I attended a couple of very good lectures on personal and business marketing yesterday by Jonathan Horlock of Home Finder People and sausages were given as an example: “Don’t sell the sausage, sell the sizzle!” — a variation on Elmer Wheeler’s original example which used steak.

An attendee said how he can turn these pink tubes of processed animal off-cuts into a delicious casserole using a Jamie Oliver recipe and in so doing gave an excellent example of marketing: by associating the jamieoliver.com^© brand with bangers he magically turned them into a feast.

Like a fully-grown Harry Potter, he cast a spell on us with the invocation Jamie Oliver!

And that is what marketing does: change what we think and feel and modify our behaviour by manipulation using images, associations, tokens and special words of power. We innocent mortals are influenced by these agents of change, the wizards and witches of marketing. They bend us to their will by the power of their minds, by showing us images and by whispering messages to us whenever and wherever we go.

In medieval times, such people with the power to turn milk sour, would themselves be tied to the steak and made to sizzle!