Portable typewriter beats a computer any day!

I know I spend a lot of time talking about what I call anti-marketing or even postmodernist marketing, but it’s a fun thing to do at a time when marketeers are taking themselves far too seriously.

And now for the next SEVEN DAYS I’ll be picking out interesting, funny and remarkable bits for my latest book on the subject, – 'The Anti-Marketeer’s Handbook'. Seven blogs in seven days for no real reason except seven is a pretty nice number… and is a week, rather conveniently, too.

And… to get you in the mood, the picture above is from ‘The Times’ on February 28th. A great example of what it’s all about. A piece of retro magic – selling an old-fashioned typewriter with the strapline: ‘No computer required!’ Wonderful. It’s always ‘ at hand’ and ‘instantly ready to use’. The ‘pitch’ was written by an anti-marketing genius. Just read the rest of the blurb: ‘ There’s nothing quite like the satisfaction of a traditional manual typewriter – with the soothing click-clack sound…’.

Selling old ‘technology’ and pitching it as better than a computer. And why not? It most certainly is!

Anyway, that’s what my piece of genius is all about. So, here’s an additional taster – the beginning of the book and a passable introduction ti the uninitiated. :

What is anti-marketing?

Well, it’s two things. Actually, it could be more, but let’s stick to two.

First one: when people with a conscience get together at world trade meetings and throw bricks at anyone from a first world country. There is also lots of tear gas and police with large Perspex riot shields. Anti-marketing here is a suspicion of the big countries carving up the world’s resources to the detriment of all others. It is about people who really hate marketing and everything it has come to stand for in a capitalist world. ‘Anti’ means ‘against’ in all its forms.

And that is one meaning. This handbook is not about that, though it does sympathise with the brick throwers, because hurling objects at marketing people is acceptable on so many fronts.

The second is a little more complicated. And it is not that easy to explain in a few sentences either, because it is a morass of conflicting and contradictory beliefs, which sometimes make no sense at all and only succeed in making you chuckle a bit. Anti-marketing is a riddle wrapped up in a puzzle. It is a slippery beast, which advocates doing all the stuff which surrounds selling in bizarre, odd, ingenious, silly and totally daft ways.

And that’s the essence of anti-marketing – it is doing it all the wrong way and somehow getting results. It is breaking the rules and not worrying about what people say. It likes to approach the whole spiky marketing thing from a completely different, oblique, and lateral angle.

There is quite a bit of reverse-psychology, dollops of minimalism, a bit of retro, some storytelling, smatterings of relationship / trust / principled and even accidental marketing, as well as a sprinkling of ethical / green / sacred and evangelical marketing, not forgetting shockvertising, of course. There is also a more sinister side too. Dark marketing is in the mix there, as the villain of the piece.

More tomorrow…