English Hacking

ㅎㅎ 제목이 좀 거창하네요… 혹시 그런 적 없으세요? 책이 너무 재미있고, 매력적이어서 나중에 읽으려고 내버려두었다가 그냥 잊어버리는… 저는 그런 책 많습니다. 그 중에 하나를 우연한 계기에 다시 집어 들었습니다. 여기에서 인용합니다. 읽어보세요.

Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Marketing Consultants
Cro-Magnons aside, modern society also looks bewildering to children. They are born with paleobrains, built from paleogenes, expecting a paleoworld: a close-knit social environment of kin-based hunter-gatherer clans. Children are wired to learn and play the normal game of life for which they evolved: be cute, grow up, find food, make friends, care for kin, avoid dangers, fight some enemies, find some mates, raise some kids, grow old and wise, die. Instead, they face a bizarre new world of frustrating duties and counterintuitive ideas: sit still, learn math, find a job, move away from friends, ignore kin, drive cars, leave kids in day care, and grow burdensome in old age.
Children face this new world with minimal guidance. Their parents go away all day to make money, to buy things, to look good and special, and to attract extra attention from other men and women, despite having mated and reproduced already. Their parents can’t explain why they pretend that they’re still in the mating market if they don’t actually want a divorce and custody battle. Their high school teachers can’t make sense of the consumerist world for them either, and their college professors can only suggest reading perplexing rants from postmodern French sociologists, such as Jean Baudrillard. So, almost everyone grows up confused, passed through life confused, and dies confused.
Only a few children do ever gain an intuitive grasp of consumerism’s principles, and these typically grow up to be marketing consultants. They learn that people general are motivated, at least unconsciously, to flaunt and fake their personal merits and virtues to one another. They realize that modern consumers in particular strive to be self-marketing minds, feeding one another hyperbole about how healthy, clever, and popular they are, through the goods and services they consume. Marketing consultants build careers around the postmodern insight: at its heart consumerist capitalism is not “materialist,” but “semiotic.” It concerns mainly the psychological world of signs, symbols, images, and brands, not the physical world of tangible commodities. Marketers understand that they are selling the sizzle, not the steak, because a premium brand of sizzle yields a high margin of profit, whereas a steak is just a low-margin commodity that any butcher could sell.
However, even the cleverest marketers still don’t fully understand which merits and virtues consumers are really trying to display through their consumption decisions. They don’t really understand the content of the signals that people send to one another. Typically, marketers get some formal education in outdated consumer psychology research, then they get real jobs at real companies and realize that their formal training is mostly useless in selling real products. In response, they strive to develop an intuitive understanding of consumer behavior and marketing strategies through years of trial-and-error learning, plus the occasional book by Seth Godin of Malcolm Gladwell. They lack the huge practical benefits of having a coherent evidence-based theory about consumer behavior, and this limits their success rate. (Geoffrey Miller, Spent – Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior, pp. 10 – 12)

왜 이런 책을 안읽는지 진짜 모르겠어요. 저도 정말 지겹고 괴로울 때를 대비해서 남겨놨었는데, 우연한 계기로 다시 찾아 읽게 됐어요. 이런 책은 꼭 사서 읽어야 한다는 게 제 생각입니다.