Yes Inner Stickler! Ultimately it’s still up to the individual to decide how they spend their money and is no fault of the stores or marketing industry or whatever.
I agree, it is up to personal responsibility. I don’t fall to my knees cursing Mars Corporation if I end up buying Peanut Butter M&Ms when I hadn’t planned on it. It was my decision to buy the M&Ms, and I will enjoy them, because they are delicious. But my decision wasn’t purely because I like M&Ms, it was because I like M&Ms, and because the packaging was made for them to be noticeable, and because they were put at certain parts of the store to be more likely to catch the eye, and various other things that subtly persuaded me to buy Peanut Butter M&Ms. I don’t buy them every time I go to the store, but there are sometimes I do. If I do, it was ultimately my decision, and my fault for eating more calories than I should have.
Like I said, I don’t lose sleep over it. And I’m fortunate enough to have money to blow on impulse buys and stuff I don’t need. But I do find it annoying how we are constantly surrounded by advertising and marketing and constantly being monitored in what we buy. And I am bothered by the rampant consumerism that is constantly trying to get us to buy more and more.
I find nothing objectionable in what you say and would tend to agree. (I don’t tend to get annoyed by advertising because a lot of it is underwriting stuff I like. )
Of course you are. Other than the odd deceptive subscription tactic, no one reaches into your wallet and substitutes a pack of Whiffies for a fiver.
The issue is *why *you decide what you do, and to what degree you had any real range of choices to make. If you’re convinced that marketing has no influence on that decision, or that the influence is trivial, you are almost certainly deluding yourself.
This is a case where all the online discussion in the world is fantasy bullshit; it’s impossible to get anywhere in a venue like this, because the respondent can lie and evade and maintain self-deception until we’ve run out of electrons.
With any person, in person, who could not lie to me, I have never needed more than five minutes to prove just how deeply and thoroughly and significantly influenced they were by marketing, far beyond what they believed. I’ve done it many dozens of times with 100% results. You can do it yourself if you just spend those five minutes being absolutely self-honest and allowing the possibility that you may not be 100% self-directed.
And anyone can grow up to be President, kid. Let the grownups talk now.
You are consistently heavy on accusations and smugness and light on actual details. Put up or shut up.
I’ve given plenty of details, up against a tide of “Ain’t nobody tells me nothin’ 'bout what to do, so there! pppbbbllltttt!”
I’ve verified the self-deluded BS level of such unsupported claims enough times that I have no reason to believe someone hiding behind a username online is any different. I am just no better at nailing e-jello to the wall than anyone else.
And I will most certainly “put up,” on a national level, quite soon.
You’ll forgive me if I don’t hold my breath.
BULL and SHIT.
Malcolm Gladwell has written extensively on how we make decisions in The Tipping Point and Blink, and even he will occasionally throw up his hands and say, “shit happens.” To put it all at the feet of THE EVUL MARKETERZ is idiotic.
Case in point: the music industry. The music industry is in complete disarray compared to the late 90s/early 2000s and the reasons are many. But the biggest reason is that the Internet allowed everyone to go their own way. Marketers lost all their power and Facebook/Spotify/Pandora/iTunes/YouTube took it. Marketers can attempt to penetrate the porous online presence of the new music industry, but it’s like swimming upriver. They ain’t getting very far is what I’m saying.
And yet, overall music sales are roughly the same as they were ten years. It’s just no longer concentrated into a few albums the marketers have handpicked anymore.
If you mean you’re writing a book on this subject, I look forward to reading it (no snark). This is a subject that I find endlessly fascinating - how there is so much time and effort spent on guiding the masses, and how the masses work so hard to convince themselves that they are unique, and not sheep like everyone else. I’m guilty of it myself - I think I’m a bit more aware than other people, and a bit more tuned in to how others are trying to manipulate me, but I’m only aware of the things I’m aware of - I have no idea how many unseen influences work on me.
Your problem is that you think the people influencing you are your enemy. That they are somehow causing you harm by enticing you to purchase their product.
Is a flower trying to hurt bees by displaying bee-friendly colors or scents? A store trying to attract your business by giving you more of what you want (than another store) is not inherently harmful to you.
Granted, a Pitcher Plant attracting a fly is not trying to help the fly, and one must always be aware of scams and bad deals.
I think most stores understand that being the “go to” place for shopping is much more profitable than figuring out a way to scam your stupid customers. They may fail miserably at enticing customers with positive shopping experiences, but annoying you is not the primary goal.
Maybe that’s where we’re all differing; I don’t see being manipulated to make more profits for anybody as a net good in the world.
what is this i don’t even
You understand that a company has to make money right? They don’t run on hope and friendship. Unless you’re advocating for some sort of cap on profit percentages, what exactly, do you want to be done about companies making more profits?
A cap on profits? Sure, why not? Why do people need more money than they can possibly spend?
