Credit Unions: Conspicuous Complicity?

Lighting it up...!

WELL!  As they say, quite a few CU marketeers got "their boxers in a wad" over the Filene's marketing post yesterday! [link]   

The "incoming twittery" was just more of the same old stuff ("SOS")....  A few flashes of madness and originality would have been much more interesting.  

If you aspire to be a thoughtful and effective CU marketeer, it might be wise and necessary for you to spend some time with Thorstein Veblen and his work "The Theory of the Leisure Class".  Believe it or not; despite being an economist, Veblen's fun! ("The most impressive satirist of his day." -- Time Magazine)  

Perhaps you need to read Veblen simply because you would like to consider where your moral compass should point, as a cooperative, non-profit leader in a for-profit, take no prisoners, "buyer beware" world. Veblen, the economist who created the phrase "conspicuous consumption", will not only make you think; he may help you choose: for-profit or not-for-profit, truth or whatever, sinner or saint?

Mr. Veblen challenges you to consider the hard-edged realities of an

"WE-aSELL" !!

impersonal, industrialized economy, juiced-up by advertising and consumption... with AI waiting in the wings! 

But even back in 1899, Thorstein Veblen was not optimistic about the logical "endgame" of a race to the bottom in a marketplace, increasingly unrestrained by local accountability, with uncertain ethical values, and flexible moral scruples.  

Veblen predicted that marketing would eventually feature the following:

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS

OF MODERN MARKETING? 

(Future predictions from 1899!) 

• Attention to overstatement
• Fabricated demand
• A low traffic in salesmanship
• Promises much, delivers the minimum
• Promises much, delivers nothing of value
• Creates an artificial scarcity
• Enlarges the list of life's "necessities"
• Downplays the truth, implies the false
• Encourages contemptuous consumption
• Promises a margin of something for nothing

✔ "Veblen saw greed as the overriding motive in the modern economy, and  examined the human cost paid when social institutions exploit it for the sake of personal profit." 

 

Are we there yet CU marketeers?