This is one of a series of blogs aimed at raising awareness of the everyday external reality we take for granted (the matrix) and then considering how well it really works for our collective well-being, both short and long term. This week the lens is on Marketing and Advertising.
Each of our personalities includes a subconscious level that contains a number of ‘deficit needs’ - needs that remain unsatisfied in spite of our ongoing efforts to fill them. These are quite normal attributes that helped shape our unique personalities. The test of whether or not we manage them appropriately can be observed in our lifestyles. For example, the three most basic drives are self-worth (the need to feel valued), personal power (the need to feel in control of one's life), and the intellect (the need not to feel stupid).
Marketing and advertising preys on these subconscious vulnerabilities to create the illusion that buying material goods and services will somehow satisfy the deficits. For example:
- How much do you spend on cosmetics, shoes, clothes or personal grooming that is driven by the hope of greater approval and greater attractiveness? What do the contents of your wardrobe say about your need to project an image of higher than average self-worth?
- How much are you sucked in by specials, sales, deals or apparent bargains, driven by a need to demonstrate your (buying) power? Where has all the money you've apparently saved gone – into more of the same? What does your credit card bill show?
- How many gadgets have you collected in the name of novelty or promised utility (my weakness)? After the novelty wore off, what was the ongoing utility value in your daily routine? Do you actually feel smarter?
- On a larger scale, consider your car or your house as expressions of your personality. What qualities do they express publicly about you? How hard do you have to work to service the debt and the image?
Now you may be thinking that you haven't handled as many of those deficit needs as you thought – but it gets worse! The Gruen Transfer (my favourite TV show) is so named to describe a psychological manipulation that is consciously created in shops and malls. The geographical layout is purposely arranged to lead to confusion; the type of music in the background is purposely designed to cause you to lose focus. That point where you realise you've forgotten what you were looking for, is when the Gruen transfer has occurred. At that point you have been purposely dropped back into subconscious awareness where those deficit needs will cause you to make unplanned impulse purchases. It should be a criminal offence!
I love this quote by Tim Jackson, author of “Prosperity Without Growth”, which I believe provides a roadmap to our only viable economic and ecological future. “We’re being persuaded to spend money we don’t have, on things we don’t need, to create impressions that won’t last, on people we don’t care about!” Tim has a great TED talk on the subject: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/tim_jackson_s_economic_reality_check.html
So there’s one born every minute – what’s wrong with the general population being played for suckers, so long as their friends are impressed?
Well the real problem is that we can’t afford it – personally, as a society and as a planet. The economy and the ecology are in collision and both are disintegrating before our eyes. The economy in our consumer-based society is predicated on never-ending growth, which economists, the government and businesses all agree must be stimulated, nurtured and hailed as the criteria for progress. Yet the more we produce to satisfy the needs of a growing population, the more natural resources we consume and the more pollution we create. It is impossible for these two essential components of our collective well-being to continue on their current trajectories without consequences too dire to imagine.
Brand managers and advertising executives have engineered that a successful business doesn’t just manufacture goods and services, it also manufactures “wants” that otherwise would not exist. American businesses alone now spend $300 billion a year to create and manipulate consumer demand. Google made $25 billion from advertising in 2010 and Facebook made $1.86 billion. By the age of 12 years a typical child has seen over 30,000 advertisements. Consider the “mind pollution” we suffer each day with ads on radio, TV, billboards, the internet and antiquated print media.
From birth onwards we have come to accept all that advertising and marketing as normal (remember Sesame Street – brought to you by the letter ‘S’?). It is part of the fabric of the matrix that pervades our very being, causing us to assume that unending consumption equates with normal life. Eventually, life tends to show us that happiness can never be found in any “thing” external to ourselves, but not if marketers can avoid it! So, while the real problem runs deeper than marketing and advertising, marketing and advertising both exacerbates and perpetuates it.
Let's start with an ideal. Imagine that there was no marketing or advertising allowed on TV, radio, or outdoors. A few keystrokes could locate on the Internet any desired product or service, but none could be pushed unsolicited at you. Unless you actively seek particular goods or services, you should be afforded the respect of experiencing no commercial advertising in any form. (Yes, I do understand the commercial implications, but let’s not start from the existing economic model being the best or only possibility.)
- How can we tone down marketing and advertising as the first step to eliminating it completely in its current forms? Here is list of ideas you might try…
- Awareness brings choice – so consciously choose not to buy anything that is pushed at you through any unsolicited advertising.
- Encourage graffiti artists to use their questionable talents for a worthy cause – “enhancing” any outdoor advertising by covering it with their tags (but maintain heavy penalties for painting on non-advertising spaces).
- Make it a tyrannical home rule that the mute button is always pressed for all ads on TV – even 4 year olds will soon pick up the habit, they will love to exercise the power and its great training for them to get idea early that ads are put on by bad, bad people to try and trick you into giving them your money!
- Choose to watch or listen to non-commercial programs wherever possible. Train yourself to “tune out” ads – don’t listen, watch or read.
- Who doesn’t agree that ads ruin otherwise good and enjoyable movies, destroying the mood and turning them into 5 minute bytes of crap! So choose not to watch them on TV – rent a DVD instead – or even turn off the box altogether!
- Notice the Gruen Transfer happening to you when you’re shopping – then smile and say “gotcha!” Notice your internal deficit impulses, and then consciously choose not to follow them.
- Understand that there are no such things as ‘specials’! Momentarily lower prices on one item are always balanced by higher prices on the other items you are most likely to buy at the same time.
- ‘Sales’ are for the commercial benefit of the shop – not you! They are always accompanied by incentives to rush, don't think, and buy it now (Gruen again). There will always be another sale tomorrow, next week, next month, closing down, stock take, opening up, fire, Mother’s day, Easter etc.
- Don't buy on credit. Take advantage of your credit card to keep track of your expenditure, but make it a rule not to spend what you can't pay off this month. You will feel more powerful running a balanced budget than regretting that impulse buy.
- Don't ever go shopping for the sake of shopping! (This is probably harder for women than for men ;-)). If you wander around without a conscious intent, then those subconscious impulses will take over. If “retail therapy” seems to be an addiction for you then at least check with your impulses first – are you trying to avoid feeling worthless, powerless, or stupid? Will more material stuff really change that?
Marketing and Advertising plays a huge part in taking us all over the economic and ecological cliff by creating and maintaining the illusion that we will forever need more stuff that holds the promise of happiness – it’s an industry that has to go! Okay – that’s a rather optimistic wish – but we all have the power to not play the game. When enough of us point out every day that “the king has no clothes on”, the illusion will collapse and we will all be so much the better for it.
Teach your children well – they will be ones who inherit the future that we collectively create today.
Do you have any other tips for dealing with the scourge of marketing and advertising?
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