🦋 The Hard Sell
A story idea (or, well, a character idea -- nothing happening in the story, yet) that developed in China as I interacted with vendors at the Shanghai textile market. I was not really there to buy anything, just keeping Ellen and Sylvia company in their hunt for silk... So the idea is, there's this character, a sexually/interpersonally-frustrated American businessman who spends time in China working for his company. Not really sure of the details of this, possibly I would model him on a British expatriate we met in Suzhou who had lived there for several years doing marketing for a British telecommunications firm. I think the character's name is Morris Babel, just because I was reading 100 Years of Solitude recently and thinking what a great character name that would be, and it seems to work for this character. Babel's business does not involve textiles but he develops the kink of hanging around the fabric and clothing markets having people sell to him -- the salespeople, who are generally attractive young women, make eye contact, greet him, ask him to look at their wares, and if he pauses to take a look, aggressively market the merchandise, pulling him in and connecting with him, or creating the appearance of a connection. Babel finds this addictive and returns daily to the markets, buying clothing and fabric and trinkets he does not have any use for in exchange for this experience of feeling wanted. It seemed to me at the market like this form of direct personal marketing was the primitive form of the advertising industry I have been exposed to all my life in America, probably (almost certainly) more effective on a per-exposure basis than mass media advertising but of course much less efficient in terms of money, since labor is involved in each exposure.
posted morning of Sunday, April 24th, 2011
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