Le Marketing

French marketing has always puzzled me.

When I was studying literature in Paris I quickly learned to deflect the question, 'and what are you doing here?' as it would invariably lead to raised eyebrows, smirks, and, 'but what do you want to do comme travail?' not completely unlike in England, I suppose, where I'm knee-deep in jokes about lazy art students going straight on the dole after graduating. But in France, unlike England, the assumption that you can't get a job with a literature degree is based on a system in which pupils have to specialise early, sticking to arts or sciences even if they're not sure which they like best, and where employers choose a candidate based on how closely their qualifications match up to the job requirements, regardless of their raw aptitude, on-the-job experience, or passion. So someone with an engineering degree can only be an engineer, and someone with a history or philosophy degree from a good university who wants to go into marketing had damn well better make sure they have a marketing qualification on top of that. (See 23 year old Jean Sarkozy's recent appointment as chairman of the body that runs la Défense, and how angry people are that he hasn't even got a fucking degree, for the importance of either relevant qualifications or a Presidential parent when it comes to finding a job.)

Most young French people I've met (admittedly, not a huge number) work in marketing. 'Le marketing' is massive. In England, if you're doing a degree course in marketing, in business and marketing, hospitality and marketing etc, it means you're probably at the University of Coventry, or Plymouth, or Middlesex, and you're heading for a job as the manager of a branch of Thomas Cook's. In France, you do your arts or humanities degree, free (virtually), straight out of school, you go on erasmus, you protest, you stand around looking mind-blowingly sexy and smoking, and then you knuckle down and get a real qualification so you can actually get a job. In marketing.

Why, then, if the cream of French youth is engaged in this industry, is it so, so bad? Take poster campaigns. I saw one on the metro the other day describing some kind of winter-time show, the main text of which read (in English): "Impossible To Describe It: Just Go!!!" Lazy. Just lazy. A clothes shop near rue Rambuteau calls itself 'Fashion,' explaining, if you hadn't grasped the significance of the word, 'make oneself more self-confident!' Those hideous Orangina animals: who on earth thought it was a good idea to put endangered safari wildlife in revealing swimsuits and slap them on the window of every Tabac in Paris? And why do adverts for literally everything else contain young children trying to look at each others' genitals?

Realistically, French promotional material can't be dreamt up by four guys called François-Xavier sharing a large bag of weed. It's got to be meticulously researched and targeted, presumably not at me. So what's difference between me and a French person which makes them respond positively to ad campaigns that leave me cold? My mission for this week is to find out...

In other news, Spotify just gave me this nugget of late-nineties joyful nostalgia.