Based on the scientific conclusion of the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China on the new development of the main contradiction in Chinese society, the 2018 New Year's issue of "Sales and Marketing" first advocates "beautiful marketing" and hopes that "China's marketing will be more successful in the next 10 years." Toward a beautiful new era.” This is such a marketing vision that excites and warms the corporate and marketing circles! However, three years have passed, and the marketing practices of Chinese companies, especially Internet companies, seem to be far from "beautiful" and even worse. Since 2019, the author has repeatedly published articles in "Sales and Marketing" calling for "building corporate brand ethics" and "preventing big companies from doing evil". Standing at this time of sudden changes and turmoil, at that time, with the "new business model" Those outdated remarks that contradicted the "new marketing paradigm" have now become a prophecy.

There is a famous saying in "The Great Gatsby": "Some people's character seems to be built on solid rock, and some seems to be built in mire, but beyond a certain limit, I don't care. What is it built on?" To use this metaphor, the moral character of marketing that currently dominates the attention seems to be built in a quagmire.

1. Advertisement. Nowadays, in the overwhelming advertising, creative vulgarity seems to be out of date, and the "bully" and "liar" modes are directly activated.

"Bully" mode: Such as XX, XX Bao, XX You, XX Zhipin, XX wedding dress...repeated playback and shouting out the brand name hysterically, simple, direct and rude. Moreover, such advertisements are often placed in elevator rooms. Advertisers are well aware of the coercion of closed media channels!

"Liar" mode: For example, "A family of three is sitting around the dining table, no matter how careful we are, we still want to give our daughter a decent birthday." "What I'm afraid of is that in my world, there are only two points and one line. "Use me as a host to save face, and you can pay it back easily next month." This is the biggest deception, which is to create a false sense of equality, and to do so, it will destroy the moral values ??and stable foundation of the entire society.

2. Promotion. Under the so-called Internet business model, "low price", "free" and "rebate" seem to have become a must-have for promotional activities. First, cultivate users’ purchasing or usage habits at all costs; second, change users’ behavior and psychological cognition; third, destroy the original industry’s operating model and establish new “winner-takes-all” game rules; and finally, it is “ The time to witness the miracle has arrived. From taxi-hailing software, anti-virus software, and food delivery software in the past few years to community group buying focused on "a few bundles of cabbage and a few kilograms of fruit," the ultimate goal of their promotions is not to sell goods, but to become a monopoly in the industry. There is no exception to this underlying logic.

3. Public relations. Public relations activities, as a process of establishing and managing social relations between enterprises and the public, generally must follow the principles of public order and good customs, and take into account the interests of stakeholders. However, the public relations activities carried out by Internet giants with huge resources are not only creating gods, but also exporting "values". For example, "996 is a blessing", "2000 yuan is for humanitarian reasons", "Look at the people at the bottom, none of them exchange their lives for money"... This is blatant hypocrisy and naked moral kidnapping. Traditional crisis public relations principles such as "response quickly", "correct attitude" and "responsive to the public" appear pedantic and redundant in the face of the arrogance of capital.

4. Promotion. The original intention of promotion is to activate customer needs and meet customer needs with appropriate products, but many of today's promotion methods are, simply put, "routines." For example, booking pre-sales, long-term rentals, installments, cards, packages... It is said that some membership-based institutions, such as beauty salons and gyms, have membership cards until 2025. Let’s harvest them first! Once a "thunder" occurs, consumers will have a long way to go to recover their deposits. On the first day of 2021, a long-term rental apartment "exploded". SOHO founder Pan Shiyi commented: This is a variant of a Ponzi scheme.

What is thought-provoking is that the occurrence of the above-mentioned marketing behaviors not only lacks the voice of questioning and reflection from the perspective of marketing conduct or brand ethics, but is instead given various names under the instigation of profit forces. "Innovation" is encouraged.

When there are so many brands of luxury bicycles that they can only be distinguished by color, no one evaluates the cost of steel, rubber and other resources consumed in a large number of low-end manufacturing, and no one questions the environmental impact of discarded bicycles. Instead, they advocated the innovation of "time-sharing leasing" model to enjoy economic, green and environmental protection.

When the P2P online loan financial business reached nearly 3,500 companies at its peak, not only did no one raise the alarm, but it was also packaged as a "self-service" Internet financial innovation. In June 2020, Guo Shuqing, chairman of the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission, publicly revealed that online loan platforms "still have more than 800 billion yuan of lenders that have not been recovered." By the end of 2020, the number of online loan operating platforms in my country has completely dropped to zero. Behind the chicken feathers, this super meat grinder in the investment field has taught hundreds of millions of Chinese people a moral and financial lesson.

When precision marketing becomes popular, marketing terms or "hot words" such as big data, user portraits, thousands of people, knowledge maps, targeted matching, etc. become the achievements of marketing technology ("MarTech") (especially Compared with the "user insights" and "communication concepts" of traditional marketing), consumers have actually become prey, "streaking" prey with no privacy at all in the Internet space.

