One cold December evening when I was twenty-two years old, I lined up outside for almost an hour to get into an exclusive club in Montreal. The gatekeeper allowed the beautiful people in and passed over the others. I would still be waiting if I had not pretended to be part of a group that had been waived in.
When I finally got in, I found out that it was all bullshit. The club was half empty. They had created a long line to give the impression that the club was difficult to get into. We lemmings, wanting to hang out with the cool kids, lined up get in. That is how marketing works. First you create an itch, and then you offer a product or service to scratch it.
If the truth be known, that club in Montreal was nothing special. The music and lighting were not appreciably different than at the other clubs, and the cover charge and the drinks were overpriced.
Which brings me to some advertisements for dating sites for seniors which keep popping up in the various news feeds that I read. Apparently, there are many absolutely stunning twenty-something models with outstanding attributes (likely enhanced by AI) who have their romantic hearts set on meeting senior men like me.
This type of advertising must work, or why else would someone be spending money trying to lure in gullible men like me? But why does it work? Are seventy-somethings really stupid enough to believe that we have what it takes to live out our golden years with young women who would not have even looked at us when we were their age and had hair? Aren’t we supposed to be smart by the time that we become old?
The answer must be that it only takes a bit of a nudge to get people to believe that they have a need and that it can be fulfilled with the right product. And people can be smart, or at least educated, and still fall for it.
In the legal profession, law schools, financially supported by Big Law, paint a picture of Big Law being the club where the really successful lawyers hang out. Students learn that they need to be accepted into that world in order for prestige, influence and money to follow. They line up for admission.
Maybe starting your career at the Big Law firms is better than starting it elsewhere, and maybe it is not. But for the tens of thousands of dollars that law students pay every year for law school, shouldn’t they be entitled to receive an unbiased education about the various options open to them?
It is a fairly commonly held view that law schools fail their students by not teaching them how to practice law. I would suggest that they also fail them by not providing them with unbiased information about where to practice law. Why don’t they? As an older, wiser, lawyer once taught me, “if things do not make sense to you, just follow the money.”
This article was originally published by Law360 Canada, part of LexisNexis Canada Inc.