Impact Of Marketing On Individual Consumers Marketing Essay

Billy Talen, commonly known with his stage name of Reverend Billy, is one of most prominent protestors on streets of Europe and US, along with his gospel choir. Sixty years of age, Billy has been asking people to resist the temptation to shop. His aim is to highlight the evils and sins of marketing, advertising and all activities conducted by the big corporations. He and his followers staunchly believe and preach anti-consumerism. Every now and then, whether in front of a McDonald’s outlet or Starbucks coffee shop, Billy along with gospel choir would hesitations in singing, “Stop shopping! Stop shopping! We will never shop again”. Without any doubts, as we move forward in the 21st century, the feeling of discomfort, distress and number of concerned buyers are increasing, thus indicating that somewhere, something is going terribly wrong and nonetheless, it should be fixed. Like Reverend Billy, many others would associate this social unrest and environmental chaos with the irresponsible and unethical marketing management techniques. (Groucutt, et.al. 2004)

In fact, this debate is not a new one and has been going around since the past few decades. This paper is an attempt to look at the criticisms of marketing, or in other words, the offences or which, it has been charged as guilty. Not only these criticisms would reveal that what is wrong, but on a passive note, those points will also disclose what needs to be done to reverse these unethical and irresponsible trends, if there are any. Moreover, towards the end, this paper would make an effort to discuss the current developments and movements in this regard in light of live examples from the corporate world.

Discussion

As mentioned earlier, marketing and marketers have received tons of criticisms for the past few decades. However, one can classify that into two distinct parts, one type of criticisms concerns the impact of marketing in the consumer as individuals and the other concerns the marketing’s impact on the society as a whole. The paper would move forward by discussing these separately in some detail.

Impact of Marketing on Individual consumers

Following are the major reasons or points due to which many consumer advocates and government agencies accuse marketing managers.

Firstly, there is an increasingly growing perception that marketing is responsible for huge costs that consumers pay for products and under “sensible” systems, these costs would be much lesser. Aspirin, a heavily advertised and promoted product, a few dozen tablets of the same sell for higher price than 100 tablets of the same non-branded or non-identical brand. A research indicates that differentiated products may sell up to 40 percent higher price of manufacturer to the retailer, primarily because of the costs of promotion and packaging. Pepsi and Coke charge more than 85 percent mark up on the concentrate that they produce excluding the costs of marketing and promotion that the consumers have to pay (Saucier & Folkers, 2008).

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Secondly, consumers point their fingers on marketers for their various deceptive practices. Too often, marketers through pricing, packaging or promotion practices would deceive their customers making them think that they will get more value than what will they actually do (Brenkert, 2008). For example, too often we would see a catchy advertisement, which would tell you price figure, most probably the lowest possible. The advertisement would promise you that the only thing you need to do is use this product or service for availing this amazing discount offer or limited time low price offer. However, majority of these ads provide limited information to deceive the consumers. You need to watch out for the small print at the bottom, which would probably, only be visible with a help of magnifying glass. This is where the catch is hidden since all other associated costs are mentioned there (Arnold, 2009). Moreover, deception by promotion is extremely common. Marketers try to portray the functions of their products in exaggerated and inflated manner. In addition, these tricks are also a part of packaging where through subtle design, misleading labeling and misquoting of size are used as means of inflate the package contents.

Why do companies have sales people? To pressurize consumers for undertaking a purchase who would not buy the product otherwise. For products like insurances, real estates, used cars and others, high pressure selling would mean that the sales person would torture you either by being extremely pushy, assertive and loudmouthed or by flattering you with his smooth yet deceiving talks (Botha, et.al.,2005). In both the cases, a purchase would not mean guaranteed value for you but at least for the sales person since his hard selling would make him win additional bonus.

Recently, there have been many campaigns regarding the safety and health issues arising by the use of various products and services. Despite knowing the fact that obesity has become a major problem in the US and the likeness of finding an obese person in a sample has quadrupled over the last few decades, yet Hardee came up with their Monster Thick burger with 1410 calories and 107 grams of fat. Important here to note is that these figures for one burger are much higher than the recommended fat intake for the whole day (Cant, et.al., 2009). For the past few years, Consumer Magazines have highlighted issues like injurious design of automobiles, Carbon monoxide poisoning by room heaters, electrical dangers in appliances, injury risks by lawn mowers and others.

The fifth criticism of marketers in regard of individual consumers would be planned obsolescence. Marketers deliberately design their products in such a way that they go obsolete before the actual need of a new model or replacement arises. Refilled printer cartridge industry is the perfect example. One can refill the printer cartridges for almost half the price of cartridge, eight to ten time, for the same or improved performance. However, printer companies have it difficult for the refill industry to operate by continually introducing new models, tweaking inkjet cartridges and laser toner containers. Commenting on this planed obsolescence, owner of a small cartridge refilling company names Laser Logic said, “It’s kind of a Mission Impossible; at the end of this tape, the toner cartridge will self-destruct” (Andreasen, 2006). Many marketers keep on continually changing consumer concepts of acceptable styles so that earlier buying could be encouraged. Clothing and fashion industry is an example. On the other hand, other marketers would deliberately hold the new models until and unless the current ones go obsolete. There have been various such allegations of Microsoft and Intel in this regard that they have been holding their next generation computer models, chips and softwares to reap the highest possible profits from the previous ones (Kotler & Armstrong, 2010). Nevertheless, Marketing managers are also charged guilty for selecting materials for their products that would rust, tear, break or rot sooner than expected, especially for products where the demand is inelastic. An author summarized it skillfully that “the marvels of modern technology include the development of a soda can which, when discarded, will last forever… and a car which, when properly used and cared for, will rust out in two to three years” (Saucier & Folkers, 2008).

