Marketing All the Way Down

With both Jaguar and Volvo, it’s marketing all the way down.

Two car ads cycled through the online hot-take ecosystem this week. First, Jaguar released a weird ad, showcasing color and inclusion, but no cars. The obvious presence of transgenderism among other things provoked a lot of pushback. Rightly so. Elon Musk cheekily asked the obvious question: “Do you sell cars?”

I saw a parallel in the ad with the story my car-guy dad told me about the launch of Infiniti in 1990. In 1990 both Toyota and Nissan were launching luxury brands, Lexus and Infiniti. Infiniti never got traction because of weird, cryptic ads. Lexus won before the cars ever shipped. “Congrats on being the new Infiniti, Jaguar,” I said.

Then another car ad filtered through the networks, this one from Volvo. It’s a three minute mini-movie that narrates the story of a man and woman who find out they’re going to have a baby. The man calls his mom, tells her the news, and then talks through his expectations for his daughter. All the while the video highlights moments from the baby’s life from infancy through young adulthood. The story ends with a lady in a new Volvo stopping in time not to hit the expectant mother in the crosswalk.

Instead of an edgy attempt at embodying the cultural narrative of inclusivity like Jaguar, the Volvo ad celebrates the permanent things (as Russell Kirk called them): family, love, care.

Both ads became symbols of vastly different moral visions, and proxies for different sides of the “culture war.” Obviously, I resonate with the Volvo side of things, and the permanent things. As a dad, the story misted up my eyes a bit, while the Jaguar ad made me roll my eyes instead.

Yet both ads were part of another cultural reality that differs from the “sides” of conservative and progressive, moral and immoral.

Both ads are trying to sell cars. Both ads are a form of marketing. As my trusty digital dictionary tells me, marketing is “the activity or business of promoting and selling products or services.”

Both ads identify a core customer, and attempt to create a story that reaches that customer—so that the customer will spend money and buy a car.

If you dig under the proxies for the culture war or moral vision, you find someone or some group trying to make money.

It’s marketing all the way down.

“It’s [blank] all the way down” is an expression that means “it doesn’t get any deeper, this is the deepest reality.” Here’s one story of how the expression developed. A city opened a brand new planetarium, where folks could sit and see the many wonders of the sky all at the same time. At the grand opening of this new exhibit, before the first viewing, a professor of astronomy spoke to a packed house about the cosmology of space, how the sun centers the solar system and the earth and planets circle the sun, keeping them from falling into space.

Afterward, an old lady came up to the professor and said, “You’re wrong about the earth and space.” The professor, wanting to be polite, indulged the conversation, asking, “How is it that I’m wrong?” “Well,” she said, “I think it’s much more likely that the earth is sitting on the back of a giant turtle.” Startled a bit, the professor responded, “If that’s the case, then what does the turtle sit on?” “He sits on the back of another, even larger turtle,” she said confidently. “But what would that second turtle sit on?” asked the professor. “Young man,” the lady said, “You’re very clever, but let me stop you there, because it’s turtles all the way down.”

The lady believed turtles are the ultimate reality of the world. The story has been told to highlight the silliness of some beliefs. But the expression “It’s [blank] all the way down” has taken on a meaning to say, “There’s no other secret behind the curtain. This thing is the reality of this particular vision of life.”

So when I say, “It’s marketing all the way down,” I mean that neither Jaguar nor Volvo are “the good guys.” They’re just trying to appeal to different markets, to sell them cars. They’re leveraging stories to capture an audience that they think might want to give them money in exchange for something.

I don’t think marketing is bad. Marketing matters in a market economy, where we have to compete with others for attention and patronage. Marketing is an action of capturing a "market” — a sphere where goods and services are exchanged for some form of payment. I’m a convinced capitalist. Capitalism has flaws, but it has lifted more people out of poverty more quickly than any other economic system.

And yet. Our capitalist market economy can twist our mammon-loving hearts in on themselves. We’re naturally inclined toward mammon—the Greek word often translated “money” in the Bible. Remember what Jesus said, “No one can serve two masters, since either he will hate one and love the other, or he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money (mammon)” (Matthew 6:24).

As with the political moment, so too with the economic moment, we can take sides instead of realizing that the entire game is rigged to begin with. As I learned long ago in The Saving Life of Christ by Major Ian Thomas, the Lord doesn’t show up to take sides. He shows up to take over.

When Joshua was near Jericho, he looked up and saw a man standing in front of him with a drawn sword in his hand. Joshua approached him and asked, “Are you for us or for our enemies?”

“Neither,” he replied. “I have now come as commander of the Lord’s army.”

Then Joshua bowed with his face to the ground in homage and asked him, “What does my lord want to say to his servant?”

The commander of the Lord’s army said to Joshua, “Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place where you are standing is holy.” And Joshua did that.

(Joshua 5:13-15).

Many appearances of the angel of the Lord are preincarnate appearances of Jesus or “christophanies.” Here the angel is clearly the Lord himself, because he brings holiness to the earth as the presence of God did with Moses (Exodus 3).

The angel’s reply to Joshua should stun us a bit. Joshua was the commander of the people of God, Israel. Yet when Joshua asks him who he’s “for,” the angel says, “Neither team.”

While the Lord does fight for his people (Ex. 14:14), ultimately the Lord’s agenda transcends the narrow categories of our own. The narrow categories of our politics and our markets.

The Lord doesn’t drive a Jaguar or a Volvo but he “rides on the clouds in his majesty” (Deut. 33:26).

In the classic movie The Princess Bride, the character of Wesley the pirate tells Buttercup the would-be princess, “Life is pain, highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.” Of course, that cynical view isn’t biblical, but the distinctions can help us.

To live is Christ, to die is gain. Anyone who says differently is probably selling something.

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