urban guerilla's guide to working in retail: marketing monkeys

[mister c]

The Urban Guerilla’s Guide to Working in Retail:
The Monkeys at the Marketing Department

From the Diary
some guy marched in.
“hey! what’s your name?”
i pointed at my badge.
he scowled. “expect a letter to your manager, you fuck. you were rude
to me, and i won’t take it.”
he stormed back out.
i shrugged.
i’d never seen that one before in my life.
customers, as i’ve so often said, suck.

Marketing and What IT Means to YOU
It was Philip Kotler who claimed that “Authentic marketing is not the
art of selling what you make, but knowing what to make. It is the art
of identifying and understanding customer needs and creating solutions
that deliver satisfaction to the customers, profits to the producers
and benefits for the stakeholders.”
This is, of course, the polite way of saying “Authentic Marketing is
one of those gimmick turds – it looks and smells like shit, but
doesn’t really fertilize your garden.”
Marketing is the greatest blanket ever pulled over the eyes of the
world. It has given jobs to millions of self-important illiterate
monkeypeople (just read their emails and internal office propaganda),
who would otherwise find themselves unable to hold a job as one of
those guys who stands in front of roadwork areas and switches their
sign from slow to stop to direct traffic.
Without a marketing department, it’s my belief that staff morale would
rise to all new heights, millions could be saved in any particular
company, and no one would use sentences such as those offered by
Kotler, who had the amusing belief that “Marketing takes a day to
learn. Unfortunately it takes a lifetime to master.”
Such nonsense.
There’s nothing to master.
Marketing’s only true achievement is its own existence. It has
brainwashed thousands of companies into using their zany ideas, and
has claimed genius on any number of successes which have little to do
with marketing and more to do with the effects of consumer chaos, or
the hard work of any number of retail assistants who are truly the
face of the company.
As a retail assistant, you’ve no doubt been subjected to an
immeasurable amount of pressure from marketing monkeys who invade your
space and begin questioning your very existence. You’ve been forced to
feel inferior to their self-belief, and you’ve been taught that you’re
merely a cog in their great machine – and an ineffective cog at that.
If at any time you begin believing this, I’d like you to remember one
basic fact: Marketing Is Bullshit.
And I can prove it.

Marketing Monkeys – A Zoological Study
Marketing monkeys can be easily identified.
They’re the ones who have ideas and precious little else.
In theory, one might claim this to be a rather beneficial arrangement,
however I didn’t say any of those ideas were actually good. Sure, on
the odd blue moon a marketing monkey might actually pull one out of
their ass, but mostly they’re unable to arrange their minds into
having an idea they haven’t already seen in action with one of their
competitors let alone scavenge an original thought from the recycled
garbage of their minds.
Recently, the franchise for which I was working had the highly
original thought to bring out a “Top 100 recommended list” to be a
permanent fixture of the store. Sounds great? Well, our competitors
had been using the same thing for years, yet our marketing monkeys
were claiming some level of genius and were busy patting themselves on
their backs and making out this wonderful new idea would revolutionise
the book industry forever. New World Orders would have to be created
from the ashes of revolution this idea was going to bring. Oh, the
paradise.
Oh the lunacy, more like.
Their claim to how they were more original than our competitors was
that “our list is actually voted by the customers.”
Given that customers are all morons, it was inevitable that our “Top
100” was bound to be shit, and shit it was. That aside, every single
customer who saw the list in action and integrated into the store was
heard to exclaim with a giggle, “Copying your competitors?”
This reaction of amused accusation of being just like our competitors,
only slower, is the natural reaction of customers who are ignorant of
the existence of our marketing monkeys and their supposed genius, and
were able to spot a leopard for its spots, rather than assume that
despite the spots, there must be a few stripes around which might make
it a tiger.
Nonetheless, our marketing department busily congratulated themselves
and went on to produce their next achievement – a recycling of last
year’s advertising material with absolutely nothing changed at all,
because why change something which worked so brilliantly last year?
Normally, I’d applaude the inaction of marketing monkeys (after all,
if they’d be a little bit more inactive, things would run a whole lot
more smoothly), however, this time, it wasn’t a case of something
which wasn’t broke not needing fixing. This was certainly a case of
roadkill in need of scraping off the tarmac and perhaps a few signs
being erected to prevent a repeat performance.
Let’s not believe for one second that a franchise is the only victim
to the madness of marketing monkeys. Recently a publishing company had
the genius idea of packaging two books together in plastic wrap and
then selling them as a two for one promotion. Brilliant idea?
Well, some customers might perk up a bit at thinking they’re about to
get a freebie, however what would their reaction be if said free book
was merely an identical copy of their first? That’s right, for half
price you could get a second copy of the exact same book for free! To
make it more intriguing, it wasn’t even a new, or particularly popular
book. Excited? I sure was. In the end, sick of hearing customers laugh
at the lunacy, the packs of two were opened and the books (eventually)
sold singularly – possibly the only realistic marketing decision made
during the whole process.

