I drink bottled water because I grew up on NYC tap and the water on tap in other places tastes yucky to me.
I don’t mind if you believe that I’m a sheep. People who don’t know me can believe anything.
Perversely, this thread reminded me to check how long until I can upgrade my cell phone at a discount. Got some quality drooling on smartphones in, too.
There’s a point where you have to accept that you cut down the fraud to as little as possible and let people be as rational or irrational as they desire. Yeah, the ecological concerns about overconsumption are there (and I still maintain the first guy who figures out a process to mine and refine metals/plastics from landfills is gonna make a trillion bucks) but trying to tie it to advertising is just asinine.
…has become an ideologically fraught phrase. As commonly used today, it carries the unstated premise that only individuals need be responsible for their actions, i.e., that groups (typically political entities or for-profit enterprises) need not be.
If you use “PR” in a discussion, rather than some other phrase describing the same concept, there’s an excellent chance you either intend the unstated premise or don’t care if people read it in. In the case of manufactured demand, that implies that all of the responsibility for falling for misleading advertising lies with the consumer, and that the advertiser is blameless in misleading to whatever degree is legalistically allowed.
The part you seem to be missing is that no one is being a manipulative bitch. You’re manufacturing that boogeyman all by yourself. It’s like you just came to a party and the host offered you a beer and you yell “Stop being a manipulative bitch!”
You look like a tool.
Indeed. The first thing that came to my mind when I read Richard Parker’s post was [thread=203185]this[/thread].
OK - I’ll come right out and say it.
All of the responsibility for falling for misleading advertising lies with the consumer, and the advertiser is blameless in misleading to whatever degree is legalistically allowed.
The important distinction here is that we already have laws in place barring outright lies about a products features. As I said earlier, if you were lied to about the design attributes of a product you may and should take action.
If you just didn’t get the warm fuzzy feeling you were after - your damn problem.
You are more than welcome to move into the high north into the bush and become a hermit.
There’s a lot of give and take in being a part of our species. If you want to participate in human society you have to put up with having other human being around you. Those human beings will want to communicate with each other, use the same sidewalks as you, use the same roads, visit the same attractions. Sorry if you don’t like them, but that’s life. If you want the good things about what other people offer you, ya gotta take the bad.
If you don’t want to take your kids to McDonald’s, don’t. I see to have no problem avoiding it.
How is McDonald’s lying to anyone? They put out ads saying that they sell hamburgers and other comestibles. My understanding is that their stores do, in fact, sell the very foods they advertise, for the prices advertised. Their ads further suggest that McDonald’s has fast and friendly service, and in my experience that is in fact the case. They also advertise that kids will have fun there, and on the occasions we do treat my daughter to Mcdonald’s she seems to really enjoy it. So what’s the problem?
History gives us plenty of big-scale advertising for products that, despite all the advertising, tanked massively. The Ford Edsel car is a good example. That phenomenon alone should tell you that companies cannot always manufacture demand. But they can awaken a need that would otherwise have been dormant, and happily dormant.
The fact the beer is free in your example makes a wee bit o difference here ya know…
I think any actual student of marketing, or for that matter any dumb kook off the street who took one business class, would be very suprised to know that marketers can actually create “fake demand” by manipulating people’s emotions.
Marketing is a desperate attempt to keep up with what people who do not know what they want, could not tell if they did, and would not tell you if they could, actually want.
And Advterising is its slutty younger sister who whores out her body because her daddy abused her when she was 6 and she’s never believed she has any self-worth since.
You don’t need antiperspirant at all, for that matter.
That’s a good way of putting it - “happily dormant.” Manufactured demand does indeed create a need (in some cases) or bring out a need that was lying happily dormant; I’m not disputing that. My problem is having someone else manipulate me for more profit, bringing out needs that their product will fill (for a price), that I was perfectly happy not having.
Oh, those of you who keep trying to drag lying in advertising into this thread, go start your own thread; I don’t know why you’re bringing that into this thread. This thread is about advertisers and marketers creating a need and then “fulfilling” that need in the buying public and my own personal hatred of it. I think it’s unethical and I resent it, but I don’t think they actually lie to us while doing it.
