Most of the time when we think about marketing, what we actually think about are the advertisements that inundate just about every aspect of our lives, but it’s far more complex than that. Marketing is, in short, any transfer of information from one person to another. If we listened purely to the rules of the advertising elite, we might be led to believe that the best promotion we can give ourselves is also the most expensive, but that isn’t always true. Some of the most effective advertising actually costs nothing at all.

Growing up, I lived in a few different towns, each with their own little quirks and personalities, but the thing that they each had in common was an abnormally low homeless population. And because the homeless populations in these towns were so low, everybody knew who the homeless people in each town were and where they lived. Furthermore– at least in middle school– it seemed that each of the homeless people living in the community were given a name by the other children in town, and the name was usually the same throughout the community. The thing that interests me is how common I found this to be. Ethical issues aside, it’s fascinating to think that a made up name assigned to a person without their consent could be used unanimously for any reason, let alone without traditional advertising. As somebody working in the marketing field, the whole situation raises a lot of questions: (more…)