Max Barry Quotes

“White coke?”
“It’s a trial product.”
“Wow, sounds cool. What does it taste like?”
“Coke,” 6 says.
“Well, yeah,” I say, “but how is it different to, say, Classic Coke?”
“It’s in a different can,” 6 says.
I wait, but 6 just looks at me. “What, that’s it?”
“No,” she says. “It will also cost twice as much.” She pours herself a Pepsi. “We’re after a more upmarket niche.”
“You really expect people to pay double for a white can?” I ask, astounded. “When it tastes exactly the same?”
6 aims a chiseled frown at me. “I didn’t say it tastes exactly the same. I said it is exactly the same.”

I’m very interested in what sort of car she’s driving because I think it will reveal some insight into her personality. After all, I don’t have a car at all, and that reveals plenty about me.

mktg case study #3: mktg shampoo
PICK A RANDOM CHEMICAL IN YOUR PRODUCT AND HEAVILY PROMOTE ITS PRESENCE. WHEN YOUR CUSTOMERS SEE “NOW WITH BENZOETHYLHYDRATES!” THEY WILL ASSUME THAT THIS IS A GOOD THING.

It’s much easier to be incomprehensible than intelligent, and most people can’t spot the difference.

mktg case study #2: mktg cola
NEVER, NEVER DISCUSS TASTE. TASTE IS 90 PERCENT PSYCHOLOGICAL AND IT DOESN’T SELL COLA; IT’S ROUGHLY A TENTH AS IMPORTANT AS IMAGE. THERE HAVE BEEN STUDIES.

I note that as in all large corporations that loudly subscribe to equal opportunity and employment based solely on skill, the receptionist is young, female and gorgeous.

To get a good job in marketing, you need to market yourself.

The first principle of marketing (okay, it’s not the first, but it doesn’t sound nearly as cool to say it’s the third) is this: Perception is reality. You see, a long time ago, some academic came up with the idea that reality doesn’t actually exist. Or at least, if it does, no one can agree what it is. Because of perception.
Perception is the filter through which we view the world, and most of the time it’s a handy thing to have: it generalizes the world so we can deduce that a man who wears an Armani suit is rich, or that a man who wears an Armani suit and keeps saying “Isn’t this some Armani suit” is a rich asshole. But perception is a faulty mechanism. Perception is unreliable and easily distracted, subject to a thousand miscues and misinformation…like marketing. If anyone found a way to actually distinguish perception from reality, the entire marketing industry would crumble into the sea overnight.

Marketing (or mktg, which is what you write when you’re taking lecture notes at two hundred words per minute) is the biggest industry in the world, and it’s invisible. It’s the planet’s largest religion, but the billions who worship it don’t know it. It’s vast, insidious and completely corrupt.
Marketing is like LA. It’s like a gorgeous, brainless model in LA. A gorgeous, brainless model on cocaine having sex drinking Perrier in LA. That’s the best way I know how to describe it.

Corporations! It's like there are these gigantic monsters living among us, and we don't mind that they're monsters because when we look at them they smile and hand us cheeseburgers. That's nuts.

I feel comfortably qualified to talk about anything, but that's a personal problem and I'm dealing with it.

When it's done with being graceful and poetic, language is meant to communicate, after all.

Look, I understand that for a lot of people, the US is superior to their country of residence in myriad ways, but I'm Australian. We have it all: the weather, the beautiful cities, the brand of football that involves neither padding yourself up like Santa Claus nor standing in a line in front of goal and covering your testicles.

Someone from the Internet Writing Workshop sent me a link to the Gender Genie, where you paste in a section of text and it uses an algorithm to detect whether the author is male or female. Or, if you’re an author, you can tell whether you’re really nailing your opposite-sex characters. I mean, nailing their dialog.

I think this is the first time I’ve altered a book based on what you guys told me. So it’s an occasion! Soon I’ll be putting up polls to choose between plots, and then it’s a short stop to accepting anonymous contributions and stapling them together while I sip margaritas on the deck of a Pacific cruise ship.