Why I Wouldn't Have a Roman on my Marketing Team

He's sad because his ears are big
(and his empire's collapsing)

We’ve learned things in my marketing class like “There is only one boss—the customer” (which is just another way of saying the customer is always right) and “if you’re not reaching the heart, you’re not marketing.” We’ve also learned that we should “Listen to the whispers, so we don’t have to hear the screams.” In a marketing sense, this means to listen to the consumer’s wants and needs instead of having to listen to the scream of profits plunging because you weren’t smart enough to keep your ear to the ground.

Rome had its own problem with plugging its ears to the whispers of the people. Rome had a “Build it and they’ll come” attitude about empire expansion. In marketing it’s called product orientation, and Henry Ford was referring to this strategy when he said, “Any customer can have any color car, as long as it’s black.” So the strategy has its place in the marketing world (it can be quite successful), but when the Romans built it and the people came, it became overwhelming. In other words, grumblings of decline went utterly unnoticed until the screams of empirical implosions were all that was left. That’s probably a little overdramatic, but at least how I see it, the Romans were a little too self-absorbed to see that its constant wars, oppressive taxation, and governmental corruption (and lots of other factors like barbaric invasions and splitting their empire in half on purpose)

would eventually lead to an impressive fall. And that’s why I wouldn’t have a Roman on my marketing team.