Today I took a rather long seven-hour bus ride from Yang Yang down to Pusan. Gonzo came along for the ride. Lot's of points strike a resonant chord here. Maybe not the marketing is dead mantra for sure. Banks for example continue to compile record returns and that housing market globally does not seem to be suffering for a new internet take-over. That the marketers have not totally dominated the internet medium is probably just a hiccup, as for Locke he was writing Gonzo five, six and probably seven years ago. The tracks of marketers spinning-advertising dollars over the web has only exponentially increased over that time. So I am still not convinced marketing is dead.
What is dead, like the dinosaur process techniques and employee retirement benefits it spawned is seemingly union labour, and the moth belt, rust belt industries it required to maintain worker minimum standards brought in not even a hundred years ago. Locke touched on Deming and one of his highly specific points of quality, namely, drive out fear. It certainly appears Deming took his points of quality from an experience as a statistical analyst, it is clear he adapted and moved on from crunching numbers to crunching the advantages that upstream and downstream dialogue have in companies which value and reward their workers with better and better management.
However, the current global flexibilization movement is the latest best way to compete according to most MNCs. To hell with quality. An exponential growth of un-monitored subsidiaries, which are all apparently financed and set up in green-field with farmer workforce imports steadily clogging every city in the developing world, to compete for five to ten dollars a day in many parts of Asia, and five to ten dollars an hour in much of Eastern Europe are the latest, best way to build profit margins and economies of scale. And companies like Toyota live and breath Deming concepts of TQM at the same time, while too often US ones tend to make it a motto, like Ford's. Quality in product and process, and management, is not a motto, maybe it is not even quite as clearly thrown in to the US working world philosophically even as Locke approaches it in Gonzo.
Furthermore, Locke makes a good point about social advertising and corporate image dryness, the textual equivalent of assembly instructions from China in English (well, at least a form of it) or the operating instructions booklets as thick as dictionaries for the latest chocolate bar cell phones. The fact that fewer media giants exist these days, although larger and more diversely controlling the media/medium/message angle helps explain why for example, corporate giants like GM are dying out. These managers were long listening to the wrong end of the telephone. But it is not the preferred shares investors who suffer. It is anyone who bought in to that company with uninsured dollars along the way. Or that pitch.
The first, possibly best reason that the official, sanctioned journalistic world operates the way it does, is that despite the fact that the way GM leads in putting the writing on the wall for major US based corporations the disassembled sums of their parts, in bricks and mortar, in parts and pieces, in clearance and liquidation is much more valuable over the short-term and a faster turn-over even without enforced bankruptcies. Just look at the way some big MNCs manipulate their dividend yields by selling or buying local regional subsidiaries rather than actually improving their sales figures. So I am not at all convinced that any blue chip investors there would want GM to live anyway. It is worth more dead, and sold off in pieces, the same way that Locke likes to say marketing is dead, such pronouncements have sometimes a ripple effect. Though I am not sure in the long run that the average developed world consumer is going to benefit from such asset realignments. Germany and Siemens provides the best case.
Sell off the losing divisions and employment benefits costs heavy portions to foreign investors, which may or may not be fully supported by government subsidies and loans with no payments even on interest.The point of all of this? GM just indicates the first real strike in a zero-sum game direction for large corporations in the developed world. Statistics will show the jobs people are taking to replace those lost are in the great growing trades of retail cashier clerk, teacher's aide, auditing. Quality is the perception that is changing. Media helps alter the perception. The more people are convinced that less and less is just as good, or good enough, or better than nothing, the more under threat the very tenets of democracy seem. At some point I hope enough people in the US at least find the courage to challenge again their corporate political leadership in a similar area as Vietnam.
What are US business graduates to do for example, when statistics indicate over 70% of most MNCs do not foresee future hiring needs for the indeterminate future? Again, Locke spoke about the differences between Church and State while at the same time suggesting that there is little if any difference between the two in the modern day. Blogs will somehow get worked out; at least they will not be free to users forever. And or the quality of what one considers freedom of speech will also be considered up for realignment under such terms. Technology has made long-term vision, corporate, marketing, or individual investor a little harder to measure. But corporations certainly seem to be taking the Internet in hand as per advertising dollars.
