Marketing Mirroring Life

“Don’t worry,” says Mum, “there are more fish in the sea.” Oh crap, she’s right! As a fresh-faced, soon to be recent graduate, how do you make yourself stand out from the crowd? You have a run-of-the-mill degree (1 of 700 to be handed out at graduation), you were involved in this club and that society and the other organisation, and had a part time job at Prince Alfred Hotel that you rocked up to hungover most days. You have a few friends that graduated last year and are still looking for solid work, and others that dove back into postgraduate or honours study with their tail between their legs. But then how do you make yourself marketable?

In a way, we are all marketing students. Life is one big marketing ploy. We market ourselves to potential employers and partners; we market our choices to our parents and siblings; and we market our ideas and dreams to ourselves. We should all be experts at this, right?

So what’s the difference when it comes to large scale marketing? Shouldn’t it be easy to convince all of Melbourne to drink Sprite, or wear CK cologne? Against a wall of ‘fish in the sea’, how do you make your product stand out? Why doesn’t mass email work? Why are billboards ignored? Why do we channel surf during ads? Because they are boring! Advertising and marketing has to take a fresh approach to catch the eye of consumers, and that’s what L’Oreal has figured out...sort of.

If marketing is life, why cant it also be second life? This Second Life phenomenon, if it can even be called that, has presented new ways for brands to infiltrate their audience. The verdict is still out for me on this one. Not sure I am convinced that this game, which just reminds me of the Sims on overdrive, will ever really take off the way Facebook and Twitter have. And also not convinced that virtual makeup will convince me to buy real makeup. Or subscribe to ABC for that matter. Check out these glamorous videos that attempt to describe what exactly it is. Any thoughts?