MARKETING ENDS NEED TO THINK FOR YOURSELF.

Byline: Kimit Muston Local View

I studied all the wrong things in school.

According to my guidance counselor, lawyers were going to run the world. I now know that lawyers are just test ``wonks'' who can't handle the math, and it turns out the future of world domination is in getting people to buy whatever you're selling. Most people call this field of endeavor marketing.

I call it diabolical.

Marketing is the unholy joining of a salesman's predatory morality with the sophisticated theories and statistical analysis of social psychology. These professionals have so detected us, dissected, defined and digested us that, whether you're Gen X or Gen Y, or even my current category of Gen Y-Bother, we're all just consumers now.

Did you know, for instance, that according to Progressive Grocer Magazine (no kidding), last year the average consumer made 2.2 trips per week to one of America's 166,135 supermarkets, spending an average of $24 each trip, which represented about 6.2 percent of their disposable income?

Yeah, I didn't know that either.

And 57 percent of women consumers described themselves as ``head of household'' while only 24 percent of male consumers did.

Now that's a market segmentation reality check.

Further, 28 percent of those customers fell into the category of ``strivers,'' defined as people constantly dieting and watching their health. I guess you'd expect that 71 percent of strivers were women, but surprisingly, of those who aren't concerned about healthy food issues, the ``unconverted,'' 56 percent were women.

So I guess the Haagen-Dazs isn't disappearing from the freezer aisle anytime soon.

Such detailed statistics are matched with the theory of self-determination, described in one psychology text book as an ``organism-dialectical meta-theory which begins with the assumption that people are active organisms with innate tendencies.''

Yeah, such as the tendency to buy something.

However, this gullibility ``requires ongoing nutriments and supports from the social environment'' - in other words, TV ads, print ads, online pop-up ads, roadside billboards, ads in the movie theaters, on shoes, shirts and underwear, on racing cars, in public pay toilets and, worst of all, advertising while you wait in the check-out line at the supermarket.

In these carefully constructed ads, the psychologists seek to create activity in the cortico-reticular loop of the brain's ascending reticular activating system in order to tweak your BAS - behavioral approach system - so you will feel compelled to seek out pleasant stimuli, i.e. the product. This approach was proved 30 years ago in the pioneering work at Harvard by B.F. Skinner, who was able to train 50 laboratory rats to shop their way through the entire Sears catalog without buying anything of use to a rat.

But marketers are not just selling little alfalfa cubes anymore. Nor are they satisfied with tempting humans with toaster ovens, Wonderbras or tiny Korean automobiles.

A recent American Marketing Newsletter proudly quoted Mr. Sid Bernstein, an advertising commentator, as saying, ``Of course you sell candidates for political office the same way you sell soap or sealing wax or whatever.'' Which raises the serious question of which of the candidates is the sealing wax and which one is the soap?

And exactly how does an advertising commentator earn a living?

So you see politics, psychology, psychosis and marketing have all become intertwined, interdependent, insufferable and incessant. The politician who once took a public position on the issues now assumes a public posture. He pontificates. But the one thing he never does is pronounce publicly proposals possible to produce profound and prolific prejudicial publicity.

I mean, would you vote for a candidate who did that?

Without spitting, I mean.

Given the state of the art and the art of the statecraft, any modern marketing director can tell you without too much effort that the soccer-mom head-of-the-household standing in the frozen food aisle is about to buy a quart of chocolate chip. He'll predict what movie she'll rent on the way home and who she's going to vote for in the next election.

Eventually, I fear, the marketing people will just cut the loop and tell the lady directly, and then she won't have to bother her cortico-reticular one little bit about any dialectical theories.

Which is probably just what her guidance counselor predicted would happen to her.