"In order to make growth happen, we encourage more & more consumption through advertising, while actively promoting inequality."- skidelsky
— Izabella Kaminska (@izakaminska) May 24, 2013
Advertising makes us buy stuff goes the argument. There’s
even a name for it; “false demand”
A large number of folks are basically broke today because of the false demand created by commercial advertising. Using monies gathered from bad credit, lousy mortgage loans and lack of savings, they went out to the market place and bought tons of stuff that they didn’t really need, really want, to satisfy the false demand created by the advertisers in this country.
This all sounds right doesn’t it? Advertising is all
about making us buy stuff – more advertising sort of forces us into buying
things that we don’t need.
The problem is that quite simply this
argument is untrue.
“The null hypothesis that advertising does not cause consumption cannot be rejected, but some evidence that consumption may cause advertising is presented.”
Far from advertising being a cause of our consumer
society, it is rather a symptom of said society. The research above is general –
looking at aggregate advertising expenditure. If we take it down to the
specific product level – here for booze and fags:
In an empirical application to data for the alcoholic drinks and tobacco markets in the United Kingdom, it is concluded that aggregate advertising appears to have had little or no effect upon product demand in this sector over the past three decades.
Yet again there is no evidence that advertising creates
new demand. Indeed, if you were to sneak into the hallowed Mad-Men halls of the
advertising fraternity, you’ll discover that they’ve known this for years.
Advertising assumes a static market and seeks to maximise share for the product
within that market.
If you think about this for a minute, it makes sense. Why
should I spend my client’s scarce cash on making the market bigger – promoting sausages
rather than Fred’s Grand Yorkshire Sausage, The Champion on Your Plate?
I find it rather odd that otherwise intelligent people
don’t take the trouble to understand the basics of something that is both ubiquitous
and also the subject of their opprobrium. I wrote this a while ago when
pop-philosopher Alain de Botton has an ill-informed go at advertising:
Mr de Botton falls into a very familiar trap when talking about advertising – that its messages are somehow different from the millions of other messages we receive, process and respond to in our lives. And our philosopher goes further to suggest some kind of balancing of advertising – doubtless under the control of Platonic Philosopher Kings or maybe just the vanguard of the ‘general will’.Advertising messages are mere communications – of course they seek to nudge us, at least insofar as their objective is to affect our behaviour. Most commonly the purpose of advertising is not to sell you something but to persuade you to carry on buying the thing you’re already buying. The promotion of brand loyalty – the core purpose of much advertising – is, if anything, anti-nudge.
To take one example, you want to have the time available
to you throughout the day and there’s a handy little invention called the
wristwatch. You don’t go in search of buying that watch because of the shiny
Omega advertisement on the back page of your magazine. Nor does your search
commence because Rolex sponsor the clocks at Wimbledon. Your demand – ‘I want a
new watch’ – isn’t created by advertising but the choice of which particular
watch you buy may indeed be shaped by those adverts.
The point about the advertising is that, when I think of
a watch, I think of a particular brand (more usually a set of brands). That is
why we advertise. And it doesn’t matter whether it’s fast food, cars, shoes or
jewellery, advertising is always about brand equity – about making sure that
your brand is in the consumer’s mind when she is in the market to buy that
product.
The quote at the top is straight from the Naomi Klein playbook. It may be the case that our avarice is the root of our economic problems (for the record, I think this is nonsense) but rather than ask about that avarice what we do is shoot the messenger. Many years ago, I was told by the boss of an advertising agency that advertising was a mirror held up to society. And if we don't like what we see then the problem is with society not with advertising.
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