"Annoying and Intrusive": Why There's More to Marketing Than Meets the Eye

I genuinely enjoyed class on Tuesday, in which debate teams were set up to argue for and against marketing as a whole. I wish I had been given the opportunity to be a debater rather than a question creator, because I had a lot to say about quite a few of the topics that were brought up. I'd like to go into detail about one of those topics in particular, and that is marketing's ability to inspire others when done correctly.

The notion of marketing being annoying and pushy bothers me, because there's so much more to it than Billy Mays trying to jam some random product down your throat through a TV. The two examples used to combat this in class were the Red Cross' promotional efforts to save lives, and Felix Baumgartner's Red Bull sponsored jump from the stratosphere. The former is very straightforward, so I'd like to explore the latter in a little more detail.

Red Bull Stratos was the name of a project that sent Baumgartner 24 miles into the stratosphere in a giant helium balloon, with the intention of jumping into record-breaking free fall before eventually deploying a parachute. While space travel has obviously been around for decades, nobody had ever attempted anything quite like this.

In my opinion, the project was marketing genius. Red Bull offered a free Youtube stream of the event, and a main source of raising awareness about the project was through social media and word of mouth. In total, over 8 million people watched Baumgartner make his historic jump, a truly astronomical figure of viewership. What those 8 million people saw was pure inspiration derived from previously unexplored boundaries being surpassed. The project was bold, creative, ambitious and full of adrenaline, all of which are some of the core attributes of Red Bull's brand as a whole. Creating inspiration in millions of viewers while reinforcing your brand and possibly exposing it to new consumers is marketing done right in my book. When you think of marketing, think of something like this rather than the perceived annoying companies that are still trying to figure it out.