Books/Hyperconsumption

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 consumers behavior whether or not it has any real impact in the effectiveness of their campaigns. (Surveillance Capitalism is the same, 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 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, 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.