The Medium is the Message

The Medium is the Message

Welcome to Marketing 301 with Professor Larry Duke. Today is the first day of class, and I’ve parked it in the back of Nesbitt Hall’s Stein Auditorium to experience day one of what for many students will be a first foray into the world of marketing. What is marketing anyway? Informing consumers of products and services, right? Is it the mechanism? The message? Or something more complex?

The auditorium fills up fast. Duke takes the massive stage and welcomes the class. He begins pacing. He is an excellent pacer. In fact, for the remainder of the class he only makes his way to the podium at stage left to change a couple of simple slides on his laptop. This is no PowerPoint affair. It’s meant to be a discussion.

“Whether you’re pursuing marketing as a career, or if this is the only marketing course you take, you will still get the same takeaways,” Duke says. “Why? Because no matter where your interests lie, we all have to market.”

Duke has a soft, warm Midwestern inflection that invites you in for dinner. For instance, when he says “value” he stretches the vowels to the point of onomatopoeia.

On the topic of value: “Marketing is more than profits,” Duke says as he paces right to left. “It’s how they relate to the employees, stakeholders and society. That is the value. It’s the core of business.”

Marketing is a set of processes, he says. It’s about creating, capturing, communicating and delivering value.

Each question is an opportunity for dialogue. But Duke’s ace in the hole is his ability to pepper his marketing message with personal anecdotes.

Later, after the class has cleared out, he will tell me that he also values the potential for his students to gain new perspectives in providing value to themselves. He’s aware that the room is peppered with future business owners and executives. Perhaps even a few budding academics who will teach a similar class one day. He gets a kick out of changing their perceptions.

He begins class with a Marketing IQ Test, which is really just an opportunity to ask students what they know already — to show them how pervasive marketing really is.

• What is the largest subculture in the U.S. population? Hispanics! Queue a discussion about the value of demographics.
• How much cash did a 30-second spot cost during Super Bowl XLVI? $3.5 million. And how many Super Bowls made the top 10 list of most watched TV broadcasts in American history? All 10. Now that’s value.

Each question is an opportunity for dialogue. But Duke’s ace in the hole is his ability to pepper his marketing message with personal anecdotes. He doesn’t do it in a way that screams narcissism. It’s more humble charm. It’s, well, marketing.

For instance, did you know that Gerber baby food failed when it was introduced in Africa? Why? Because the labeling — featuring that cherubic infant — was taken too literally. As in: this jar is full of babies. This gets a laugh, despite the gruesome image. Marketing fail, right? Absolutely.

But did you also know that Professor Larry Duke was a Gerber Baby? That a picture of rosy-cheeked Baby Duke once appeared in a psychology textbook that caught the eye of Gerber? Turns out Baby Duke became a top 10 finalist for the Gerber Scholarship Competition. He didn’t win top honors. But he did get a scholarship for $50.

“That’s why I’m here teaching and not in Hollywood,” he says.

He gets a few laughs and flashes a smile. He gets more laughs when he says he had to market to his wife to get her to marry him. He doesn’t elaborate. It’s enough to simply say it happened.

Duke tells anecdotes full of pop culture references — including Seinfeld, Joe Camel and HBO’s Vice — during what he calls Marketing 301 Jeopardy, a kind of open-ended quiz that he also uses as a mechanism to take attendance. Students must hand in their quiz sheets before they leave class. He tells them the answers. It’s the dialogue that matters.

“You’ve been a really good group today,” Duke says.

As the students place their Jeopardy sheets on the table in the back of the auditorium and file out the door, I wonder if they are aware that they were just marketed to. And I wonder if Duke wonders the same thing. But he’s still on stage answering questions for a line of students, greeting each with a wide smile.

Now that’s marketing.