Healthymagination.

That’s the word that General Electric has coined for it’s public education campaign regarding their efforts to change health care for the better. Or not. GE is waging a huge public relations campaign – and an even more expensive lobbying effort behind the scenes to change both health care and energy policy at the Federal level.

Wait a minute…what’s one got to do with the other?

Pay attention, campers, because I hope, by the end of this post, to have opened your eyes to how marketing – innocent little marketing – is being used as both a tool to change the hearts and minds of the public, and as a club, to force the government to support policies that will benefit GE financially.

To really understand what’s going on, you have to grok the classical meaning of the word fascism. Forget what you’ve learned about the word, and how it’s typically used as an insult, or a way to villify a group or position on an issue that some other group doesn’t like. In the classical sense, fascism refers to a form of government whereby business and government are inexorably intertwined, so the interests of either are virtually indistinguishable from each other. It’s a condition when large corporations are able to push policies that benefit them, and in exchange, the government gets to have a large say in how these corporations are run. Call it collusion, call it one hand washes the other – by any other name, it’s fascism, boys and girls.

So here’s the thing. On the one hand, GE is marketing like crazy, spending big bucks on ads for “Healthymagination,” wind power and solar power. The ads aren’t strident – quite the contrary. They attempt to position GE in the minds of the viewers as a beneficent power, descending from on high with technological answers to today’s problems. “We bring good things to life,” indeed. In the shadows, however, GE is busy pulling strings and peddling influence, to influence public policy. Why? As Woodward and Berstein said, “follow the money.” You see, GE has a huge stake in the health care industry. Ditto for wind power (they are the largest manufacturer of wind turbines in the world). It benefits them to sway policy so that more turbines are built, and more of their health care products are in demand. A certain amount of lobbying seems reasonable, doesn’t it? I mean, if your company designed some widget that would make you billions, you’d want the government to order a bunch, wouldn’t you? But when there is no transparency in lobbying, the modern day analogs to smoke-filled rooms result in policy by executive fiat – no discussion, no debate, and chance for the public to determine if said policies are good or bad. I remain steadfastly unconvinced that “what’s good for GE is good for America.”

Think about it this way – GE makes wind turbines. They want to create wind farms, because that can create lots of inexpensive (except for the turbines) electricity. Problem is, Electricity is difficult to store for any length of time, and it doesn’t travel well. Since we didn’t have the foresight to build most of our cities where it’s really windy, we have lots of supply in places like the Texas Panhandle and Wyoming, but not a lot of demand. But that doesn’t stop GE. They want to build turbines in the middle of nowhere, and leave solving the transmission and storage problems for later. While that kind of thing wouldn’t make a lot of sense to a businessman, government is seldom encumbered by archaic concepts like “profit,” “efficiency” and “logic.”

Not enough? Consider this: GE is big in health care – diagnostics, data storage and retrieval. They are also big in communications (They own NBC and RCA). I’m a little uncomfortable with this entire “let’s put all our medical records online, and give the government access to them.” Do you really want some monolithic multinational like GE to have the keys to your records? I know I don’t.

So here’s my beef – marketing is great for swaying the hearts and minds of the general public. But when you’re only telling part of the story, and spending big to keep the whole story from the public, marketing crosses the line into propaganda’s turf. I’ve got no problem with happy smiling ads that try to remake a company’s persona. But when those ads hide the truth, and do their best to hide the truth, I’m not quite so understanding.You see, for marketing to work, it requires a bond of trust between marketer and customer. When consumers realize that they’ve been lied to and manipulated, they will not just blame the marketer. They will begin to distrust marketing itself. And that will be disastrous for all of us.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 20th, 2009 at 5:31 pm and is filed under marketing.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.