Books/Hyperconsumption

Book cover

Subtitle: Corporate Marketing vs. the Planet

Author: Gerard Hastings

The author is a retired professor of marketing. I personally don't believe that corporate marketing is as effective as the author claims it to be.

Introduction

Marketing became necessary due to an abundance created by efficiency of manufacturing processes. Demand had to be stimulated for this increase in supply. Marketing is not just limited to advertising, but has come to dominate all aspects of the product lifecycle. There are two indicators to marketing's success in the last century - the exponential growth of corporations and the woeful state of our planet. Humans are already producing more stuff each year than the combined biomass of the planet. But there are small businesses that are not corporations. Advertisers haven't reduced people into mere consumers yet. The insane notion of perpetual growth on a finite planet needs to be questioned.

Part 1: The Corporate Marketing Machine

Let us begin by understanding the methods and tools of the corporate marketer.

Human beings depend on each other to survive. Business is a manifestation of this interdependence. Corporate monopolies create an imbalance of power in this interaction, with their psychopathic (irresponsible, manipulative, superficial, lacking in empathy, asocial and shameless) pursuit of profit. Their fiduciary responsibility is only to their shareholders. They are part of nobody's community. They use their financial power to lobby governments and evade taxes, thus getting more powerful.

Advertising originally served the purpose of businesses informing people of their goods and services (like a baker putting up a sign about fresh baked bread). In 1928, Edward Barnays, nephew of Sigmund Freud wrote "Propaganda", a book about grabbing power by manipulating public opinion. His ideas were wildly popular with corporations who applied them in their marketing campaigns. Business isn't about just satisfying needs of the people, but every whim and want, even creating new ones. Barnays said that the manipulators of public opinion become the invisible government of the country. There were books to counter this - "Silent Spring", "Small is Beautiful" and "Hidden Persuaders", but they didn't have a similar impact.

Advertising is a form of organized lying. They are lying to consumers all the time, without even bothering to hide the fact. According to the philosopher Hannah Arendt, being constantly lied to deprives us of our ability to make informed decisions leading us down the path of hyperconsumption. For the lies to be effective, advertisers need to know their consumers intimately. They are always studying consumer behavior whether or not it has any real impact in the effectiveness of their campaigns. (Surveillance Capitalism is similar, but automated and at a large scale.) Advertising has long lost its main purpose of informing the public about the offerings of a business. It is now mostly about creating want for an unnecessary thing. Incremental improvements (think Apple products) and minor differences between products are exaggerated. Many product advertisements are detached from the product being sold (cigarette and alcohol ads) and try to create an association of the brand with some kind of desirable feeling in the consumer's mind, like prestige, luxury, freedom etc. One thing that strongly resonates with me as someone whose personal computers nearing a decade old is this example from the book - "tech firms sell us computing capacity we can never begin to grasp, let alone harness". This deception takes many forms - direct advertisements, sponsored posts, product placements in movies and TV, reviews and content from brand ambassadors or influencers.

Marketers get the best returns for their efforts by targeting not the people in the most need for their product, but the ones who can be the easiest to convince and willing to pay. Customer segmentation is done because there are only so many products but an infinite diversity of people. This explains why there is an overabundance of products in rich countries while people in poorer countries struggle to have their needs met. They are not worth targeting. This also implicitly sends the message that having money justifies over-consumption. There are 4Ps in the "marketing mix" - Product, Price, Place and Promotion. It is difficult work being a consumer in a rich country when a bewildering array of products are offered in each category (not a problem in developing countries in my experience). The packaging is the silent salesman. The "buy one get one free" promotion makes us buy more than we need and even buy a product we had no intention of buying. Prices are detached from what it really costs to make the product, even ignoring the human costs of sweatshops or conflict minerals and costs to the environment. Product displays, slotting, "frequently bought together" influence consumer behavior. The brand itself has value that is distinct from the product. As a though experiment, think about what you would pay for sneakers with no logo when you are standing at the door of a sweatshop in Bangladesh. Branding drives obsolescence too. The emotional high of using the latest product wears off much quicker than the product itself. Finally, we pay for the privilege of wearing corporate brands on our bodies, while billboard operators get paid to do so.

Children are important to marketers for several reasons - they have pocket money to spend, they can influence the decisions of their parents and they are future consumers. Inculcating brand loyalty in children can provide a lifetime of profits to a corporation. A child doesn't know the difference between a TV program and an advert. Being exposed to marketing at an early age can lead to unhealthy habits involving junk food, cigarette smoking, obsession with makeup and alcohol consumption. Children groomed by marketers turn into consumers. Their beliefs and attitudes once solidified are hard to change once they are adults. Banning tobacco advertising has seen a successful reduction in teen smoking. The author expresses hope for Greta Thunberg's generation (but she doesn't want adults to be hopeful).

