This post brought to you by...
So Independence Day I went to a minor-league baseball game. It was fun (our mascot is a Sasquatch), but I couldn’t help noticing that every time the teams switched out, some hapless fan was dragged out onto the field to compete in a poorly conceived minigame with the sole purpose of promoting some corporate sponsor. Now, I’m sure everyone who’s
( Read more... )
There are many reasons why corporations succeed, not all of which have to do with the effectiveness of advertising. They provide us with the products we use daily in order to happily function in society. They sell these products under an established brand, so we are more likely to receive a decent product from them than from, say, a guy selling a similar product off of a blanket on the street. However, due to advertising exposure, we often purchase products that we have absolutely no need for. That "slight nudging" you are talking about is something that affects enough people to give rise to totally pointless industries, especially for kids' products.
It's a well documented fact that small children respond to brands and advertising with far more zeal than adults. This fact leads companies to pour a whole lot of money into studying child psychology and child-geared advertising, since they can get a huge return on their investment. Walk down any toy store aisle and you'll see tons of shit that no kid on earth needs, but it all gets sold, because kids are really suceptible to "created wants;" if someone convinces them that every stupid Pixar tie-in product is cool, they will nag their parents until they get what they have been convinced that they want.
Here is a link to lots of experts talking about this effect. Click on "Marketing to Kids." http://www.thecorporation.com/index.cfm?page_id=314
So maybe you don't want to listen to any of these new-fangled "economic studies" or whatnot (some of which are partially putting me through college, by the way), and maybe you think that the average person can steel himself against the onslaught of advertising we are exposed to all of the time, but you have to agree that little kids are pretty vulnerable to external stimuli. We've all seen kids freak out when their parents won't buy them the new Power Rangers action figure (or whatever it is the dang whippersnappers are into nowadays). They're not rational actors (my apologies for using jargon of the hated economists) and they often can't understand when something is a totally irrational purchase. Yet, through their parents, they wield a disproportionate amount of purchasing power. So, companies, seeing the dollar sign potential, manipulate them through big, bad advertising. It's scary, and not a little fucked up.
I could write more, but I have to leave the office and nudge shy participles into the coherant clauses where they belong. Id est, I have to do my Latin homework. See you tomorrow.
Reply
Now that transcript is scary. Alright, touché. Advertising is obviously a force to be reckoned with, if you can imprint brand loyalty into young children or whatever, and yeah, probably a lot of people buy things based on irrational associations derived from ads (x drink will make you happier, x shoes will make you more powerful) - but the surfeit-of-information barrier remains. You can't imprint children with cradle-to-grave brand loyalty if competing brands are attempting to do it simultaneously, or rather, only one of them will win, which means that the other marketing campaigns have been ineffective. It's a bit of a rat race for the corporations - they have to spend a lot of money, and they end up where they were before relative to other corporations.
And even so, it's ludicrous to think that an individual who slobbers all over the Cheerios board book at age 6 months, and is repeatedly exposed to Cheerios ads on television growing up, can never break free of this mental stranglehold and decide, "You know what? I don't even like Cheerios. I'm going to fix myself some bacon." Individuals remain individuals no matter how hard you try to program them into the dutiful consumers they should be.
Reply
Reply
Leave a comment