Tag: Marketing

Be A Rebel, Be Content

Happiness, Health, Success

To buy the new fashion item or the new gadget, etc is to be unhappy with what you already have because it is not the new thing being sold to you. That is what it boils down to. This comes from the story told by those selling things to us that what they are offering will make us happy. This cannot be true if the last thing they sold us, which is now out of fashion or less up to date, also was supposed to make us happy.

It is better to try and be content with what we already have. Otherwise we will be leaping from shiny object to shiny object and never really being happy, just momentarily joyful.

What Is Normal?

Happiness, The Pathway To Fulfilment

When we look at a bottle of shampoo it will often say that it is for Normal Hair. In our culture we have an idea of what normal is, it is what the majority of people we know do or say, or in the case of shampoo, the type of hair that the majority of people have. I would like to suggest that normal is simply what is most popular, it is not a trait by which people should be judged.

In marketing, companies will often aim their interruptions at the majority in the hopes that everyone will pay for their product or service. There is a fundamental problem with that. Either the product or service is designed for a particular kind of person, in which case it is not for everyone, or it is aimed at everyone and therefore no one, because we are not all the same.

In culture, we often want to be ‘normal’ and to fit in, but when we try to act or think in ways that are the most popular then we are not being ourselves. We are performing a role to be accepted, but everyone ends up doing the dance of normality and losing themselves in the process.

What we should do, in my opinion, is to figure out what our values are, what we believe and, importantly, what our ethics are. This will determine which people we will enjoy spending our time with. We can identify our ‘tribe’ and we will then genuinely fit in and thrive. The goal with this is to belong rather than to be accepted, and these are two very different things.