How Modern-Day Advertising Destroyed Our Culture
What Marketing and Advertising Is All About
Marketing and advertising has been carried out under the same premise and conditions for just about a century now. The mediums, the creative approaches, the distribution channels and the measurement strategies have all changed, but its core function is still the same:
Get people to think of themselves as consumers first (being a citizen, a parent, a child, or a friend all comes secondarily).
Use the power of psychology to get them to crave more stuff.
A Brief Look At How Modern-Day Marketing And Advertising Came About
The marketing and advertising known today was created due to a fundamental economic need of private business. Technological innovation of the first and second Industrial Revolutions allowed for an exponential increase in production capacity. With new machinery, more goods could be produced faster and at lower cost. But the problem was there: Who was going to buy these new goods that the society could now produce?
This is where modern day marketing and advertising was born.
The pioneers, people like Paul Mazur, Edward Bernays and Charles Kettering, realized that in order to create the demand to meet the increased supply, the culture needed to be transformed.
Our innate human characteristics as social and emotional beings needed to be leveraged in order to create the demand. Goods and services were previously promoted in only rational/functional terms, but this approach wasn’t going to work. As Paul Mazur stated, speaking about the U.S. at the time:
“We must shift America from a needs to a desires culture. People must be trained to desire, to want new things even before the old have been entirely consumed. We must shape a new mentality. Man’s desires must overshadow his needs.” — Paul Mazur, 1927
In other words, a new type of marketing and advertising needed to be created. One that created fierce dissatisfaction among consumers: Dissatisfaction with their own lives. With how they viewed themselves.
This was the method to drive consumption and purchasing. This was the method for creating a “society of wants.”And this continues to be the primary method deployed by marketing and advertising today.
We prey on people’s fears and uncertainties. We give them false hope that purchasing this or that item will allow them to achieve all they aspire to do and be, whether that be related to physical appearance, wealth, social acceptance or social status. We create all sorts of associations that are nothing short of outright lies.
It’s about creating a sense of incompleteness, of inferiority, of not fitting in, of missing out, of FOMO, and of inadequacy, feelings which can only be alleviated through purchasing of the specific product. It’s about creating false voids which can only be filled through purchasing of the products we market. It’s a brilliant tactic because it preys on the human being’s innate social nature and its fundamental needs of social acceptance.
What Has This Done To Us As A Society?
Before we move forward, we need to ask ourselves what the true impact of the marketing and advertising strategies we have put in place has been on our society as a whole. Marketing, using all of the psychological hooks right from Freud, is powerful stuff. It dictates how we as people feel about ourselves. In order to achieve its objective of greater sales, it instills feelings of inadequacy into us as people and results in a toxic culture.
In the macro sense, what is the impact of these methods?
A society characterized by:
- Low self-esteem
- Low self-confidence
These characteristics drive our obsessive consumerist society and are destructive to our sense of self and culture as a whole. And these outcomes do not even touch on the wasted human talent and monetary resources allocated to advertising ($197 Billion in 2019 in the US alone) or the environmental impacts that threaten our species as a whole.
These industries have delivered nothing less than huge costs on our society for over a century now.
They don’t create much of any (I’m being generous) innovation that solves the systemic problems facing us as a world community.
They have reduced our culture to one of hyper-consumerism, self-deprecation and ultimately, self-destruction.
They have created and subsequently intensified this devotion to consumption and “growth” that our future generations and those that come after will be paying for many times over.
Advertising is all about the green dollar bill, about getting us to buy more things that we don’t need, in most cases, with money we don’t have, cyclically. As people (not “consumers”) it’s important to not take any of these advertising messages to heart, though that is harder said than done. As the saying goes, “it’s just business.”
*last updated: October 27, 2020*
