A culture of "eye to eye"

I have been spending these past couple of days trying to catch up with the books that have been piling up around my flat and lay there unread.

By coincidence most of the titles I had with me were by American authors, Levison, Underhill, Hopkins, so after a while, as I was starting to feel somewehat uneasy reading, I realized there is something particularly annoying/exciting about American marketing books: they are always addressed to YOU - YOU, the person reading them, you, the unadulterated holder of the book, the one whose eyes are facing the page right now. And they always, and I mean always, assume you bought the book because you want to make money.

This I find a disturbing/wonderful quality of American marketing: the directness and lack of any self rightous nuance about the goals of it all. Nobody writes to propose theories, everybody writes to make money or to let other people know that exact way to make money themselves. It is very much like telesales or advertorials and, come to think of it, it may be the reason this formerly great economy was doing so well: sheer, poignant drive to make money, by pig-headedly and without any doubts following a goal.

I read Levison's 50 reasons to do advertising and can find at least 10 which are exactly the same thing worded differently and this does not diminish the strength with which this person-to-person, eye-to-eye writing persuades that he knows what he's writing about.
I wish we had not lost this strength of conviction because I know this is what made great managers like the one we read about. Maybe, with the crisis, we'll see less dilly dally with "the perfect" brand propositions and more decisive money making attitudes :-)

picture via