The free market does deliver 9ultimately) what people want to buy-but does it deliver good quality? take American cities: usually, cities deliver some level of services to their inhabitants; but in the USA, it seems that life in the city involves crowded streets, ugly commercial developments, and high costs. Is that what people want? No, but that is what get delivered. same with Detroit-it seeks to dictate the kind of cars that you can drive-yet with gasoline nearing $4.00/gallon, it is still producing huge SUVs and trucks with 8 cylinder engines.
Why are these paradoxes around?
Oh I don’t think that’s true; for better or for worse, I think one view is that terrorism is encouraged by hatred of what is perceived as an imposition of another culture on the culture that those terrorists prefer. I’d be surprised to learn that there are no efforts by the State Department or whatever to Americanize parts of the world for security reasons to the greatest commercial extent possible.
That’s pretty frickin’ terrifying. Fortunately for me, I couldn’t care less about the human race but I think you have a very strong point.
No, we might not be forcing McDonalds onto people via gunpoint but we are marketing western goods and the “western lifestyle” to people in a sophisticated and unfair way. The western world has learned to live with marketing of ever increasing sophistication and has developed a certain form of “tolerance” to it which has forced marketers to engage in increasingly clever techniques which tap into our deeper desires. “Primitive” societies have never been exposed to this form of marketing before and are far more vunerable to western style marketing pitches.
Similar to how native americans were vulnerable to old world diseases, the developing world now is being subjected to forces which could act as a highly effective way of killing off existing culture. In this case, it would make sense to discuss whether some form of “quarantine” would be the right or effective thing to do.
Visiting China over the last few years, it’s become evident that many middle to upper class Chinese suffer from a form of materialism and social peacocking that shames even the most status conscious American.
Can something like this be stopped? I’m pessimistic. The Chinese companies aren’t stupid and they’re rapidly reaching parity with western firms in the sophistication of their marketing (although some Chinese ads are still hilariously primitive from a western standpoint). Once the idea is out there, it’s hard to get it back into the bottle. Are the Chinese consumers becoming more discerning and sceptical of marketing claims? Probably not fast enough. But I think it does mean that we need to have genuine debate on this at a level above “It’s a free market so Nyeer!”
What would be an example of this apparent ultrapotent marketing for which a certain tolerance needs to be slowly developed before exposure can be considered safe?
I’m not a marketing expert but during the 50’s to 70’s, a large part of marketing was convincing people that your product was objectively better than the competitors (think pepsi challenge). During the 90’s, marketing largely shifted towards brand marketing which focused on convincing you that you were a type of person if you bought this product (think the pepsi generation).
Additionally, a large part of the institutional structure we’ve built around resisting marketing is still absent from the developing world. We have a reasonably efficient information transfer system that allows people to gain access to information that inures us to marketing. Everything from blogs that tell us baking soda is just as effective for getting out red wine stains to books like No Logo and documentaries like Supersize me are all an anti-consumerist movement which you don’t even realise is there until you’re in a culture where it’s absent. In the US, everyone “knows” that McDonalds uses poor quality meat and everyone “knows” that clothing makers run sweatshops with deplorable working conditions. Whether these are true or not is irrelevant but they serve as a valuable counteracting force against a hegemonic corporate discourse.
This is something that’s very hard to express unless you truly immerse yourself in a foreign, “primitive” culture and see how relentingly gullible the majority of those people are to even the most trivial of marketing claims.
I’m not sure if this fits the bill, but how about that thing where Nestlé aggressively marketed formula baby milk in developing countries.
It’s a terrible example. Everything Nestle said was perfectly valid. They only neglected or overlooked that many of these regions don’t have access to clean water. The problem wasn’t the marketing, which was perfectly sound. The problem was that people don’t follow the directions on the freakin’ can. They didn’t bpoild the water before they made up the formula.
IOW nothing to do with agressive marketing, which worked because the product was good, and everyhting to do with an illiterate and ignorant populace. Ignorance and ill education are’nt overcome with exposure to marketing.
WHat always puzzles me is that when a Chinese opens a restaurant in the US that’s a wonderful exmaple of cultural diveristy. When an American opens a restaurant in China that’s cultural imperialism. When Bhuddism was rapidly growing in the US that was a wonderufl exampe of the benefits of the “Global Village”, when Christianity is growing in Thailand that’s cultural imperialism.
That’s hardly just something about which you can shrug and say ‘oops!’ though, is it?
And even so, doesn’t that actually make it a rather good example of what Indistinguishable asked for: “marketing for which a certain tolerance needs to be slowly developed before exposure can be considered safe”
Actually, I don’t believe that’s true - the marketing is alleged to have promoted their products as superior to breast milk, which it isn’t.
That would be the instructions that were missing from the can, or printed in an inappropriate language for the region?
Re marketing having a more powerful effect on other nations:
I can attest that when I was in Russia after the fall of the soviet union when all the foreign brands came in, the marketing really did have a powerful effect. In america we just ignore it because we’re so used to it. Thing is that modern marketing taps into our instincts for art and culture. It tries to make products “cool” the way people think about fashion or other trends. Marketing employs a lot of art itself, of course, to leverage those instincts. When you unload all that advanced graphic design, choreographed tv ads, et c. on a public who’s not used to art on such a level, it really hits those instincts powerfully.
It’s not that foreign brands are better. It’s not “the market at work delivering to people what they want.” It’s just that the marketing machine guns cut down everything in their path. The only way for a local to compete is to quickly aquire all those brain-manipulation techniques (which, in many places, they do to some extent. but not in all and not as well).
Economic conservatives like to pretend human psychology doesn’t matter. They do this only because it simplifies their theories a hundred fold. But they’re so wrong that it’s not even funny.
This is hardly unique to societies influenced by cultural imperialism. Similar comments could be made about the school system in the US- is it really a good thing to have long summer vacations and high school students getting out of school at 2pm in this day and age of working parents?
But how could we do that? It’s not easy to keep cultural developments secret, even ones like the atomic bomb. What chance do we have of keeping something like fast food or marketing, which is a part of most people’s lives, secret? It’s not just a matter of keeping our companies out of other countries, either- the people in those countries can see what the fast food companies are doing in our country, and emulate that in their own.
Even if we could do it, how do we do it without sending the message “You’re too primitive or unsophisticated to handle our marketing techniques/fast food/whatever” That sort of message would probably make aspects of our culture more attractive, not less, to the people whose cultures we’re trying to protect. And it really is hard to see how we could implement some kind of cultural quarantine without sending that message…
This looks like a job for that anti-consumerist movement…
So what? If those ads convince people that new products are better than their old products, then why is that bad? And how attached were people to their old products if all it took was “advanced graphic design” to peel them away?
So the only reason Russians bought Western goods after the Cold War ended was because of “brain-manipulation techniques”? I didn’t realize it was so easy to sway unsophisticated foreigners. Perhaps you should go to Congress and tell them that we don’t need to fight the war in Iraq anymore. If we just put these ad geniuses with their brain-manipulation techniques in charge they can use their advanced graphic design, choreographed tv ads, etc., on the Iraqis and they will succumb to our will.
Show me any evidence that economic conservatives have ever pretended human psychology doesn’t matter. If you have spent any time around free market economists (a few of my friends fall into this category) you’d know that they are quite interested in human psychology.