Marketing is about adding value, finding innovative ways to solve problems. Sometimes marketers set out to ‘solve’ problems that around the BBQ would be termed a ‘1st world’ problem.
‘Which dog manicurist’ rates in my mind as such a problem, the subject of a conversation I was unfortunately involved in at a local dog park a few weeks ago.
However, sometimes extremes are pushed.
An extreme example perhaps, but the fiasco surrounding breastfeeding at the recent World Health Organisation meeting in Geneva convened in the belief that there was a consensus informed by science to be ratified, shines a light on the ethical challenges we face.
For some, mostly our wives and mothers, it is a highly emotional question, to breastfeed or not, substituting formula for the real thing. It seems that the 1st world is returning to breastfeeding as the developing world turns to formula, believing it is a sign of maturity, sophistication, something to which they aspire.
To me the answer to breastfeed or not is blindingly obvious.
We evolved as mammals, breastmilk evolved with us, and is therefore uniquely suited to the nurture and development of a baby. The high jacking of breastfeeding by those flogging formula for profit is to my mind an unethical, indeed immoral act of marketing strategy.
Formula is terrific for those who for one reason or another, cannot feed. Back in the day the baby would have either died, or been passed on to someone who could, a ‘wet-nurse’ for nourishment.
The sight of the WHO being managed by those with an agenda favouring formula for profit over the natural product appals me.
Where has our moral compass been hidden?
Locally, the marketing for profit before ethics brigade have taken over in the financial services industry, insurance, urban development, and a host of other sectors, and we are all the poorer for it.
Bit by bit the fabric of our communities is being ripped apart, the evolutionary power of Dunbar’s number thrown against the wall of technology as the power to communicate and collaborate erodes what made us human in the first place.
Somewhere, somehow we have to find the tipping point, and start to recognise that all that is new is not necessarily good.