However, who cares? As long as the company can quickly grow into a "unicorn" with a valuation of more than US$1 billion, as long as the company can successfully IPO, until it devours huge resources and expands into a "too big to fail" monster, in the discourse system of neoliberal economics , the huge negative externality spillover can be easily wiped away by the phrase "free trade and spontaneous adjustment".

What is even more serious is that marketing in the quagmire has produced two consequences that have a profound impact on society:

1. Corruption of language

There is no doubt that advertising language has an important impact on daily language, and the current advertising language has caused more damage to the Chinese language: dissolving the original meaning of the conventional text; creating sentence patterns, changing words; and distorting grammatical structures. Moreover, this kind of destruction is also rape without consent, that is, advertisers/advertisers, as a special role in contemporary culture, have the privilege of publishing new formulas and expressions without consultation with the public.

More importantly, the words of public figures are empty, simple, crude, lacking in sincerity and even hypocritical and deceitful, which will lead to "corruption of language." In other words, once language becomes a pure word game with the purpose of manipulating people's hearts or commercial realization, it loses its original communication function, which ultimately leads to the destruction of people's logical thinking ability, the decline of moral standards, and the distortion of values. Language has become a tool for marketing evil based on pragmatism. Words full of speculative connotations such as "realization" have been inadvertently integrated into daily language and have become neutral expressions. People have lost their sense of reflection and criticism when using such words.

2. Digital imprisonment

In the circles of digital marketing and social media marketing, there is a buzzword called "feeding", which means precise distribution to Content that your target audience likes is like feeding food to a captive pet. In fact, as early as the emergence of the Internet, Nicholas Negroponte predicted the emergence of "the Daily Me" - a completely personalized newspaper. American law professor Keith Sunstein strongly agrees with the concept of "My Daily" and further refined it into the concept of "information cocoon" in his book "Information Utopia", warning of the information partiality and information isolation caused by the personalization of the communication system. consequences.

If commercial enterprises use big data and information technology to try to control all the information that consumers can see and hear, and then control consumers’ thoughts and concepts, then consumers will unknowingly Being trapped in a designed "information cocoon" and deprived of the right to know, the right to choose, and the possibility of development is undoubtedly equivalent to condemning consumers to digital imprisonment.

There are two ways to expand the market: one is extensional expansion, which uses market penetration to occupy a larger market space and compete for more consumers; the other is connotative expansion, which uses technological innovation to guide and Manipulate fashion, artificially maintain or expand the market demand for certain types of goods, force "old" products to become "obsolete", shorten the "social life" of products, thereby forcibly eliminating "old products" and forcing consumers to buy products that meet fashion standards. "New Products".

People who have become rich have not established a correct concept of wealth and have a strong desire for expression, which provides suitable soil for the popularity of consumerism. However, in addition to productivity improvements and national psychological factors, the deeper reason lies in the market expansion impulse of enterprises under conditions of oversupply.

The dangers of consumerism are obvious:

First, waste due to scarcity of resources. Consumerism advocates uncontrolled consumption, one-time consumption, and "throw away" consumption, which is a huge waste of natural resources and overdraws the living space of future mankind.

Second, replace the means of realization in the name of happiness. In modern society, there is nothing wrong with pursuing personal happiness, but after reckless consumption, what you often get is not happiness but disaster. For example, in recent years, there have been frequent incidents of college students taking online loans to purchase famous brands, resulting in high debt levels.

Third, replace the long-term vision with a short-term perspective. To achieve lasting, balanced and comprehensive development of individuals and society, what is needed is a long-term perspective. Consumerism's short-sighted behavior of carpe diem and focusing only on the present will lead some people to be greedy for enjoyment and double their laziness.

Fourth, the autonomy of personal behavior is weakened and control is enhanced. Sweeping under the wave of consumerism, people blindly follow the so-called "fashion" and "fashion" and lose the ability to think independently. And some companies that ignore social responsibilities will do everything possible to induce consumers to satisfy the needs that are stimulated, the needs that are compared, and the needs that are generated to "get eyeballs" in order to earn high profits.

In this sense, consumerism, especially the extreme consumerism that advocates "fashion", is a consumption exploitation mechanism manipulated by capital. Moreover, this exploitation mechanism is based on consumers' "voluntary cooperation" and "cooperative conspiracy", so it is a more concealed kind of exploitation. Zygmunt Bauman, the British thinker who proposed the concept of the "new poor", pointed out in "Society Under Siege": "Capitalism has discovered that once consumers rather than producers are exploited, the pathological impulse for entertainment - has the potential to become the greatest Even an inexhaustible source of profits. ”

In the information age where the Internet is ubiquitous, let us rationally reflect: Who keeps us entertained to death?

"Sales and Marketing" has a profound vision of "beautiful marketing" and puts forward the "Three Beautiful Questions": Why can't we make good products? How should those beautiful products (services) with a sense of the future be described? ?How can China’s products, brands, and culture carry out the mission of building a community with a shared future for mankind? The author refined it into "the truth, goodness and beauty of marketing".