The Idea of Numbers
Marketing monkeys’ ideas are often perplexing, sometimes bordering on
the outright dangerous. Our bookstore was recently forced to begin
accepting any and all refund demands by customers, no matter what.
As a franchise, this was considered the right thing to do to get an
edge on our competitors. I have yet to understand how customers
reading their books and then bringing them back to get their money
refunded can be a genius-level marketing decision. As far as I was
aware, we were operating a bookshop, and not a library. Needless to
say, this new procedure caused more headaches than smiles for those of
us who actually worked with those animals the marketing people had
little to no experience with – customers.
And there’s the actual problem with their species right there.
Marketing monkeys are hired direct from universities, and seldom have
more than an extremely casual relationship with the retail industry.
Casual retail workers are (and I apologise to you if you truly believe
you are qualified to call yourself a retail worker), merely stand-ins
for those of us who’ve been stupid enough to contemplate a career in
this area. Casual workers have more fun, do less work, have zero
responsibility, and just mess things up for the fulltimers to fix.
That is, after all, the very nature of high school and university
students.
Marketing monkeys, therefore, have absolutely no idea as to the
practical realities of selling a product. They can tell you all about
how to do it, but they get their ideas from books and exams and these
are written by fellow marketing “experts” who have a similar lack of
reality. They form their own ideas on how to sell a product by a study
of impractical numbers gleaned from surveys, statistics and pure
guesswork – three incredibuly unreliable sources of information.
It has been often pointed out that you can make a survey say
absolutely anything you want it to. You can translate any survey any
way you wish, and you can very easily guide a survey into underlining
the very point you wish to make. Basically, surveys are never
surprising, and always ridiculously simplified to the point that most
people filling one out spends half the time not knowing what to choose
because there’s no none of the above option so they’re forced to
choose the one which hardly represents them but which they feel they
can live with ticking. The rest of the time they’re just in a rush to
get back to their lunch break and wish this seedy little man with his
stupid questions would hurry up and finish.
What’s worse is marketing monkeys are fully aware of this, and they
invented a mathematical calculation which they say fixes this attitude
in 100% of all marketing surveys.
See?
See how they do that?
They justify their irrelevence with bullshit and offer further
gobbledegook as “evidence” of their truth.

From the Diary
got a bunch of copies of what women want today.
i practised using the splice machine on them and put them up to be
hired out.
tonight customers kept bringing the movie back.
“this is a porno! it’s supposed to be mel gibson’s latest film, not
well-hung studs, volume 64!”
i don’t give their money back. after all, they got to see what women
want.

