Marketing: The Magic Mirror or The Power of Attention


"Magic mirror in my hand, who is the fairest in the land?"…
My Queen, you are the fairest in the land."

Marketing is the art of creating the illusion of primacy, rarity or uniqueness, any kind of exception in order to sell something.
Because exception such as primacy, rarity and uniqueness generate envy in people, envy generates attention, a growing attention is audience and nowadays audience can be converted into money or into a cult (used in ancient times… though).

But what are the skills involved?
If we do not apply any judgment, the art of creating illusions belongs usually to activities such as magicians, storytellers, artists, mythomaniacs, shamans, crooks, frauds, hypnotists, manipulators, mentalists, liars, leaders, publicists etc.

So the skills seem to be related to some kind of ‘surprise’, ‘magic’, ‘attractiveness’ or ‘charisma’, anything to capture attention.

Some of them formulate clearly the illusion others play with the illusion and most of them hide it completely. But all of them are some kind of ‘artists’ since they use their own ability with mastery or not to make us believe, dream, participate or work towards a goal, an idea that usually surprises us attracts us and for long time enough so that hopefully with the help of circumstances the desire of the ‘artist’ - ultimately - can manifest. Of course there is no performance guarantee because life does not guarantee anything. And we understand with a little bit of maturity that we do not control anything, yet we can all recognize that a belief can definitely pull people away long time enough to cause a change – basic principle of stock market - thanks to people themselves actually except they needed consciously or not a ‘master’ to convince them and carry the burden of responsibility in case of ‘failure’.

We can also notice that if the desire manifests the ‘artist’ will be considered positively and if it does not he/she will fall into any of the pejorative activities listed above.

But we have to keep in mind that effectively the creation as such is not that important and that is obvious because we are never ‘the creator’ in the sense that first of all we do not create we discover - Lavoisier principle: "no new matter can come into existence where there was none before” or “for it is impossible for anything to come to be from what is not, and it cannot be brought about or heard of that what is should be utterly destroyed." And finally for one exploitable discovery there are many discoveries that precede with a majority not being exploitable at all due to circumstances. 
Again circumstances…

So basically whether our attention is caught by somebody else’s dream and we participate in its manifestation or we are ‘artists’ so we embody our own dream to catch attention and make it happen.

But let us never forget that if we are not perceived as the Queen in the land, means as the absolute reference in what we are trying to sell then our marketing is not good enough: there isn’t enough magic in the mirror we have chosen.

The only thing we can do then is to check out our ‘magic’ skills whatever, whoever we use in terms of vision, attractiveness or charisma in the present circumstances. And we better keep in mind that even if we are the Queen a serious ‘Snow White’ competitor will appear at some point as renewal energy and it belongs to us to fight against or integrate it.


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