Marketing’s impact on the society

Critics claim that many of the societal evils and havocs are result of unfair marketing practices and due to self-fish marketers.

We live in a society where people are judged by what they have, however, this judgment should take place on rather who we are. Slogans that rose to popularity during the 1980s and 1990s like “greed is good” and “shop till you drop” are a just the right examples to prove this point. Many experts feel that its time to stop wasting resources and should return to basic moral values and socially responsible behavior. However, yet the infatuation with materialism continues (Botha, et.al., 2005). Interesting here is to note that a study of changing American and European life since the Second World War would show a consistent yet astonishing trend. If put on a graph, every line concerning money and luxury would seem to sky rocketing, exponential growth over the years indicating a never ending trend towards materialism.

Consumers are now obsessed and would literally die in the absence of those products and services, which did not even exist a couple of centuries back. Inflation adjusted per capita income of an average American has tripled since 1950s yet the American nation is in debt. In fact, statistics reveal that on average American households spend around 1.22 US dollars for each dollar that they earn (Arnold, 2009). The question here is that who is to blame? This obsession with materialism and endless desire to have everything is not an inbuilt tendency or a natural state of mind but something created by the marketers over the past few decades. Marketing no loner satisfies the needs, wants of people instead it creates new desires and needs, and then fulfils them (Groucutt, et.al., 2004).

Secondly, businesses have failed to maintain a balance between private and public goods. For example, automobile is a private good but as the ownership of cars has increased, people are requiring public services such as roads, highways, traffic signals, parking space, police services and others. Moreover, there are societal costs associated with these too, for example, in this case, in form of air pollution, car accidents, traffic congestion, gasoline shortages and others. The only thing the marketers have done is to increase the selling of private goods and have completely avoided the public services and costs associated with the same (Peter & Donnelly, 2003).

Thirdly, the current marketing system is also responsible for creating cultural pollution. Marketers have now started poking their noses in the private lives of customers. In fact, these advertisements are now hunting us. Email boxes full of spam mails, telemarketing calls all day long, magazines full of advertisements pages, commercials interrupting almost every channel, billboards blocking every scenery, these interruptions have are cluttering the unconscious minds of people with messages of greed, sex, symbol, power, status and materialism (Murphy & Laczniak, 2005).

Ethical Consumerism and Environmentalism

Consumerism refers to organized movement of citizens for the improvement of their rights and bargaining power over that of suppliers. It was in the early years of 1900s when Upton Sinclair’s writings were able to make the consumers think about the wrong doings of corporations. The second wave in this regard came onto the scene due outrun in prices due to the great depression of 1930s and drug scandals (Armstrong, et.al., 2009). The third movement began in the 1960s when Ralph Nader and John F. Kennedy declared that consumers had to right to know, to be informed and to be heard, and the right to safety. However, the fourth and current wave in consumerism started with this new millennium, often called as ethical consumerism. The underlying idea of this movement is that consumers now believe that not only they have the “right” but also the “responsibility” to protect themselves from unethical actions of marketing (Arnold, 2009). Despite the fact that it is more active in Europe but it has acquired great success and the ethical consumerism industry had grown from 13.5 billion pounds in 1999 to 36 billion pounds in 2008 (Kotler & Armstrong, 2010). Environmentalism on the other hand is the movement that concerns protecting and improving the living environment and forcing companies to adopt policies of environmental sustainability.

However, towards the end of this paper it is important to note that not all marketers and companies can be accused of unethical and irresponsible practices. Smart and forward-looking companies are the ones that have turned their focus to enlightened marketing, sense of mission marketing, societal marketing and corporate social responsibility (Peter, 2008). They have clearly understood that there is a lot of potential in ethical movements and rethinking campaigns, it has become costly and ineffective to reach people with the traditional marketing channels. Marketers understand that acting socially responsible would earn them the attention, reach and trust that are the desired as results of any marketing campaigns. Levis is designing 100 percent organic jeans made from organic cotton and natural compounds (Cant, et.al., 2009). Animal rights group Viva finally achieved success to convince Waitrose to allow its ducks to swim and reduce their flock sizes so that these ducks could be saved from eye infections, blindness, filthy and disheveled feather and other diseases (Saucier & Folkers, 2008). Before this announcement in 2007, none of 19 million ducks sold in UK every year used to get a chance to paddle their feet in water. Sony reduced the amount of heavy metals. Like mercury, lead, aluminum, and cadmium in its electronic products. Nike is now making more and more efforts to produce shoes free from PVC and is directing its activating to educate people about the same. UPS has finally have found cleaner and more environment friendly trucks that have replaced the traditional smoke-belching diesel trucks. Xerox has started Xerox Corporation Equipment Remanufacture and Parts Reuse Program aimed at recycling and converting the end of life products. In this way, Xerox prevents more than 120 million pounds of waste materials being left in the dumps, saves energy for producing new ones and saves costs of the company as well. Timberlake gives its employee paid leave for 40 hours every year to pursue volunteer work (Andreasen, 2006).