The rise of surveillance capitalism provided tools to marketers to gather information on their consumers at an unprecedented scale and granularity. The targeting of advertising and its delivery is automated. Our digital exhaust on the Internet is scooped up as behavioral surplus on which targeting algorithms are set loose to profile and segment consumers with the aim of showing the most relevant advertisements to them. (The author has only read Shoshana Zuboff's book on Surveillance Capitalism but not Cory Doctorow's, so he believes the lies of Big Tech on how effective their mind control machines of marketing are, while not considering their monopoly power, enabled by Reagaonomics.) A lot of free apps and websites sell data to data brokers who will then package and resell it to anyone who pays, from Big Tech to foreign governments. Recommendation algorithms are used to sell consumers similar things and also to drive them down ideological rabbit holes. The data from surveillance feeds back into the 4Ps of the marketing mix.

Etienne de la Boétie’s essay on The Politics of Obedience from the 16th century mentions 4 ways in which the elites maintain their power - bread, circuses, symbolism and paid collusion which have equivalents in corporate marketing. A gluttony of products, the entertainment industry including sports, brands and the various people who collude with corporate marketers. All of this while we pay for the privilege. Marketing works in politics as well as commerce, while the purpose is manipulation of the public opinion against their own interests and shaping it in the interests of big business. The tactics from Public Relations and Corporate Social Responsibility are also used by politicians. Cambridge Analytica has successfully used the tools and tactics of surveillance capitalists to manipulate public opinion during Brexit and in the election campaign of Donald Trump.

Since corporations are psychopaths by diagnosis, they gladly do business with fascists, try to overthrow governments that are unfriendly to their ambitions and replace them with military dictatorships - profit at any human cost. Many multi-national corporations are now richer than national governments. They are undemocratic entities accountable only to their shareholders. (My personal opinion is that the chartered corporation is an outdated 16th-century institution made in the interest of colonial powers for the exploitation of colonies, that must be recognized as a social evil and abolished by civilized societies. The biggest corporations are in the US of A and their government has made it abundantly clear to the rest of the world that they are huge supporters of settler colonialism in 2024, so this is not going to happen anytime soon.) NGOs help corporations and their billionaire plutocrat owners to launder their reputations by spending 0.1% of what they took from the people. There's usually more money spent on marketing the CSR activity of a corporation than the activity itself. This is called Cause Related Marketing. This also brings in good profits for the brand. The advertising of selfish altruism can corrupt children's understanding of morality. It's like a psychopath trying to win your over with charm.

Part 2: We Shall Overcome

Change is inevitable and the fragile charade of corporate marketing cannot last. Consumerism as a way of life on a finite planet and consumption as a substitute for democratic participation will not be accepted forever.

The corporate marketer's power over us begins to diminish when we begin to realize that we are human beings, not just consumers, though this doesn't affect their accumulated wealth and political power. The ability to escape our selfishness is what makes us human. Moral agency and critical analysis seem to be in short supply. Some consequences of overconsumption like lifestyle diseases are attributed to individual behavior and lead to victim blaming. Others like the climate crisis have perpetrators in the global north but the victims are the global poor and future generations. Solutions like "nudging" (based on fraudulent research) do not engage in reawakening our moral agency or engaging with our critical faculties, thus losing out on teachable moments. Striving with internal conflicts, the guilt and discomfort of material gains on the backs of others suffering helps us escape from the toxicity of the corporate mindset. This is the opposite of buying a product to make your problem go away. The Fairtrade movement illustrates that the rest of the goods which are not in Fairtrade are inherently unfair. Caveat emptor is not enough, think about the producer. We can look at the methods of the abolitionists of slavery in Britain for inspiration - fundraising, letter writing to political representatives, petitions, fliers, protests, public meetings and boycotts of products. The author appeals to our humanity and collective power to bring about change.

Marketing existed at a human scale before its current corporate form. The idea of social marketing can be applied to have the opposite effect of corporate marketing. To produce the maximum of well being for the minimum of consumption. The negative externalities of products should be taken into account, with some of them being limited or prohibited. Polluter pays principle helps internalize the costs. Single-use and built-in obsolescence should be replaced by repairability, reusability and recyclability. Advertising must be restricted to provable facts instead of just peddling lies and saying caveat emptor. Putting values ahead of perceived value of the product, fairness throughout the supply chain, making the healthy options cheaper and rewarding less consumption overall. Marketing regulation needs strict enforcement in all sectors. (The author provides an example that if someone in the UK wants to repeal the Factory Acts and make child labor voluntary, they would be a laughing stock. This book was written before some of the US states banned abortions and re-instituted child labor.) Small is beautiful. Citizens must support small local shops and providers over large corporations. Governments should fix tax loopholes and make corporations pay as much in taxes as small businesses do. Some examples of steps in the positive direction - Know the Origin store, Ethical Consumer magazine, Real Seeds organic farm, Fairphone. While a corporate marketer tries to extract the maximum value out of addicts and whales (their corporate PR denies this of course), a social marketer tries to get the addict to quit or a gambler control their betting. We can stop feeding the bad wolf. The Truth campaign in Florida is a successful example of successful social marketing against tobacco products. Social marketing can help us manage the transition from this unsustainable way of living, rather than fall victim to it.