and in their living light I seemed to detect the qualitative equivalent of breathing - but of a breathing with no return to a starting point, with no recurrent ebbs, only a repeated flow from beauty to heightened beauty, from deeper to deeper meaning. - Aldous Huxley

p.s. For the record, as some have assumed, I've never taken any illegal drugs, not even inhaled. Heck, not even a cigarette in high school.

Comments

[Jill]

Esther,

Welcome back. I've been catching up on you by reading your blogs but, as usual I don't leave a comment. But this poem is EXTRAORDINARY.

I'm on a parallel inward path and not brave enough to write about it. But I'm meditating an hour a day and reading great stuff. You've read I'm sure, Yoganda's Autobiography of a Yogi, one of the great spiritual works of the 20th century. Well, just published by his fellowship (2005) are his writings and commentaries on the original teachings of Jesus called The Second Coming of Christ, the Resurrection of the Christ Within You. You will not read anything fresher or more amazing. Beautifully published with illustrations and footnotes, I can only read one discourse at a time, they are so full and deep.