Marketing Morals

The first moral science story of my young days which I remember was the story of a farmer, who was worried because his four sons did not work in farms and kept quarreling amongst themselves. One day he told them that he had placed his pitcher of money somewhere in the farm. He had forgotten where he had kept it. All four sons in search of the money pitcher dug the entire farm, but were unable to find the money. The farmer then requested his sons to sow a few seeds of wheat once the farm was already dug up. After a few days a healthy crop came up in the farm. The farmer then explained to his sons, the secret behind the pitcher. The actual secret was: working hard together toproduce the wealth in the form of a crop that could then be sold for money. I always wondered about the purpose of telling such stories to young children. Do they really understand the message at the age of six, seven or eight? Is there a way that the message goes across much more firmly? Are elders trying to sell the Morals to young children? Is it a type of marketing? I went back to the MBA books to understand the term “Marketing”. Marketing is explained as a "process of exchanging products and value with others". What a good example of marketing it is, when we talk of exchanging value in form of Morals. Most people will relate marketing with the purpose of financial profitability. But in this new age, the phenomenon of marketing has to be used even to establish your point well, even in the context of telling Morals.

Many people of my age and a generation before me have never endorsed the idea of marketing for noble purposes. They feel that marketing is a way to fool people, to make them buy useless things. They say that a good thing sells automatically. 

Today, the number of options for good things is also very large for any user to select them and then take them. If we have to reach out to an ever increasing population for moral education, we need to use the same techniques that a typical marketer does to reach out to his clientele. We need to understand the requirements, do surveys, prepare offers, and reach out to their points of presence. I believe that using stories to tell morals is an offer made by a writer to its readers. It asks a reader to promise to take the gyan he is about to impress upon the reader and thus offers him a story to begin with. Got it, if not, wait for another story to come soon.

Dr. Sunil Ji Garg