Enough Said by Mark Thompson

Author:Mark Thompson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466864726
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

A Question of Judgment

By now it sounds as if all the cards are stacked against the public. If the language of marketing becomes a decisive influence on the other forms of public language, and if Sherlock Holmes is correct that our collective response to it will approach “mathematical certainties,” are we doomed to become like Pavlov’s dogs, salivating on cue? Or is there some way we can keep our critical distance and make up our own minds on the matter in question?

To answer that, let’s begin with traditional commercial marketing. Why, given the persuasiveness of all the commercial messaging, don’t we just buy every single product available? A professor of marketing might begin by offering two answers. The first is competition. Every marketing message has to compete with rivals. You see an advertisement for a car and you’re convinced that the best sports coupe in the world is a BMW. But a few seconds later you are confronted with an ad for a Mercedes coupe, then an Audi. Each makes different claims and, more important, evokes a different ambience: the Mercedes suggests increased success in life, perhaps, while the BMW might flatter your image of yourself as a skilled driver, and as for the Audi—well, maybe precisely by not being either a Mercedes or a BMW, it seems to confer on you an individualism and lack of conformity (at least compared to other buyers of expensive German cars).

The second is empirical feedback. When we consume products or use services, we are able to put marketing promises to the test. A movie studio may claim in its marketing materials that a given film is the funniest ever made, but if the opening-night audiences discover there isn’t a laugh in it, by the following morning the grim truth will be there for all to see on Rotten Tomatoes and IMDb. Many products are what economists call information goods—you can assess the quality of the product only after consuming it—but if shoppers are unhappy with the product they bought, they won’t come back for more, and they may well tell their friends to avoid it as well.

Both competition and empirical feedback depend on the human ability to subject consumer choices—and rhetorical claims—to a process of critical discrimination and to make an assessment, in the light of both the immediately available information and broader life experience, of which is the best or the most credible. The Greeks called this faculty phronesis, a form of practical wisdom or judgment that they distinguished from sophia, the wisdom they associated with scientific and abstract knowledge. Cicero called it prudentia in Latin, and the English word prudence is an apt term for it.

It is prudence that arms us against unwarranted marketing claims, by allowing us to perform a sense check on anything that sounds too good to be true, and the same goes for any other kind of persuasion. In mature and well-functioning political and rhetorical environments, awareness of the public’s capacity for prudence encourages politicians who otherwise might be tempted to promise the earth to show some restraint.

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