The Battle for Rationality
There’s a common misconception that marketing monkeys are mean-
spirited evil little goblins who spend their lives trying to make
retail assistants regret the very day they joined the company while
sitting back drinking coffee and going on five-hour long lunches.
I’d like to go on record as saying I never once believed this to be
true and I’d hate for you to be getting the wrong idea.
Marketing monkeys have never at any time partaken of coffee in my
presence.
Lattes and Cappuccinos, yes. But never anything so crude as coffee.
The rest of what I said is, basically, true.
They’re evil, mean-spirited goblins, and they are extremely
contemptuous of retail assistants the world over. This is because they
know we’re right, but can’t say so, for this would precipitate their
undoing. It’s a common marketing tactic to shift the blame of
underperforming companies onto the shoulders of those who have no
voice – the underpaid and overworked slaves who have to face the very
hordes of Hell on a daily basis (all customers are demonspawn).
Marketing monkeys spend millions designing shiny useless campaigns
which they unleash on indifferent consumers (how many of us really pay
attention to the ads? Only insane-o people from other dimensions, or
the criminally insane). Then, when it is revealed that those very
creations weren’t very effective, they accuse the retail staff on the
frontlines of not actively promoting their schlock (schlock is a
technical term), or doing it in an effective manner which undermines
the genius of their creation.
Letting marketing monkeys continue with this sort of behaviour can
lead to all sorts of problems, from uniform overhauls to demands for
certain haircuts and jewellery to be excluded from staff pools. Or,
worse still, a complete examination of the environment of the retail
assistant which can have deastating and far-reaching consequences.
For example, many people who work at a cash register will hardly move
from that spot. They’ll stand there in one spot for literally hours on
end. The best they can do is kind of lean from one leg to the other,
and at the end of the day one of the worst side-effects of a life in
retail is one of aching feet, ankles and knees. In my case, I managed
to score a straining of some wacky tendon in my upper leg which caused
excruciating pain which lasted for about two years. I went from doctor
to doctor, who laughed. I couldn’t very well afford physio. I was a
retail assistant, not a marketing monkey. I was on less than 30k (for
the marketing monkeys and assorted business individuals out there –
that’s per annum, not per week like you bastards get).
In the end, I was lucky to find a chinese massage place which did
ultra-cheap deep-tissue massage, which helped ease the pain somewhat,
but took a chunky payment of around fifty dollars a fortnight from my
pay (something which hit me rather hard considering my lifestyle).
And the reason I was in such pain?
Because some marketing monkey had, some years ago during the
fledgeling part of my career, done one of their surveys to discover
that customers don’t like seeing people at cash registers sitting
down. They find it annoying.
Really.
So, virtually overnight, the chairs disappeared.
Including mine.
I will never forgive this decision because I have yet to see a
marketing monkey standing in front of their computer all day long,
unable to move from this position and if they do, it is merely to walk
to the bathroom and back.
The practical decision to have chairs in the first place was to
provide a level of comfort for those who stand in one place for too
long. Walking around is one thing – you can get sore feet from that,
I’m sure, but being stuck in one place gives all number of back aches,
shoulder complaints and leg problems. It can drive you crazy.
Marketing monkeys took all that into consideration, and couldn’t have
given a shit. This is due to their lack of experience in the field,
and for the fact that they have nice comfy chairs, and when they
don’t, they wander off down to the local café and use their comfy
chairs for hours on end.
Arguing for rationality is an exercise in futility. If you ever try
to, you’ll get a nasty surprise.
As example, just before my chair privilege was removed, I was working
in a video store. It had previously been a franchise, owned by a
