One of the insights that’s recently been emerging in my experience—and between the founders of Culture51—is marketing does not simply reflect culture. It creates it.

 

What does that mean? Well, recently I've been watching an eye-opening documentary called The Century of the Self, by Adam Curtis. While a tad cynical for my taste, it explicates how, for the past century, marketers, PR professionals, and “ad men” have had a far greater influence over culture than most of us, myself included, know. And what I've been realizing is that many of the values, assumptions, and perspectives that I take for granted actually became woven into our societal fabric through marketers.

 

One man in particular, Edward Bernays, popularized not only Freud’s theories—he was Freud’s nephew, after all—but also used them, and in particular the idea that human beings are driven by irrational, unconscious fears and desires, to manipulate consumers to buy products they didn’t need.

 

Now, I don’t think this is all necessarily bad. Bernays, for example, understood that people buy not based on features, but on what the product can do for them, and how it makes them feel—the benefits. And that’s become a norm of marketing, one I find little problem with.

 

Where it becomes problematic, though, is in which desires we’re marketing to, and how and why we’re doing it.

 

Indeed, one of the reasons underlying our distrust of marketing is because its motive—its why—is often coming from one of separation. That is, there is the marketer and you, and the marketer doesn’t recognize your humanity as his own; to the contrary, his goal is to turn you into cash, at any cost deemed reasonable in the legal parameters of a modern economy. That can mean using sex, fear of social ostracization, degraded self-image, or a variety of other psychological tactics marketers employ on a daily basis to sell more product.

 

But what if, on the other hand, that marketer were to approach the growth of his company, and the sales of his product, from a motive of non-separation? In other words, what if he were to begin the process of convincing you why you should buy his product with the recognition that you and he are not separate, not at all, but are actually an expression of the same one consciousness, humanity, cosmos?

 

That would change things, would it not?

 

And what if that marketer were to recognize, and act from, the idea that not only are we all one, but that that oneness of which we are a part is actually the creative, or evolutionary, impulse itself? And that what that impulse demands is ever-higher degrees of authenticity, transparency, creativity, awareness, and shared humanity?

 

That, dear reader, is the premise of Evolutionary Marketing: that who we are at the deepest level is not separate, and, in fact, is the cosmos itself striving to become, to develop, to evolve.

 

Imagine the world we could create if that were the basis for our relationships. And imagine how marketing would transform—how it would make a radical leap from a separative force to one of truth, beauty, and goodness.