Successful marketers know that one of the most effective ways to get customers to spend money, time and energy consuming their products and services is to convince the customers that they need a particular product or service. Most often they accomplish that by either creating a need where one did not exist before, or by turning a want into a need. For example in 2011, Dove introduced a new deodorant purported to give women “softer, smoother underarms in just five days.” Hinging on the idea that women’s armpits are unattractive, the sales campaign for the product included ads portraying women joyfully cutting the sleeves off their shirts, as if they’d just been liberated from a shameful deformity and survey results asserting that armpit dysmorphia is a pervasive problem plaguing the majority of women worldwide. By pinpointing a problem that most consumers didn’t even know they had, exacerbating anxiety about the problem, and then selling the cure, Dove’s powerful marketing formula successfully creates a need where one did not exist before.
The computer and mobile phone industries have been successfully turning wants into needs for decades. People are really adamant about needing their computers and cell phones. Remember when internet access used to cost like a hundred dollars a second, when you actually figured out what “Wi-Fi” meant, or when only grown-ups carried a cell phone? I thought needs were about survival. “Yeah,” people tell me, “I know. I need them to survive.” And they’re not kidding either. Just try telling someone you’re taking his or her cell phone or computer away for the day and you’ll get one of two responses. One is, “Oh Hell no, you’re not!” The other is this unbelievably sad, scared look, that I think is best described as panic, sometimes followed by whimpering and, on occasion, cowering in a corner in the fetal position. Ok, so we need them. Why? Because we’ve been told over and over that we do, we believe that we do, and so we do.
The pervasive message that marketers spend as much as $200 to $400 billion a year on, and bombard consumers over 3,000 times a day with, is, our lives, as they exist right now, are not enough. We are not successful enough, pretty or attractive enough, or rich enough. We don’t drive the right car, support the right cause, live in the right neighborhood, or eat the right foods. We don’t smell right, don’t dress well, and we don’t belong to the right groups. Our teeth aren’t clean enough, our clothes aren’t clean enough, and our houses aren’t clean enough. We’re not efficient enough, productive enough, or well enough connected. We need to work harder, exercise harder, and play harder. We need to be better friends, better spouses, better parents, and better providers. We need $1.5 million to retire, we need to take our families on vacations, and we need to pay for our kids’ 155 different activities. We need more money, more money, and more money. And if we just had a little bit more money, more success, more status, more shoes, whiter teeth, if we just had the right product or service, our life would be nothing but sunshine and happiness, just like all of the excited, smiling people on the billboards and in the television commercials.
Our parents heard it before us, and their parents before them. Our families are surrounded by it. It’s all around us, all the time. It is a never ending, around the clock message. We are lacking, we’re not good enough, not yet. Out with our friends and colleagues, at work, even at our schools and places of worship – we are bombarded by it. And based on the figures, we’ve marketed the heck out of it, we’ve bought it, and we’ve even gone into debt for it.
MEANINGFUL CONSUMERISM 