ghostly owner who had virtually no contact with the store whatsoever.
We were then bought out by the franchise and they sent in their top
guns to fix the place up.
Basically, a team of marketing monkeys was sent from Sydney to show us
all how to suck eggs.
I had the State Marketing Monkey, and the Australian Head Office
Marketing Monkey, and an Assistant Marketing Monkey, all working to
“improve” our store.
Great idea.
First area of business – resticker every video in the store, as ours
were the “old style” which was being phased out.
“Let’s do this today!” cried one of the monkeys. “I’m sure we can do
it by the end of the day if we all pitch in.”
He took those of us still left working for the store aside, and one by
one started us on a section. The job involved using industrial-
strength de-goo stuff to take the old stickers off, and then
restickering them. The amount of de-goo stuff used, by the way,
cracked my fingers open, and to this day it hasn’t fully healed.
A simple job.
The State guy helped me out by doing a few videos.
Then he got very bored. He began fidgeting and looking around.
In the middle of one, he goes, “you keep that up, Lucas. I’ll be right
back.”
He went to his other two compadres, and they decided they should all
go to lunch. Which they gaily announced with all the enthusiasm of
children.
One of the other workers asked when we’d get our breaks, and I swear
to God and all that’s holy, he turned and actually looked surprised
and said, “can’t you eat as you go?”
The three went to lunch, and I swear to you that it’s true, but they
did not return for over five hours. When they did, they looked at the
work we’d done and began congratulating themselves on their work. They
ignored us completely, and actually took credit for everything as
though they’d stickered everything themselves. I even managed to see
one of the reports they sent to their managers in Sydney, stating that
they had personally worked the day restickering and thus revitalising
fading product on our shelves. Not once was the work of the staff
praised, including two who had come in and were not even getting paid
for it, but did it out of misguided loyalty.
How misguided?
Well, toward the end of the day, as one of the marketing monkeys began
to be ready to go back to her hotel room for a break, one of my other
staff began to leave to go home for dinner. The marketing monkey began
complaining about our lack of commitment.
Already frustrated with a lack of actual team commitment despite the
repeated lectures on “involvement” and “pride” and the rest of the
jargon that goes with any monkey speech, I asked how someone who had
been there since 6am, and who was leaving for their first break of the
day at 7pm and who had not had the pleasure of a five-hour long break
could be showing a lack of commitment when it was also a fact she was
not getting paid for her presence but was in fact volunteering as a
favour to a supposedly impovrished and failing store of which she had
been a proud staff member of for seven years. The marketing monkey
turned to me and gave me a baleful look.
She then went on to inform me that my job was not guaranteed and
neither was anyone else’s, and if we wanted to be employed, then we
should work harder. That we should act as though we were being tested
on our commitment to this – “our” store.
This caused the manager at the time to down her tools, stand up, and
say “ok. Fine.”
And she quit right there on the spot.
So did another girl who had probably been the most productive of the
store.
Leaving just me and one other to stand there suppressing a giggle.
To make things even more amusing, the marketing monkey desperately
phoned the girl to beg her to return. She made a call for rationality.
The marketing monkey said she shouldn’t be swayed by the irrational
behaviour of our former manager, that she should think of her career.
Her career?
The girl on the phone politely informed them that the manager was also
her aunt.
The marketing monkey pointed out that this shouldn’t have any bearing
on the case.
The girl hung up.
The marketing monkey didn’t understand at all.
Worse still, she was forced to do something the next day that no
marketing monkey has had to do before.
She had to serve customers.
That in itself would require a book all of its own to describe, but
needless to say, I still giggle every time I think about it…