1. Products seek truth

Good products are people-centered and serve people. Tracing the history of German Bauhaus design can be inspiring. After the European Industrial Revolution, the integrated system of "design-production-sales" of handicraft production was broken. The shortcomings caused by the separation of design, manufacturing and sales are: blind indulgence in the application of new technologies and new materials, shoddy products and lack of aesthetic standards. In order to correct the flashy, cumbersome and vulgar pretentiousness of industrial products, the Bauhaus philosophy emphasized: 1. Life is more important than art; 2. Less is more; 3. Design serves function. This human-centered design concept perfectly integrates the economy (efficiency), practicality (function) and artistry (aesthetics) of industrial products, and art comprehensively and holistically intervenes in human modern life. The ideas and aesthetic taste of Bauhaus have profoundly influenced many brands including MUJI, Apple, etc.

In recent years, in the most competitive and representative Chinese home appliance industry, a new generation of smart manufacturers represented by Midea Group have launched COLMO high-end brand home appliances that highlight Bauhaus design concepts. , balancing and integrating product functions with rational aesthetics, represents new possibilities for Chinese enterprises to pursue truth-seeking exploration in product innovation.

2. Spread goodwill

In a compliant world, marketing spreads goodwill between people and between people and society, not the other way around. On the one hand, the policy orientation from the competent department level shows that brand content supervision will become increasingly standardized and strict; on the other hand, the awakening of circles has also strengthened the spontaneous power of public supervision. This requires corporate marketing to strengthen self-discipline and self-supervision when outputting content. For example, when creating topics involving region, gender, income, patriotism, heroes, etc., they must abide by public order and comply with good customs. In short, content dissemination must be people-oriented, take into account the concerns of stakeholders and the public, and improve management from aspects such as corporate culture construction and system and mechanism design.

3. Enterprises seek beauty

Peter Drucker pointed out in his classic book "Management" that enterprises are the organs of society. Enterprises do not exist for themselves, but to achieve specific social goals and to meet the specific needs of society, communities and individuals. He emphasized that there are only three management functions as an organ of the enterprise: economic performance, employee development and sense of achievement, management social influence and social responsibility. As a social cell, enterprises must be benign, rather than malignant cells that cause harm to the social body. A requirement with a higher moral standard is that a great enterprise must have the mission and original intention to serve the national economy and people's livelihood above the pursuit of profits.

Zhang Jian, a patriotic entrepreneur in the late Qing Dynasty, was a role model when he devoted himself to business and saved the country through industry when the country was in danger. In 1895, Zhang Jian founded Dasheng Cotton Mill. The word "Dasheng" comes from the "The Great Virtue of Heaven and Earth is Sheng" in the "Book of Changes", which entrusts Zhang Jian's ideal - the greatest political issue in heaven and earth is the national economy and people's livelihood, and what he promotes is "righteousness and not seeking benefits." , the Chinese business way of knowing the way without counting the merits."

1. Social cost view

Social cost refers to the additional cost of "product" that spills over due to externalities in addition to the operating costs of the enterprise (private sector) and is borne by society. The most typical ones include environmental social costs, governance social costs, etc. At the same time, social cost can also be regarded as an opportunity cost, that is, the social economic resources must be used for a certain purpose and the most profitable other opportunities of the economic resources must be given up. For example, steel and rubber are not consumed in the production of bicycles. for other purposes. For a long time, the social costs that companies have excessively consumed in the name of “innovation” have been greatly ignored.

2. Privacy protection

A few years ago, Robin Li’s controversial “privacy-for-convenience theory” reflected the huge disparity in data disposal rights between large enterprises and users. Symmetrical position. Today, when we are highly vigilant about the disorderly expansion of corporate public power, "privacy protection" will become a key issue for Internet platform companies. It is true that users have no control over their private data, and social network providers have full access to user data, which is technically unavoidable. However, as a business, we cannot use the weak concept of privacy and lack of means to protect rights and interests as a business opportunity, let alone use the so-called "bad nature" of human nature as an excuse to do evil. At the end of 2020, the State Administration for Market Regulation issued the "Anti-Monopoly Guidelines for the Platform Economy (Draft for Comments)", which targets the stubborn problems of Internet platforms such as "big data killing", which means that consumer privacy protection and consumer privacy protection have been removed from the legal level. Fair competition is placed in an important position in the development of the network economy. It is foreseeable that the new regulatory policies will surely urge large Internet platforms to standardize and innovate in corporate culture, strategy and mechanism design.

3. Human dignity

According to the latest data released by the National Bureau of Statistics: In 2020, the average weekly working hours of employees in enterprises across the country reached 46.9 hours, and the workplaces of enterprises that implement the 996 work system People work nearly twice as many hours as Japan. Generally speaking, if the company is in a rising stage of development, overtime is inevitable.

However, this does not mean that companies can touch the legal bottom line or play "edge balls". What's more, bad corporate cultures such as using overtime hours as a KPI and using overtime as a "show of loyalty" are prevalent. The reason why excessive overtime is openly promoted as a kind of corporate culture is not because of work needs, but because the company or capital ignores "people" itself as a value.

Author: Doctor of Economics, Postdoctoral Fellow, Executive Dean of New Retail and Brand Research Institute of Nanjing Polytechnic University

Responsible for proofreading: Zhang Ke

Responsible for the second review Person: Wang Shenzhen