Kathy's Blog

“Seriously though, are you at all interested in switching to marketing?”

The man who asked me this I feel had good intentions. He had recently married a single mom and it had been an enlightening experience for someone who had grown up in a home where there were no financial worries.

He continued by saying that the sad truth was that no matter how good a scientist was, the only way to get ahead was in marketing or finance. What initiated this was that I talked to some potential clients and it had resulted in sales. I had done the same kind of work as the clients and knew exactly how the equipment we were selling worked. This flew in the face of the idea that you had to make things magical to sell.

My parents are both in their 80s and grew up on neighboring farms during the Great Depression. One of the things that I have noticed is that their “emergency” grocery store trips usually involve buying boxed cereal. When I asked them why they ate so much of it, they said “cereal is good for you.” Then the gravity of it hit, the marketing people had convinced them during very hard times that the grain their families grew themselves was inferior to the much more expensive brand name boxed cereals.

I mentioned in part 2 that scientific research consists of a lot of just plain work. In the 1970s when I was in graduate school, the department head let it be known that if push came to shove, he would let tenured faculty go before the master glassblower. Now there was a statement of an employee’s value! The graduate students were working with the machine and electronics shops to create, repair, and modify their own equipment. For a lot of us, this shop experience was very valuable in being able to work manufacturing jobs during periods when scientists became considered optional. (This was not necessarily hard times either, the biggest mass layoff of scientists was by the oil industry in the 1960s when they discovered they could make money without doing a lot of research.) Now the manufacturing jobs are scarce too. How did that happen? Sigh…

Something about the offer for a marketing job in the 1980s was offensive. I didn’t remember it ever coming to a vote that people who make money from managing money or encouraging people to buy stuff should be considered more vital to society than people who make things, invent things, take care of other people, do repairs, grow food, etc.

I was also a bit miffed that the great education that I got at taxpayer expense (as a response to the launch of Sputnik) should just be ditched.

This morning I viewed Jamie Oliver’s TED speech and yesterday watched Faces of America on PBS — both had a theme of keeping or reclaiming our culinary heritage. That is what a lot about Michelle Obama’s task force against childhood obesity is about as well.

The successes of marketing are amazing. By processing cash crops, introducing additives for preservation, flavor, and color, and putting them in a box, they will become more popular than fresh foods. I am thinking that a big error we are making right now is that of trying to get things back to where they were just a few years ago and preserve our “consumer culture” — what we really need to get back is a producing culture. But with all this marketing expertise, maybe this time we can push sustainable, healthy changes? Could it all start as simply as encouraging people to start cooking again?

My mother recently had two strokes as well as a number of other health problems. I knew that there was a shortage of health care workers and that they are not paid nearly what they are worth but this really brought it home. The health insurance industry has already threatened if they are cut out of their position (between us and our doctors) it will result in massive unemployment. Here is an opportunity for people who have health industry experience to be encouraged to retrain as health care providers.

But that is “hard work” (say that in the past president’s voice to get the full effect). I was happy when President Bush mentioned that, but disappointed that he didn’t recognize that should be a way of life especially for people in public service. We need people who are willing and able to do hard work and to recognize their contributions to society.

That gets us the the “easy” error, but that is for another day.