From the Diary
stallone’s got another movie out.
it’s crap, of course.
all the italians come in and rent it like crazy. rocky goes out with
it, too. and rambo.
noone rents out stop or my mom will shoot though.

Snake Oil Peddlers
Marketing monkeys peddle snake oil. It’s what they do, and they’re
proud of it, too. A great example of peddling snake oil and convincing
the world they’re buying something good is that wonderfully stupid
show, Seinfeld.
There’s nothing funny about the show at all. It’s a mishmash of silly
faces and twitches mixed with monotonous droning and no jokes at all.
However, the show has a laugh track, designed to act as giant red
arrows for those watching to know when to laugh. This is very helpful,
because anyone watching a comedy show always hates to feel like they
didn’t get the joke. It’s like when you’re a kid, and you hear your
first joke which includes several new terms for women’s anatomy, only
you’re still a year or so away from learning more complex biology, so
you have absolutely no idea which bodypart is the joke, but you have
to joke, or everyone will laugh at you and tease you for being a
virgin (it would be amusing because everyone is only about 6 or 7
years old at this stage, only in the suburb I come from, this is about
the age everyone starts to feel the first beginnings of pressure to
mate, and by the age of 12, most girls are either on single parent
pensions, or desperately trying to fill out the paperwork).
So, to hide the fact that you don’t know what’s funny, you
automatically trigger yourself to laugh at all the right times. Take
away the laugh track and you have a difficult time. This is mostly why
when sitcoms make a movie special, it gets bagged for not being as
funny as the series. It’s never because the jokes weren’t there, but
always because the laugh track wasn’t there to remind you all where to
laugh.
How does this relate to marketing people?
Well, it was obviously a sneaky set of marketing people who, upon
realising the show was boring and stupid, got together and thought of
a way to make it unassailable by anyone thinking of criticizing the
show altogether. They called it the “nothing.”
And, if you claim the show wasn’t funny, they proudly stand, show
their shiny bright grins and tell you how you’re the stupid one
because you didn’t “get” that it’s about nothing.
Oh, I “got” it alright, I just got it too well.
Marketing is about finding the fears of the audience, and undermining
their sense of self to encourage them to be more adventurous, or more
confidant in acting just like everyone else. It works in the same
basic technique as government propaganda. In fact, many marketing
monkeys flit from government to business sectors without even the
slightest speed bump.
Hitler managed to convince the German people to lock up foreigners
(Jews, Gypsies and anyone else he didn’t like), and no one really got
upset about it. This was because he had a fine set of marketing
monkeys who worked so hard with their campaigns, slogans, and assorted
monkey memorabilia, that everyone was absolutely convinced that their
neighbours and friends and even their family were all so 100% in
favour of the idea of concentration camps and the like, that they felt
they should feel the same, and if they didn’t, there were some nice
big red arrows outlining exactly when they should shout abuse at
anyone being lined up and dragged from their homes.
Marketing monkeys always get mad at this, because they like to think
they are the voices of freedom and not of anything remotely resembling
the Third Reich. This is because they believe their own hype. The
truth of the matter is they are merely funnels for shit. They
concentrate the greater shit into smaller shit which is more potent.
But, no matter what you pour it over, it’s still shit.
Every modern politician has a marketing monkey (they call themselve
public relations representitives or somesuch long-winded whiffy
title), and it’s that monkey’s job to instruct the politician to use
particular words which 99% of the population doesn’t understand in
order to present their leader as somewhat intelligent, and extremely
knowledgable when the reality is that leader is more often than not a
product of more marketing monkey tools such as surveys.
The most blatant and finest example of this is the race for the
American presidency. This is a brilliant spectacle, and you can see
the machinery in motion as every politician leaps about from opinion
to opinion, and stage to stage, in an effort to appease certain areas
of their “market”. In politics, customers are called voters.
There’s no difference between customers and voters, as often they’re
the same people – idiotic and insecure, but with a high level of
bullshit tolerance.
The American race is hardly any different from any other country’s
race, but it’s certainly one of the most extreme and entertaining. The
heights to which the applicants will go to convince the world they’re
understanding, caring, family-friendly, religious, and a member of
some kind of downtrodden minority (even all the upper class white guys
had so many struggles to overcome, it seems), can be seen as an
exercise in extreme cynicism designed to stupefy a nation into
believing that politician actually means what he/she says he/she
believes.
Marketing monkeys, of course, find these accusations rather offensive,
and will sometimes claim that this justifies their existence. They
claim this is proof their methods work, and that the success of the
leaders in the political arena alone shows just how effective they are
at promoting snake oil. They widely announce their own genius at their
campaigns, and grin broadly at the cleverness of their slogans. They
stand in little circles and play with their weenies in a self-
congratulatory manner.
They are, naturally, quite wrong indeed.
The peddling of snake oil is hardly a skill. It’s a fraud. And the
success of a particular campaign is one which should be a criminal
offence, rather than seen as simply a courtship ritual. Take, for
example, their George Bush (either one, really), and you’ll see no
mention of warmongering as a campaing slogan. Slaughtering people was
never part of their campaign platform. Quite the opposite. The
continued message of peace, love, and empathic communication was their
goal. They turned tens of thousands of innocent dead into an
insignificance, and promoted instead some kind of shiny happy place
which would be built on the blood and suffering of those who are
currently bearing the full frontal attack of military oppressors who
can use all the words they want but it is actions which, ultimately,
speak louder than words.
And that’s something marketing monkeys never understand. That actions,
not words, are the consequence of their activity. The problem, of
course, lies in the fact that they have an office, cushions, five-hour
long lunches, mooching sessions (mutual weenie-holding), and far too
little understanding of life outside.
Snake oil, be it the latest fashion from Chinese sweatshops, or the
latest psychopathic politician built to conquer oil rich nations under
the guise of spreading freedom, is still, at the end of the day,
simply snake oil.
It never does what it was advertised to do, and they always have a few
loopholes written into their packaging to make it impossible to get a
refund.
Lucky monkeys, of course, have the odd decent product. But these
seldom need marketing monkeys at all, so they’d much prefer to have a
flawed product so they can actually be paid for patching up more holes
in the sinking ship than would otherwise be needed. Rather than fixing
the ship, they’d prefer to just put on a few band-aids and paint over
it.
Marketing monkeys, of course, would prefer to blame other management
departments, but this is a cop-out. Management might make some
steering decisions, but marketing monkeys are responsible for the
roads taken. They do the supposed research. They tell the managers
what they believe customers want.
It’s just a shame that they’ve never met a customer in their life.