Archive for March, 2008
Monday, March 31st, 2008
Marketers: Liars Who Lie About Lying
Deception is the very ether of big business marketing. As Gregory S. Carpenter and Rashi Glazer reported in their award-winning Journal of Marketing Research article, “Meaningful Brands from Meaningless Differentiation: The Dependence on Irrelevant Attributes”:
[M]any brands…successfully differentiate on an attribute that appears valuable but, on closer examination, is irrelevant to creating the implied benefit.
For example, Procter & Gamble differentiates instant Folger’s coffee by its “flaked coffee crystals” created through a “unique, patented process,” implying (but not stating) in its advertising that flaked coffee crystals improve the taste of coffee. In fact, the shape of the coffee particle is relevant for ground coffee (greater surface area exposed during brewing extracts more flavor), but it is irrelevant for instant coffee: The crystal simply dissolves, so its surface area does not affect flavor.
Similarly, Alberto Culver differentiates its Alberto Natural Silk Shampoo by including silk in the shampoo, and advertising it with the slogan “We put silk in a bottle” to suggest a user’s hair will be silky. However, a company spokesman conceded that silk “doesn’t really do anything for hair” (Adweek 1986).
Consumers apparently value these differentiating attributes even though they are, in one sense, irrelevant.
Although they claimed in their article to find such results “disquieting,” Carpenter and Glazer proceeded to
propose a set of hypotheses about when consumers will value this additional attribute, and tests in two experiments support our explanation.
Thus, we suggest that differentiation based on a unique, distinguishing, but irrelevant attribute, through the consumer inference process, can create a relevant and valuable perceived difference, leading to a meaningfully differentiated brand.
“A meaningfully differentiated brand,” is, of course, marketing success — a profitable stream of new, fraud-based product sales.
The struggle to discover new ways of deceiving buyers, of course, continues. Intensification, being the royal road to “more for ourselves,” is the only thing overclasses know how to do, in good times and bad.
But do practitioners often admit the evil nature of their own labors? They most certainly do not, even in the face of the most blatantly Orwellian tactics.
Consider the story conveyed by reporter Stuart Elliott in today’s New York Times:
NEVER mind brainstorms. These days, Madison Avenue is all about brain waves.
That may be overstated, but it is no exaggeration that agencies and advertisers are growing more interested in neuroscience in their never-ending efforts to improve effectiveness.
The ardor of the ad business to adopt the technical tools of biometrics — measuring brain waves, galvanic skin response, eye movements, pulse rates and the like — is increasing as consumer spending, the engine of the American economy, slows.
In other words, in hard times ads must work harder to move the merchandise.
“Instead of hypotheses about what people think and feel, you actually see what they think and feel,” said Joel Kades, vice president for strategic planning and consumer insight at Virgin Mobile USA in Warren, N.J.
“I’m not such a huge fan of ad testing,” he added, but measuring biological responses is “absolutely useful.”
After explaining some of the techniques already being used in major corporate marketing campaigns, Elliott raises the topic of criticism:
Some consumer advocates question the role of biometrics in ad research. They worry that blending “Weird Science” with “Mad Men” will give marketers an unfair advantage over consumers.
As usual, this prompts the hoary old “we’re only collecting votes” fib from the architects of the new tools for spying on sub-conscious response mechanisms:
“The role of neuromarketing is to understand how people feel and react,” Ms. Moses said. “It in no way sets out to meddle with normal, natural response mechanisms.”
Yes, sure, right. Big businesses are spending millions studying people’s brains, pupils, and sweat glands only for reasons of pure science?
[Moses'] opinion was echoed by Robert E. Knight, the director of the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at the University of California, Berkeley, who is also the chief science adviser at NeuroFocus.
“We’re not trying to predict an individual’s thoughts and actions and we’re not trying to input messages,” Dr. Knight said.
Who in the world could possibly believe that? It is simply and obviously a huge lie.
And these lying liars who lie about lying are key employees of the “entrepreneurs” we continue to permit to boss our society…
Saturday, March 29th, 2008
The Real War
The real aim of the United States’ illegal Iraq Invasion is to implant a puppet government in Iraq that privatizes Iraq’s oil infrastructure and “invites” the US to exercise special control over it via “permanent” military bases and other arrangements. White house “officials” have recently admitted this to The New York Times.
Well, to help you cut through the latest cover story in the marketing of the war, you have to read this marvelous piece:
http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/80580/
Friday, March 28th, 2008
Here Comes RFID Spying…
The Washington State Legislature was the site this week of yet another major corporate victory. State Rep. Jeff Morris (D) had introduced HB 1031, which proposed to require businesses wishing to track people’s movements via the RFID (radio frequency identification) chips embedded in places like cell phones and store “loyalty” cards to first obtain “opt-in” permission.
Such RFID “skimming” — which is already being practiced, by the way — allows corporate marketers not only to track and time a person’s precise movements through retail (and other) environments, but also, via the data associated with RFID chips, to connect the knowledge of movements with large amounts of detailed, individually-identifiable demographic and financial information.
This kind of knowledge is immensely valuable in the big business marketing process, which is neither more nor less than the extension of Frederick Winslow Taylor’s “scientific management” principles into the effort to profitably control “consumer behavior.”
Well friends, guess what happened when Rep. Morris’ bill hit the floor in Olympia?
That’s right: The big boys came out to deliver their message. The bill passed, but, as passed, it only pertains to “skimming” by individual identity thieves. The new law “makes it a Class C felony [in Washington state] to intentionally scan another person’s identification remotely without his or her knowledge and consent, for the purpose of fraud, identity theft, or some other illegal purpose” — but leaves business skimming unregulated. The reason? Corporate capitalists got their way and had the bill’s proposed “opt-in” rule stripped out.
