When Marketing Encourages The Fallacies Of Stereotypes

There is no power of marketing to shape worldviews or incite grand spending unless a person allows it to.  In a society that has very rampant sexism, racism, or ageism, though, marketing that appeals to or perhaps even outright encourages these fallacious stereotypes is likely to be at least moderately successful, since marketing like this is crafted around what consumers act as if they want.  Just like bipartisan political structures and fitheistic churches, this kind of marketing becomes an extension of someone's irrationalism, a business version of one someone with power doing as they wish even though the ideas they are treating as true are demonstrably false and are not even really their primary concern.  Mindlessly generating as much revenue as possible is the primary goal, and marketing that appeals to fallacious ideas can then appeal to fallacious thinkers--and there is no shortage of the latter.

Marketing can easily present clothing, technology, or household items intended to make men or women or people of various races identify with arbitrary social constructs rather than humanity and individuality (and even then, humanity and individuality only in light of reason and morality).  Some marketers or their employers might realize that stereotypes are false and assumed, but out of irrationality just act otherwise, and others might have never thought about the issue or cared, but what all businesspeople of these kinds have in common is that they are slaves to greed and not truth.  Any truths that they happen to stumble into as non-rationalists are only acknowledged or approved of when they somehow can be used to make money at the expense of knowing or honoring the truth.  What they think is money for the sake of money is their objective in life, and marketing might manipulate the unintelligent quite easily when it comes to stereotypes.

As such, the falsity of stereotypes and the inherent epistemological invalidity of believing in them makes marketing of this kind irrationalistic in intent and unjust.  Some prominent examples of how, for instance, gender stereotypes would be manipulated for marketing purposes relate to how women supposedly dislike video games or how men supposedly do not care about clothing that accentuates their bodies or is more colorful than is culturally encouraged.  Because of these assumptions and errors, products can be sold by idiots to idiots, with few or none of them actually pausing to realize just how erroneous the concepts and motivations behind this objectively are.  This is not an intrinsic part of marketing, it is vital to clarify.  In a society structured like America, it just happens to be what many people will blindly indulge in.  Marketing can be used with rationalistic motivations and complete philosophical honesty.

Anyone who does purposefully or lazily constructs their marketing otherwise is interested only in the truth that a certain kind of consumer is willing to pay money to fit into stereotypes (or make it appear that they do when they know they do not), not in any truth that does not make him or her money.  This is why ads and television spots and emails might be made as if someone likes a certain activity, food, aesthetic style, musical genre, or technological device because they are male, female, white, black, Hispanic, Asian, old, young, and so on.  It is of course not only epistemologically invalid to believe stereotypes are true since they must involve assumptions, but even the epistemological disparity between one person's psychological traits and another is only there because of the conceptual distinction, because there is objectively no connection between something like gender or race and personality.  Marketing does not have to exclude being clever or culturally relevant in not promoting stereotypes, but fallacious and deceptive marketing can never be clever except when it comes to expressing stupidity.