Informer or Influencer?
Posted on Monday, November 21, 2011
It must be human nature – to spend all we make on things that we feel we need. From what I have seen, most of us have our lives set up to spend pretty much all that we earn. In comes the salary, then out go the payments.
Is it human nature to spend what we earn? And what role does the marketing and advertising of products by all those companies out there play?
What if instead of advertising and marketing messages being blasted at us 24/7, governments would be blasting messages telling us not to waste and not to buy products we don’t need? What if advertising and marketing of products were illegal? Could the disease known as materialism be wiped out?
Over my lifetime I have lived in six different cities for extended periods of time. At least long enough to have immersed myself in each of the cultures. I lived in one of the wealthiest suburbs in Canada and one of the poorest neighborhoods in Egypt (well, to be fair, I lived near it). Those two places in particular, when compared to one another, reveal a fair bit.
In a nutshell, in the wealthy suburb of Canada, people were always buying new things, upgrading, and ultimately comparing themselves with each other. And they were spending all that they earned in order to do so. In Dar el Salam, the neighborhood in Cairo I spent my evenings at in a coffee shop for the better part of a year, people were spending all they earned in order to survive. There was never – as there never could be – thoughts of buying the extras. It was food and shelter.
Now let’s tie this back to marketing and advertising. What happens when the people of Dar el Salam see all those ads featuring things they cannot afford? Whether they ignore them or not, they are certainly not driven to buy, because they do not have that option. As for those of us in the West, with the capacity to buy, do those billboards push us to buy, or simply inform us of what we can buy?
It’s a debate that has been around for a long time: The evils of advertising. It is my business, so I see it from the inside as well as the outside. And I do not see anything evil about it. When you tell your friends how amazing your new iPad is, you are not being evil. So when that billboard does that very same thing, anti-capitalists should not take offense.
Brand building by companies with the bucks to spend heavily on it only gets us to spend our money on their product instead of their competitor’s. But make no mistake, with or without the ads, we will spend on one of them. Because if it is human nature to spend all that we make, then all we really need is the informer, not the influencer. The influencer is us – or rather, our human nature.
