This
heresy came from a joke and a thousand smiles with a story about someone they
call “passion fruit” for his incredible ability to “tangle things up”, in
colombian slang, which can be translated as an enormous power of influence over
others.
I
took this little term to my class this week and a comment made by one of my
students sounded incredibly like
“passion fruit”: an application of the art of marketing to lead
customers to buy a product that does not necessarily add the most value, or
perhaps they do not even need. In short, the “passion fruit effect” is the
cornerstone of a consumer society ignited by the effect of modern marketing,
with all the hype.
Of course, I have nothing against marketing. I love it. I work with it. I teach it and I learn about it every day. My heresy is that the problem lies in the fact that the “passion fruit” effect is a short-term illusion, if what we are selling is just passion fruit and not a product that actually adds value. Passion fruit is sweet and enjoyable, but the cost of selling by tangling things up is the reality that people will not continue to be misled for long. So in the end, no one is in for the long haul.
And the situation gets even more
complicated when we apply the passion fruit effect to our relationships and we
think that the way to sweep someone off their feet is by “tangling things
up”. Over time, the effect wears
off and we stop adding value. This
generates empty spaces in our relationships that are eventually impossible to
bear. Our customer, in this case,
our partner, understands that you cannot keep a true relationship going based
on the “Passion fruit effect” and we eventually lose them – even though in some
cases, their body is still by our side -.
