YOU CAN’T CONTROL WHAT YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND

 

 

Recently, I posted a link to an Adam Curtis documentary.

It was called ‘The Century of the Self’ and the first half traced the birth and growth of the consumer society.

(Being an Adam Curtis documentary, the second part spiralled off into the evils of capitalism, but that isn’t the part that’s of interest to us.)

The first part of the documentary was crucial learning for anyone in advertising or marketing.

Throughout history, right up until this century, the concept of buying things merely because you liked them didn’t exist, the masses only ever bought what they NEEDED.

They used something until it wore out, then they replaced it and used that until it wore out, then they replaced that, and so on.

The process was always the same, you only bought something as you needed it.

The idea that ordinary people would buy many pairs of shoes or buy many dresses, and would wear them as the fancy took them, just didn’t exist.

Everything had to be useful, nothing was bought on a whim.

But in the twentieth century, mainly in America, industrialisation meant factories were making more goods than the public could wear out.

People had to be persuaded to buy MORE than they needed, so the ‘consumer society’ was born.

And that meant someone needed to persuade people to buy all these goods that they didn’t actually need.

Obviously that is when marketing and advertising were born.

Advertising and marketing exist in the gap between NEEDING and WANTING.

Understanding our history allows us to look at our function in this process.

To see why many different kinds of communication are required, here are three for instance.

We should learn that a ‘distress purchase’ is something you don’t buy because you like it, not because of style nor fashion, you buy it because you have to have it.

(Like car insurance, or safety equipment, or medicine, or anything to fix a problem.)

This requires very different advertising to an ‘FMCG’ – fast moving consumer goods.

Like the name implies, an FMCG is something that is bought and consumed quickly and often, it’s also relatively cheap.

(Like chocolate bars, food, drink, soap, toothpaste, washing powder, cleaning products, most of what you find in a supermarket.)

Which is different again from ‘consumer durables’, these are things that last a lot longer, so you don’t buy them very often, because they’re more expensive.

(Like cars, or computers, or furniture, or mobile-phones, or games consols, or fridges, or washing machines.)

Once you understand the various categories, and the different audiences, you can graduate to crossover thinking.

Clothes for instance, could be sold like a consumer durable if it’s expensive, or an FMCG if it’s just fashionable and cheap.

Health products can be sold like a distress purchase or an FMCG, depending on the benefit or the necessity.

But having the conversation forces you to uncover fresh thinking, instead of the knee-jerk response that ‘brand’ is all that matters.

So hypnotised have we become with brand, that we use the same strategy to sell a luxury car, an alcoholic cocktail, or a chocolate bar.

Don’t believe me? – BMW, Aperol, and Cadbury’s all used JOY as their brand-strategy.

Strategists distilled the core of these brands down to the word JOY without any thought about what product a consumer is actually buying.

Whether it’s a £100,000 luxury German car (consumer durable), or a £20 Italian alcoholic cocktail (fashion), or a £1.50 chocolate bar (FMCG).

They assumed the purchase process was the same in each case, BRAND was all that counted, so JOY was the strategy.

Lack of knowledge about what the consumer society is and why it exists is responsible for this autopilot non-thinking.

Because we never learn why advertising or marketing exists, we can’t question it, so we can’t come up with fresh alternative strategies, we have no option but to follow the herd.

Which is why 89% of advertising is purely decorative and not functional at all.