One of the defining features of Western civilization is that we're all amateur marketers by default. Regardless of what our mother tongue is, the second language we are most exposed to is invariably Hype.

By the time a child is five years old he is probably able to sing more jingles than songs and identify more corporate logos than letters of the alphabet. No wonder, since it can be very difficult to tell where a hamburger or a toy or a movie leaves off, and where a global marketing juggernaut begins.

Consider an average day in your own life. Because the most precious commodity in our marketing-based society is Consumer Attention, the fast and furious battle for our awareness clobbers us during every waking hour.

Rather than list all the places and ways in which marketers grab our attention, it would be easier and more poignant to list the places and situations that are free of any marketing message: to wit, none.

You pretty much have to leave society and head off into nature to get away from it all, right? Wrong. The average person dressed and equipped for the great outdoors displays more corporate emblemry than a Nascar racer. If that's not enough, they're probably imprinting the earth with a shoemaker's logo with every step.

The point isn't to decry this arguably greed-warped and spiritually bankrupt situation, but rather to sharpen our own marketing skills from it. For instance, don't be fooled by the name - junk mail is a goldmine of marketing intelligentsia. Collect it. Become a student of it. Ask others to save theirs for you, especially those items that they like and dislike most.

Then, reverse engineer it.

By reverse engineering, I mean try to figure out the reasoning behind every decision. Why this envelope? Why this headline? Why this message to this recipient?

That's the great thing about marketing - there are no secrets. If it works, it's out there getting in all our faces. If it doesn't, you won't see it... at least, not twice.

Try to get in the habit of reverse engineering all the marketing messages that hit you throughout the day. Each of those messages cost someone money - they weren't taking potshots.

That's not to suggest that it's all good. Actually, you can learn as much from bad or inept marketing as from the good stuff, so don't dismiss schlock too quickly.

If marketing is the second language of the Western world, then speaking it fluently is just a matter of developing some good listening skills. As with any language, there's a science behind the art. Master the underlying structure, and all the power-packed headlines and spiffy taglines will follow.