by Tom Pantera
Columnist

I don’t watch much reality TV any more – the players generally are too savvy, and it becomes more about tactics than winning – but I do have one guilty pleasure: “Undercover Boss.”

Yeah, I know, it’s reality TV and it’s edited more toward what makes a good show than it is toward any reality. But still, having worked for my share of clueless executives, I think it has occasional moments of veracity. I always get a big kick out of watching these high-powered CEO-types get struck with the realization that even the lowest-level employees at their companies are real people, with real lives and real problems. And yes, it’s what amounts to an hour-long commercial for whatever company is involved. A lot of them aren’t companies I’d normally patronize, either because they aren’t in my region or I’m not their target market.

Last week’s was particularly odd, though. It focused on the CEO of a company that sells “extreme sports” wear aimed at skateboarders and those kind of folks. The company had some serious communications problems; their designers would work up store displays, but the word would never get down to store managers and they’d have to build displays themselves. And the designs for the company’s silkscreened shirts likewise didn’t get to the factory floor, so the guy doing the printing had to sort of make up his own solutions.

What was interesting to me was that the entire company’s product line was aimed at the skateboarder market, people who generally pride themselves on being rebels and not listening to The Man. Yet, the company was attempting to reach them through the kind of scientific marketing that you average skateboarder would find offensive, if not downright lame. It’s like trying to market patchouli oil to hippies.

I grew up the son of a salesman, so marketing is kind of in my blood. And after spending most of my life working in the media, I have a keen appreciation of what marketing is supposed to do and often does.

It’s really kind of a fascinating science, because it tries to apply rationality to often irrational human decisions. People have made whole careers out of trying to figure out where a given item should be placed on grocery store shelves. Everything from the shape of a package to its colors to its wording is studied and focused-grouped to within an inch of its life. And that’s not even counting the advertising campaigns, which are marvels of detail-focused worry. Basically, every time you see somebody in a commercial that person has been cast for extremely specific reasons.

The best marketing, of course, is invisible. The target isn’t supposed to know it’s aimed at him. Much of the hardest work in marketing goes into making it relatively inconspicuous. Older readers may remember when generic products first came out; often as not, the packaging was white with large, black, block lettering. It screamed “generic.” And I’m willing to be that as much thought went into that design as went into the design of the cell phone you use.

The world is really based on marketing and its handmaiden, sales. When you go to work every day, your basic job is to market yourself to your employer. If you don’t do that successfully, he finds a way to get rid of you. And even if you do market yourself to your boss, you also have to market yourself to your company’s customers. They may like the product, but if the guy trying to sell it to them is a first-class chowder head, nobody’s going to be making any money.

Marketing can be disreputable, but for the most part it is what it is: the real engine of the economy. Marketers often fudge the truth, but it’s rare that there are outright, provable lies told. In the first place, there are laws against that kind of thing and the publicity from getting caught can be worse than the crime itself. And in the second place, sooner or later dishonest marketing is hoist on its own petard. One of the reasons my Dad was a great salesman is that he was one of the most honest men who ever walked the earth.

What’s a little disturbing is that faith in marketing can be a little extreme. To paraphrase Lincoln, you can sell all of the people part of the time and part of the people all of the time, but you can’t sell all of the people all of the time. Sometimes, your product is just so bad that the best marketing in the world won’t help you.

We’re seeing that happen now in the aftermath of the presidential election. Few people in the Republican party are talking about what they’re actually trying to sell to voters. It’s pretty obvious the Republicans’ various hobbyhorses simply weren’t popular with the majority of the electorate, or at least weren’t as popular as Obama’s. Yet, a big chunk of the Republican party is desperately saying that they lost not because of the ideas, but because of the way they were packaged. The marketing, they say, just has to be better.

Well, I don’t think so. The fact is, when you have a candidate who portrays anybody who needs government help as a “taker,” there’s something wrong with the basic message. There’s a lot wrong, in fact, but from a practical standpoint it’s kind of a bad career move to insult the people you’re trying to sell your ideas to.

Marketing can only go so far. It’s gone a little too far in some areas of life. Maybe this is a good opportunity to remind ourselves to be a little more careful about believing what we’re told. That’s always good advice, whether you’re buying a t-shirt or the leader of the free world.