marketing

The First Fad

~ MKW Publishing ~ 13 Comments

It’s the 50’s and marketers are trying their best and spending billions of dollars to work out and manipulate consumers. To change the customers habits and behaviours to better suit the corporations needs, rather than be there for the need of the people. My article Consumerism covers that a bit more.

But within these times, technology moved along and a distinct marketing advantage came forth. Television. Huge resources were put into it, much as they are today. They wanted to use television advertising to get to a much larger audience and therefore number of customers (adults), and potential customers (children). And then something happened in TV that caught a generations attention and gave them lots of data to work with apparently in unravelling how to create marketing situations on demand.

Davy Crockett.

The TV series happened and became hugely popular, leading to merchandise, leading to big sales for companies. Then just as they stocked up with more goods, it dropped off. This is apparently what led to then investing in fads, what causes them, how to maintain them, and steer them in the direction required. Being able to influence great numbers of people at once, through clever and psychological campaigns. As you can imagine it didn’t take long for it to move into other areas, if it wasn’t in them already. Military, political, education, medicine and any industry they wanted to boost and use to infiltrate people’s habits and wants. Entertainment was also high on their list it would seem with crazes and fads chucked at us left, right and centre thereafter.

Television helped all that massively, because while they had already been using the media and propaganda for decades, this gave them a whole new reach, and quicker. Now the internet has increased that capacity to an alarming level as has been shown by current events. The fact that recently we have been subject to a rather aggressive marketing campaign, whereby they readily admitted they had a whole team, studying our behaviour to scare us into compliance, covered in my article Nudge, nudge. They didn’t hide it, although didn’t admit they had been studying this idea for quite some time. With many of the systems, procedures and protocols ready for this ‘surprise emergency’, as well as the coordinated media campaign and government regulations across the board, in various countries. Another sign it was not random in any way, to me anyway. And really, as each country has reacted and we have been fed the media stories we are meant to read, things get pushed in the direction they would like. Demanding everyone’s attention, daily briefings, new rules every day, doom threats constantly, weekly clapping rituals, repeating certain phrases over and over. Almost as one would expect when trying to hypnotise people, and condition them to a new way of life. They say it only takes 90 days to form a habit, so the length of time imposed for various restrictions and hoo-ha was more than enough. And some people would have been quite overwhelmed and shocked by the ‘unfolding disaster’ which appeared to be around them, so would have been potentially in a more receptive state to hypnotic and coercive techniques. I wrote a piece about the coercion tactics The three d’s of conversion under coercion for a little more on that.

But we can see around us now that it is all out in the open, and the book I read to find out about all this motivational industry marketing is called The Hidden Persuaders, written in the 50’s when this was unfolding in corporate America. Well, it is no longer hidden, and isn’t confined to America. Global corporations under the guise of international organisations have set their sights on a new fad, and we are slowly moving through the phases of their ‘marketing plan’, to cajole, coerce and convince the masses that it is all ‘for the greater good’. Of lining their pockets is the part they don’t say. More taxes, more money, more richness going all the way to the top, literally starving and choking the people now while they take ever more. It’s relentless and will continue to be until someone pulls the plug on the whole devious scheme to ruin people who have now served their original industrious purpose. And now appear to be needed for their medical cannon fodder and constant surveillance plans, seemingly using a constant stream of ‘illegal immigrants’ as either a distraction, a replacement population, a waiting army, just to upset any local and community cohesion that could take place to fight back at the authorities? It’s anyone’s guess at this stage what their ultimate goal is for this strange situation we find ourselves in, and when it will turn nasty for them. We are encouraged to spend time trying to imagine how bad it is going to get for us, with all the disaster films they have made, Prepped for disaster, or clever programming? covered that a bit, so you don’t need to even use your imagination. But more time needs to be spent on when it does go wrong for them, because things will change afterwards, they will have to. The old times and ways really are going to have to be left behind, but that doesn’t mean you have to follow the sterile, monitored path they have waiting and are trying to steer everyone towards. Making it seem as though that is the only way, because it’s what they have worked so very hard for and it’s what they seem to want. But because everyone didn’t just hand themselves over to their ‘vision’ at the start of the ‘pandemic’, they now have to do it through crazy politicians stumbling over targets of net zero and a very driven marketing campaign of protesters/actors and well placed and timed events. Steering and shaping society and opinions as they want them, introducing music, drugs, lifestyles, motivations, dreams, products, ideas and all sorts of things they wanted you to be aware of, thinking and doing. Don’t ever think they haven’t thought about anything that is a ‘public release’ item, whether it be a media piece or releasing biological agents on the unsuspecting public like they also did in the 50’s and 60’s, they will have given it an awful lot of thought…

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(c) K Wicks

Consumerism

~ MKW Publishing ~ 31 Comments

I’ve already pointed out how the conveyor of consumerism is now putting us as the product in my article Mark of the Beast. But I started reading an interesting book from the 50’s that was recommended to me and would like to delve further into the concept around it and the marketing of it.

The Hidden Persuaders, by Vance Packard. He’s the author who wrote that special book I refer to a lot, The People Shapers. So thought it was about time I read this one too. It’s about marketing, more specifically the techniques and strategies used since the 50’s to convince us to buy things. Which then took on a new role for many other areas as well, helping to shape how we are today as a society. Although this book is about the US, it can be applied to here as well. I’m only two chapters in, and it’s gold. Covering the use of mass psychoanalysis to guide heavily funded research and campaigns. Within the commercial landscape initially and then increasingly in the political one. I’ll share some key phrases with you.

“What the probers are looking for, of course, are the whys of our behaviour, so that they can more effectively manipulate our habits and choices in their favour”

Very quickly after that line, he mentions it moving from the “genial world of James Turber into the chilling world of George Orwell and his Big Brother”. Indeed, he is correct about that, as we see around us today and especially with that particular book being mentioned a lot. But this next sentence stands out to me

“Another aspect of people’s behaviour that troubled marketers is that they are too easily satisfied with what they already have”.

They were concerned that although business was booming across the board it couldn’t be sustained unless you put more pressure on everyday Americans to consume more. In a 1955 Christianity and Crisis publication they stated

“The dynamics of an ever-expanding system require that we be ‘persuaded to consume to meet the needs of the productive process’.”

So, with over-production threatening, they turned their attention, not to that they might be making to much, no, it was that the people were buying too little. Funny and tragic all at once really. With billions being poured into marketing, the phrase ‘We don’t sell lipstick, we buy customers’ came about. People became a bigger commodity then I realise. But their biggest hurdle it seems at first was that after a time, most people really did have what they need. And if the products were any good, shouldn’t need replacing every year. So, what to do. They went for the idea of creating ‘psychological obsolescence’ to make people feel dissatisfied with what they have and want new. I wonder whether this is how that saying ‘keeping up with the Jones’s’ came from. To encourage you to covet what someone else has, to think they have more, or better and that you too should have it. That’s really raged out of control now, hasn’t it?

We know they use whatever trick they can to get us to buy things, but it isn’t just about the bottom line, or money. It seems to be about controlling the way you think as with an awful lot these days. Bit more sinister than just ‘buy my stuff’ isn’t it?

(c) K Wicks

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