It’s OK to enjoy marketing.

Working in Washington DC you can easily develop a sort of dour attitude about the seemingly “superficial” delights of shopping.

Let’s be honest: We pride ourselves on being “policy” people, wonks. There are a lot of PhDs, JDs, MBAs, MDs, and pretty much every other acronym you can think of around here. We live to work hard, study up, and maybe go hiking on the weekend.

As a result, again let’s just face it, the folks around here are not the best-dressed people in the country. Maybe the clothes themselves are expensive, but they tend to be highly utilitarian, very serious, and we don’t like frivolous people. To illustrate I snapped the pic below (cropped the faces out so as not to embarrass anyone).

Contrast this image with…well pretty much any random person in New York.

In New York, looking seriously good is nothing less than a requirement. (Photo by Helen Alfvegren via Flickr/Creative Commons) And I think you could say the same about places like Miami or LA as well.

…and, back to DC:

Living here for so long I’ve gotten out of touch with my passion for fashion. But that part of me is slowly coming back again.

I think it’s because I had a little bit of time off recently, and spent it not writing constantly, but hanging around at the mall. And watching a few of the latest episodes of Shark Tank–the one show my entire family seems to like.

Doing this I realized that not everything in life has to be so serious. We marketers sometimes put our own profession down….I’m not sure why that is, maybe some of us have seen unethical stuff or realized that the world has much bigger problems than launching a new brand of skateboards.

I feel a stirring in me. I’m going back to a time of my youth that was full of excitement, when I literally papered the walls of my room with tear-outs from the pages of Vogue.

“All good things in moderation,” they say.

Enjoy your life. Enjoy yourself, whatever your passion may be.

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All opinions my own. Photo by Oleksii Leonov via Flickr (Creative Commons)

– By Dannielle Blumenthal, Ph.D.

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