Look, if you go into Tim Hortons for a good cup of coffee and a tasty donut at a fair price, you’ve just been manipulated by the corporate execs who made a decision to serve good coffee and tasty donuts at a fair price.
They don’t pay for good coffee because they love you, it’s because it encourages you to buy their coffee instead of going somewhere else. To get there, you probably drive past some crappy deli that sells burnt coffee and stale donuts, but you don’t go there. Some Tim Horton’s VP made the pitch to keep selling good coffee and tasty donuts on the back of people like you who he assumed could be “manipulated” into choosing Tim’s instead of Crappy Deli.
Fuck you you mealy-mouthed little fucking worthless turd. Just because hardly anyone is buying your little conspiracy theory nonsense doesn’t make me the ‘kid’. I find it pretty funny that Sam Lowry has said pretty much the same thing that Inner Stickler, Justin Bailey and I have said and you agree with him but not the rest.
Exactly. Believing that’s “manipulation” is tin-foil hat nuttery at its finest.
Addressing a lot of the above without wasting space on quotes; unintendedly turned into the long form.
Yes, I think it does do harm - to individuals, families, communities and nations - to entice people into buying things they don’t really need and would not have bought without the enticement. This goes far beyond luring someone to buy one brand of ketchup or car over another; it has to do more with getting people to spend every loose dollar on some goddamned thing - anything, useful or not, well-made or trash, even something invented by the marketing department with no better purpose except to extract dollars. We’ve built a vastly overheated global economy shipping shit from one corner to another, for no purpose except to line the pockets of those who lay awake nights inventing new niches money can be extracted from.
I think that anyone who dismisses this concept because they believe all judgment and responsibility is 100% on the individual buyer is wrong (and probably self-deluded on the point). It is not only some stereotypical “stupid shopper” who is manipulated in this way. We have been generationally brainwashed into perceiving the world the way the marketing world wants us to see it; making poor choices is the best most of us can do. Even what the smug reader of Consumer Reports will trumpet as a smart, smart buy can get pretty stupid-looking if you take one more step back. (Have you ever noticed that CR and most other “consumer advocates” never, ever take the position that you should not buy ANY product?)
I will make it crystal clear that I am not anti-capitalist; I am not anti-wealth; I am not anti-business; I am not even anti-advertising in any large sense. I don’t advocate trying to legislate marketing practices, especially in any form of “outlawing advertising” or setting profit caps or anything of the kind. I don’t espouse minimalism, living small, or anything on a “live green” platform. I don’t go out of my way to make value judgments about personal acquisitions (but will never stop asking variations of “why” about them).
I am dead-set against companies and entire industries that exist only to feed on a paying population, though, and the collective mindset that people exist to buy shit - all the shit they can possibly earn, borrow or steal money to buy, their whole lives long, and that the amount of shit you buy in any way defines you as a person. And I am deeply appalled at the degree to which people, even - and perhaps especially - those who smugly claim they are free souls, directed and influenced by no one, buy into this concept as their foundational lifestyle.
** Give me five minutes of honest thought with as much self-deception set aside as you can manage, and think this through: What aspects of your life do not stand on a foundation of earning as much as you can to acquire as much as you can over the span of your life? And who told you that was a valid basis for a life, and why?**
Let me qualify those questions: I’m not asking why you’re not all Harvard MDs. The question is “within the range of options you’ve had in your life” and with the overall arc of your life in mind, not whatever you’re fucking around doing at 23. The big picture of your life and circumstances. You need not post your answers; they’re for you. I’m not looking for validation. May you discover something useful about yourself and the world around you.
This is a nearly impossible venue to have a meaningful discussion in, because of the limits of conversation and the ability to hide behind anonymity. But I’ll add to my former comments about convincing people in person: every single one of them came to the same conclusion, not specifically prompted by me: We’ve been conned, people. Not conned into buying Pepsodent or Coors or a Chevy, but conned into spending our lives away. Even the smartest of us is not likely to have escaped; some are just bigger winners in the casino.
You want to call bullshit on me? Fine. It’s not likely you’re going to stand very high on the scale of people who have called me out and ended up on my side.
I may or may not have much more to say in this thread. I am busy with more practical and focused efforts along these lines, and while I enjoy engaging Dopers with the arguments, I have a much bigger audience to address, and have plans to do so shortly.
You called yourself kid, kid. Maybe you’ll want to switch to a grownup user name.
One of the things I haven’t bothered to respond to is this kind of simplistic straw man argument. You’re free to go back through my posts and see where I said choosing one brand over another is some kind of manipulation or a conspiracy. One of you makes such a dippy claim, then another one pipes up to agree that it’s nonsense.
Picking one brand of ice cream over another, or any such choice, barely registers on the scale of effect I’m actually talking about. When you can grasp that I’m not talking about what brand of beer you have in your fridge or whether or not you ran out to buy something you saw advertised on TV, you might get what I actually am saying.
Or not. I certainly don’t give a shit if you do.
Care to explain why not?