# Marketing's existential crisis
## Current Form
There’s a quiet crisis I hear about often in marketing: a fundamental discomfort with the craft when it so often slips into patterns that **flatten reality** into symbols, memes, and “content.” We trade depth for reach, care for clicks, and complexity for legibility. When we reify meaning into “assets,” when people become “personas,” when story becomes "content," something sacred is lost.
## Spark
This came from a reflection on [[reification]], critique, and the ethical edge of brand and strategy work. Also from the ambient discontent I, and so many, creatives and marketers feel every day.
- When does meaning-making become meaning-exploitation?
- How do we resist the industrial logic embedded in “content”?
## Tensions or Unknowns
- How do we reconcile the desire to make meaning with the systems that exploit it?
- Can marketing be a sacred or humanizing practice?
- What forms protect complexity rather than flatten it?
- What would “post-alienation” marketing look like?
## Next Evolution
- Name the existential layers more clearly: sacred vs instrumental, signal vs noise
- Explore parallels in art, education, activism—where meaning risks becoming output
- Develop rituals or frameworks that resist flattening and preserve care
### Wayfinding
%% DATAVIEW_PUBLISHER: start
```dataview
TABLE WITHOUT ID
questions AS "Responds to",
origins AS "Informed by",
ideas AS "Developed alongside",
concepts AS "Builds on"
WHERE file.name = this.file.name
```
%%
| Responds to | Informed by | Developed alongside | Builds on |
| ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ----------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| <ul><li>[[thinking/questions/the future of saas.md\|the future of saas]]</li><li>[[thinking/questions/what remains human.md\|what remains human]]</li></ul> | \- | <ul><li>[[thinking/saplings/marketing judgment is the future.md\|marketing judgement]]</li></ul> | <ul><li>[[thinking/concepts/semiotic capitalism.md\|semiotic capitalism]]</li><li>[[thinking/concepts/embodied cognition.md\|embodied cognition]]</li><li>[[thinking/concepts/Jevon's Paradox.md\|Jevon's Paradox]]</li></ul> |
%% DATAVIEW_PUBLISHER: end %%
>[!info]- ChangeLog