Those of you who have a good reason for buying bottle water, good for you! You’ve actually thought about your purchases, instead of just doing it because everyone else is doing it! And yes, I have a house full of stuff, too - somewhere on the first page, I said I wasn’t a paragon of virtue. I am trying to do better, though - are you?
True enough.
A whole genre of entertainment was “created” to sell stuff us we don’t need (well technically “better” stuff).
Soap Operas.
The example you gave (other than bottled water), however, is the sparkly deodorant. Sparkly deodorant isn’t going to increase deodorant sales overall, and a lot of marketing doesn’t attempt do that. What it does is differentiates one particular deodorant from the others, in order to convince you to buy that brand. Product positioning, which is basically what you are complaining about, is in large part about filling niches in the market in order to “steal” market share away from other brands, not necessarily about increasing usage of the category as a whole. Although that’s nice, too, from an economic perspective. Every need or want people have and act upon translates to dollars in the economy and jobs that support people.
There’s a handy term that describes what you guys are talking about, coined by Schnaiberg and Gould (in, oh, the early 80’s or so): the treadmill of production. It very much ties into, and is basically supported by, the tragedy of the commons.
The trouble is that the urge to acquire is much stronger on a social level than the appreciation of the environmental consequences (and the inevitable human consequences brought on by the fact that humans aren’t really exempt from assaults on the ecology of the planet). We simply use stuff up and throw away the remainder, assuming that it’s really not our problem.
Granted, Schnaiberg was an avowed radical, preaching about this stuff at the dawn of the Reagan era, but I think he was really on to something.
The only way I’ve been able to deal with it is to opt out. We make a conscious effort to avoid the consumerist bullshit, and live fairly lightly.
The endgame is still pretty bleak. There will never be enough people who live like this to make any difference, and if there were, we’d have outgrown the consumerist tendency altogether (which obviously is never going to happen).
Essentially, then, that leaves us with technology. We’d better hope that consumerism leads to enough technological cleverness to deal with these problems. Unfortunately, technology lags decades behind the exponentially-expanding problem, and can basically (barring a vast leap forward which will change everything) never catch up. That’s one of the premises behind another fairly radical book, Beyond the Limits.
Yes, I very much believe in this idea, and have spent most of my adult life coming to terms with the fact that the world my children will inherit will be fundamentally worse, less interesting, less biologically diverse, and more fragile than the one we live in now.
The idea that consumerism and the attendant wastefulness will always expand faster than technology is my main criticism of the market as the be-all, end-all solution to human problems, btw, but that’s a whole 'nuther thread.
And the flip side of that is every dollar spent on “trivial” shit is a dollar that can’t be spend on “non trivial” shit.
Of course how to exactly define trivial shit vs non trivial shit is a non trivial task for even the gods, but anybody who doesnt believe that such a spectrum even exists lives in a fantasy black/white world IMO.
Of course, it does. Probably the vast majority of the stuff we buy falls more on the “trivial” side than the “non-trivial” side. But that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t all help the economy chug along. Deciding what my personal budget should be in terms of what I should spend my money on vs. what I want to spend my money on is for me to figure out. The Economy doesn’t care what I spend it on, it just wants me to spend it.
That seems exceptionally unlikely to me. We live a reasonably comfortable lifestyle and even a quick look through my expenditures suggests that trivial stuff is a small part of our budget. Twenty percent of my paycheck supports the government, ten percent is saved, about twenty percent pays for my house, I spend about seven percent on the vehicle I need to do my job, and throwing in food, heat, electricity - sorry, there’s not a lot of trivial shit in there. And I make pretty good money.
I don’t actually know any grown adults who spend most of their money on bullshit. They spend their money on food, clothing, shelter, utilities, daycare, and that sort of thing.
Oh, you’re right. I was kind of thinking about expenditures after the very basic necessities like housing, utilities, food. My assumption is that sparkly deodorant, for the majority of people, comes after that stuff. Like when you go to Target…how much of that stuff is a need vs. a want?
One good example of a necessity that probably gets overlooked in favor of a fancy cell phone is health insurance, especially for younger people. So, I’m not going to say that the right or smartest choices are always made. But that doesn’t make it the marketers’ fault.