It's Not A Conspiracy

It's a marketing strategy.

I say this all the time, and people are baffled by it. “Karen, how can you say that it’s not a conspiracy? They are getting together to plan things that ultimately cause great harm.”

The problem of the matter is intent.

A conspiracy is a group’s plan to do harm. I think on a small scale, someone knowing better and going ahead with it anyway, with personal contact with those whom they swindle and hurt for personal gain is more or less on the conspiracy end of things.

However, with large companies and their marketing divisions coming up with ways to get the public to be more receptive to a product or service, create a demand that never otherwise existed or to sell their product or service to a government who can generate demand, there is no focus whatsoever on the customer they will never see who happens to get hurt. This is not a consideration. As such, these can’t qualify as more than marketing strategies. The intent isn’t to cause harm. It’s just an unsightly side effect of selling what was unknown to them as a potentially harmful product.

It may be that large companies run in a compartmentalized fashion for just this reason. The legal team and liability group are separate from the research group who are entirely separate from the marketing team who feed a script to the sales groups. It’s to protect the company, and not to necessarily to harm others.

This is why you’ll see some guy in the research end of Pfizer may end up using a product that he may be unaware that the company’s legal team is defending from various allegations. His field in the data analysis end might just be reading trials conducted by a different group who were told by legal what data to ascertain for the most protection from liability. Perhaps, they ran all the tests that were required of them by the FDA. They are just fulfilling their minimum requirement to maintain compliance. So, he just sees figures that look good enough and thinks little of the sequence of events that unfolded to get that information to him or the general lack of relevance of the data to the actual safety or efficacy of the product he is taking.

So, you see, none of that chain of events necessarily implies a desire to do harm so much as a swiftest and least complicated way to bring a product to market and to get the most sales. Even when a marketing team runs their ads by a legal department to get approval, the legal department may adjust it to make the language more vague or flexible to avoid potential issues in case further data emerges that conflicts with initial claims or so false information is not given to the public. In so doing, they aren’t trying to harm but to say things that are ambiguous for the sake of not making false claims. They are protecting the company from liability with some faith, generally that the company is largely doing as it is required by law, however minimal that may be. They have the intent to protect their employer and the jobs of their employees. They aren’t considering how to hurt people.

The real problem lies in the discernment of the potential customer or consumer to distinguish between campaign slogans and facts. This is the art of propaganda. It requires little critical thinking to weed out, but great insight into one’s owns hopes, aspirations, biases and assumptions. If you don’t recognize your own assumptions, beliefs and biases you’re doomed to accept anything these marketers sell you.

James Corbett spent years on a Propaganda Watch series to help people understand their own biases and assumptions and how they are exploited. I highly recommend anyone who feels they may still be prone to suggestibility, and we all are in some fashion, to go back through the years of his groundbreaking series and challenge yourself to see what you may be afraid to look at, to challenge your preconceptions and to hold your review of all marketing, even from your favorite authors and health gurus to a higher standard. Only then can we return our focus and resources of time and attention to that which truly keeps us moving toward our aspirations.