If you don’t know it yet, I’m here to tell you that big business exerts an exorbitant amount of influence on our society. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with big business, because they are only doing what they are legally and essentially obligated to do, and that is produce a profit. But because their investors’ and employees’ lifestyles and livelihoods are at stake, big business will go to great extents to accomplish their goals. Even if that means “playing” us, the consumers.
The amount of money spent on marketing their products and services to consumers ranges in the billions of dollars each year. We are used to all the marketing and advertising, and have become a bit desensitized to it in terms of being selective about what we actually go out and buy. However, the mental imprint of “lack” that all of this marketing cultivates can create problems for us.
Businesses exist to supply solutions that the market demands. They solve problems and can make lives easier. What many people do not consider is that demand and problems can also be cultivated, created, or manufactured. They do not have to exist before a solution is offered.
Lucy Hughes worked at the world’s largest media-buying company, Initiative Media, as the “Vice President, Director of Strategic Research and IMsight”. She is renown for designing a study that discovered “the nag factor”, which revolutionized the way advertisers marketed to parents via their kids. She had this to say after concluding the study: “You can manipulate consumers into wanting, and therefore buying, your products. It’s a game.”
Marketers cultivate a mental imprint of lack within us in order to sell us their products and services. By researching and appealing to our psychological desires and needs, marketers use subtle means of influence to bypasses our conscious awareness. Their message is that we are not “enough” as we are in terms of attractiveness, status, fulfillment, sexual performance, and many other aspects of life. They cannot fulfill their mission of making a profit unless they can convince us that we aren’t shit without what they have to offer.
You are being played unless you realize that you are a part of this marketing game. Marketing does not simply stop at commercials on television or internet banners. It aims to influence entire cultures and cultivate lifestyles and identities that are tied to the continuous purchasing of any given products or services.
Unlike other radical opinionators, I’m not going to tell you that big business and marketing is evil and conspiratorial (although I can understand the sentiment of that argument). I just want to ever so eloquently inform you that, “it is what it is”. It is up to you to understand the game and be a player instead of a computer character.
This means not letting something or someone else define you, recognizing that you are enough as you are, and making your consumer decisions based on what “you” want, not on what you are told to want. This isn’t an anti-consumerism message, this is a pro-you message. If you like the fancy whips and weaves, “do you” and buy them. But if it’s coming from a sense of internal lack or deficiency, stop and ask yourself whether you’re getting played or not.
Art of Sleeping Awake 