Mediating marketing malarkey
The recession is here. Even now Barack Obama is president of the United States, our jobs aren’t safe.
So I’ve been looking to the marketing profession for inspiration. After all, if I’m going to have to fight other editors for work, I need to know how to market myself. I decided to find out more about marketing. I even thought I might learn that ancient profession. I could write copy, couldn’t I? Professional marketers earn a lot more (a lot more) than professional editors, and seeing as I can’t understand the words I edit any way, it might be a good career move.
I decided to find out whether there was some sort of professional marketing body I could turn to. So I typed “marketing profession” into google, and – testament to how skilled these people are – the Chartered Institute of Marketing came up at the bottom of page 2.
Their courses are ‘groundbreaking’ apparently.
Which reminds me of something else I saw – it could only have been days or hours later when I happened to see the Royal Town Planning Institute website. Everybody’s at this marketing malarkey, I thought, as I read their strapline:
“Mediation of space, making of place.”
It sounded really good. I turned the words over, rolled them round my tongue and repeated them. Gosh that sounds so good, I thought to myself. I wonder what it means.
“Mediation of space, making of place”.
I wanted to linger a moment longer, but then realised that it reminded me of something I’d heard before – something that the government came up with. Yes that was it: ‘place-shaping’. I remember now – what the ‘Sun’ newspaper once took to mean “making a nice office”.
But back to this strapline: how do those clever town planners mediate space?
A friend of mine once trained in professional mediation. She worked for a while with couples who were seeking divorce. She said it was about finding common ground between people.
This couldn’t be the same thing, could it? Do town planners sit between opposing walls, hostile plots of land, listening to their grievances. Could they be the answer to the problems in the Middle East?
I was excited to think I might have discovered something important. Something that perhaps Barack Obama might want to know.
But I thought I’d better check – so I turned to the Oxford English Dictionary and looked up ‘mediation’. It said:
“1. intervene in a dispute to bring about an agreement or reconciliation.”
I started to get excited but then this caught my eye:
“2. (technical) be a medium for.”
So, it turns out the RTPI is ‘a medium for’ space, and of course, I don’t mean in the sense of getting in touch with the space that’s passed over to the other side. That would be ridiculous. I mean, ‘an agency or means of doing something’.
The town planners are a means of doing space.
May be when I know more about marketing, I’ll be able to understand big concepts like that.