As reported by PR Web:
Images are conjured up of scenes from sci-fi movies like Minority Report. For instance, a shopper walking into a store could unknowingly transmit their identity and whereabouts via a membership card, while they pick out items and make their final purchases. That information then goes into a database for further analysis and targeted marketing schemes.
Morris admits it’s been an uphill battle to win even this small yet commonsense protection for consumers. After years of advocating for stronger protections, including an opt-in requirement for retailers to abide by that was included in the original version of Morris’ bill, corporate lobbyists have fought to kill it every step of the way. These business interests have remained steadfastly intent on allowing the spy chips to remain unregulated as they quickly move to embed them in any or all products imaginable.
Morris does not intend to give up the fight, however. “This is just one small step to stake out some boundaries around our individual consumer rights before it’s too late. The battle now that criminal acts are covered is deciding whether or not spying on consumers for marketing purposes without their consent is criminal.”
One bit of good news: Rep. Morris has agreed to do a short interview with me via the internet about all this. I’ll be posting his report here on TCT as soon as I get it.
Monday, March 24th, 2008
Recession/Depression: No Break from Marketing Cancer
As the late, great Marvin Harris wrote, despite their (somewhat) changing tactics and technologies, ruling classes have always had only one basic strategy: intensification. When times are good, pour it on; when times are tough, pour it in on even harder. (See Harris’ Cannibals and Kings for the basic explanation of this very strong historical tendency.)
Big business marketing is, of course, merely the newest form of class-struggle-from-above, a.k.a. the latest weapon in the 6,000-year run of regimes based on overseers deploying threats and promises to make underlying populations’ thoughts and behaviors comport with the entrenched interests of great wealth and power.
For those trying to resist the destruction of the ecosystem and human culture — and corporate marketing greatly accelerates both these processes — it is vital not only to recognize marketing as a branch of systematic elite coercion (rather than of the much-advertised but still little-delivered freedom of choice), but also to note that, as such, marketing is fully subject to the intensification principle of class domination. When times get economically tough, big business planners work even harder to manipulate ordinary people into shopping (remember: watching commercial TV, by far the #1 “free time” activity in the nation, is merely a disguised form of shopping) and buying in prescribed ways:
Right on cue, the latest issue of Advertising Age has a story called “Recession Can Be a Marketer’s Friend.”
[R]ecession ‘[makes] the stakes higher,’ said David Rubin, brand manager on the U.S. launch and now director of U.S. hair-care marketing for Unilever. ‘Consumers are forced to make tougher choices when the economy is bad, and the role of marketing just gets amplified.’
The same story quotes a former McDonald’s marketer on the same point:
My response [to recession] has always been that when you go through periods of stress, that’s when you really have to go after top-notch, high-quality people, and really go out and market like crazy.
The lesson here is that there is simply no break from the further commercialization and commodification of the world. It is built into corporate capitalism, the world be damned.
Friday, March 21st, 2008
Are You Dumber Than a Toddler?
The automotive-industrial complex is banking on the answer to that question being “Yes,” and it is doing what it takes to make sure it stays that way.
On Sesame Street, they used to do “One of These Things is Not Like the Others.” Well, take a gander at that diagram up there, which comes from the website of the National Ethanol Vehicle Coalition — i.e., the car corporations and the corporate corn farmers.
See anything missing?
Hint #1: It’s the exact thing that “e85 fuel” is supposedly going to free “us” from.
Hint #2: Do corn plants pop up like weeds, and also spontaneously grow, harvest, transport, mill, and distill themselves?
Hint #3: The masters of our investors-first society are counting on training you to keep flunking this test.
If you haven’t already seen it, take a look at the new wave of “from gas-friendly to gas-free” advertising from General Motors (click through to page 2 in the “Chevrolet” sub-section and look at “Chevy Fuel Solutions”) . The anti-schooling, the planned implantation of fundamental ignorance — it’s a classic big business marketing strategy (shift the context + “look over there, not here”), but it has never been more appalling or dangerous to humanity.
Hint #4:
Saturday, March 15th, 2008
Squeezing Smithsonian
Few ever talk about it, but one of the cornerstones of the American way of unrestrained corporate capitalism is the intentional hamstringing, or even outright killing, of public enterprise. Think Amtrak, as compared with the SNCF and the Shinkansen.
Well, the same starvation strategy also applies to the Smithsonian Institution. As reported in this morning’s New York Times:
The new secretary has his work cut out for him. He inherits an institution that has been struggling with how to cover a $2.5 billion shortfall to pay for the maintenance of its buildings, many of which are in dire need of repair. Although the Smithsonian gets 70 percent of its $1 billion operating budget from the federal government, Congress has been pressuring the organization to raise more of its own money.
The nation’s foremost public museum system needs a one-time injection of $2.5 billion plus a stable $1 billion budget, but can’t get it? This, in a $14 trillion economy with $4 trillion of annual government spending.
What this means is not just further intentional starvation of the Smithsonian, but also the further commercialization of whatever activities it can manage to sustain. Where do you think Congress thinks the Smithsonian will have to turn to “raise more of its own money”? It won’t come from Joe and Jane Sixpack, that’s for sure.
This story also has a special connection to those interested in the effort to expose big business marketing for what it is. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History has an Archives Center. For a while, the Archives Center had money to collect actual documents and oral history interviews from those involved in planning and executing some major corporate marketing operations. That money and that program — the Center for Advertising History — expired over a decade ago, but the CAH collection nevertheless remains one of the very few places a member of the public can get a direct, comparatively unfiltered, first-hand look at the utterly coercive, dishonest, and dangerous big business marketing process.
Think the mega-corporations to whom Congress is selling the Smithsonian wouldn’t like to “lose” that little batch of stuff?
