On the marketing scale of life, “0″ is the local electronics store putting on a sale and “6″ is Red Bull throwing a man into space, with a parachute.
Those of us who sell stuff have fantasies of reaching six. My fantasy is to chalk sidewalks around the world with an obscure, opaque and contradictory slogan like “Red Bull Gives You Wings.” I’d love to drop a cooler of my product at an underground show. I mean every random underground show in every cool city in the world in the same weekend. Obscurity, of course, needs a budget.
Dropping a product into a cultural moment and then having the public craft meaning from that moment takes an incredible amount of complicity. It takes a culture that accepts brands. It takes a time in history where a magazine called “Adbusters” sells, without irony, its own brand of shoe.
It would be nice to market the stuff I have without creating a kickball league. It would be nice to elevate the human voice amongst the likes, circles, pins, tweets and video. I’d like to find equilibrium between the Red Bull fantasy and the electronic store (another version of “0″: “welcome to my blog, please buy this thing”). Suggestions welcome.
