Cultural Choice or Cultural Marketing

In recent decades we in the industrialized world have a variety of cultural experiences available to us which we consider a form of recreation and entertainment. It usually involves an immersion into a different way of life, one that we would never see other than as cultural tourists. We buy the clothes that we wouldn't normally wear and try to talk the same way and about the same things as the people where we're going. But we're outsiders pretending briefly to be a part of the world that we've only read about or watched in the movies.

The U.S. Presidency and Hero Worship

The U.S. presidency has become a committee of a couple of dozen well connected and well educated people who advise a single, charismatic, photogenic person who implements the policies decided by the committee.

This may be objectionable, especially to those who have never considered the idea and who are accustomed to hero-worship. But it is unreasonable anymore to expect a single individual to have the capacity to handle the duties of the office. No single person knows the intricacies of energy and science policy and is at the same time able to negotiate trade or arms agreements with a variety of nations.

But that's just want most Americans want and expect from their president. They want John Wayne (as Gil Scott-Heron once surmised) or George Washington. A man who will walk over and punch the collective Islamic State right in the nose and tell them to sit down and shut up. Then walk calmly back home. That's an allegorical scenario but that kind of thing is just what this country thinks it can find if it just keeps looking for the right candidate. Delusional is what I would call it.

The Alvin Award

After Larry Bird retired from basketball in 1992, I loudly declared to anyone who would listen, "The NBA will never name another white man its Most Valuable Player."

And boy was I wrong.

Consumer Behavior and Psychology

I heard a segment on the news this morning which talked about (among other things) why and when humans give charitably. It is worth noting that we tend to tip better when the waiter gives us a piece of candy along with our bill in a restaurant. Also mentioned were the rates of charitable giving when we receive unsolicited gifts such as return address labels with our name and address printed on them, or a small gift from Hare-Krishna members in the airport.

It reminds me of things I've heard and read about certain marketing practices designed to get a person to spend more, for example product display tricks such as putting the same product in two or three different size containers and pricing them in such a way as to influence which size we purchase.

I would like to believe that this inside information and the details of marketing ploys would one day have  some monetary value to me but that's not necessarily true. Despite knowing how retailers and other corporations try to change my purchasing behavior:

• It is unlikely that I will take this information and profit from it by purchasing more wisely
• Knowing the tricks of marketing or philanthropic organizations does not necessarily mean that I will anticipate and counter these devices
• Nor do I harbor any idea that if I did outwit them, that I will get rich because of it

And most importantly, it goes without saying that even if I did save money--even a lot of it--this way, I wouldn't necessarily be any happier than I am right now.

Product Competition and U.S. Politics

I have been thinking in recent years about marketing consumer goods and politics. My theory says that competing products on the consumer marketplace which are most similar and which differ very little in quality or substance are the very products that are marketed most aggressively. Ad campaigns for things like soft drinks, local auto dealerships or domestic beers for example are presented in a way to make the consumer believe that one of these products is far superior and beyond comparison to the other product of its type. Coke and Pepsi come to mind. They are practically indistinguishable from one another, made of largely identical ingredients. Yet based on the intensity of their marketing efforts, either company would have us believe that the other product tastes radically different and is entirely inferior.

There is no shortage of examples of this. Auto dealerships for example are merciless on the local news broadcasts of most major metropolitan areas. To hear them tell it, buying a Toyota at ABC dealer is a recipe for disaster and you're going to save hundreds if not thousands at XYZ Toyota showroom on the other side of town. But the truth is both businesses are working from the same supplier and paying the same price to the manufacturer. Their labor market and overhead are nearly identical, being in the same metro area so there can't be any discernible difference between the price you get at one rather than the other besides a difference based on random chance.

And there are other products whose peddlers spend what must be tens of millions a year to get us to buy a different brand but nearly identical product. The truth is, these extensively and incessantly marketed goods are extremely limited in the variety of choice they can offer the consumer. In addition to centralization and uniform manufacturing processes, there are state regulations on what can and cannot go into a product, what it can be called, etc. that force competitors to offer a product under different brands that are essentially no different from one another.

But perhaps the most exaggerated example is with American politics. In recent years the Democratic and Republican parties have been trying to sell themselves to voters as radically different in their philosophies and budget priorities and attitudes toward everything from health care to crime and immigration.

But the truth is, rhetoric aside neither of them has instituted any policies that are much different from the other. Neither of them, for example will drastically reduce entitlement spending. They may quibble about miniscule government spending on the margins such as educational or job training programs but these arguments are meaningless when viewed against the real threat to American fiscal health: Social Security and the Medicare/Medicaid programs.

As an example, welfare payments to the poor were curtailed under Democratic president, Bill Clinton. Conversely, medicare payments were expanded under Republican, George W. Bush. Yet both the Democratic and Republican parties would have you believe that only the opposing party would do something like that.

Both parties have their outliers, of course. But I suspect that if we took a random sample of legislation and asked American voters to identify which party sponsored or initiated the law, very few of us could (beyond blind chance) determine whether it was a Democrat or a Republican who was behind the bill. Yet they would have us believe that like Coke and Pepsi, the difference between themselves and those across the aisle is night and day.

I call politics the most exaggerated example, less because one person's policies exactly replicates another, but more due to the lengths to which these people will go to distinguish themselves from others whose policies might differ slightly but which in the end support the status quo.

Alternative Advertising

Advertising is one of my pet-hates, primarily because so many ads seem to treat the viewer/reader as an idiot. Automobiles with names like 'The Magnum' or the 'XKE325' apparently try to appeal to the base emotions that might be more abundant in a nine year old than a grown man.

Of course there are some television commercials which are innovative and humorous, but unfortunately after the first 200-300 views, anything gets rather old.

And some ads are aimed not at buyers of a certain product or service, but at a different audience.

Potential employees is one example. Several years ago Wal Mart ran a television ad that featured several senior-citizen employees who spoke about the variety of activity in their particular Wal Mart and that you never knew what you were going to see at a Wal Mart. The ad didn't mention any of the products or prices or discounts but really featured the working life of a retired and presumably part-time Wal Mart greeter or cashier. It seemed to me at the time that the object of the commercial was not to get people to come in to buy stuff but to get people to come in and apply for a job.

And they were particularly targeting the elderly, part-time, bored, newly retired types who might find it a way to spice things up if they spent 12-20 hours a week earning an hourly wage down at the local outlet. I can only guess that Wal Mart likes these senior citizen, part time workers since they do not require health insurance since the law does not require health coverage for part-timers and that presumably those older than 62 qualify for medicare at some level.


Other advertisements are directed at cultivating investment in a particular company. These tend to be for products or services that don't have a retail market or that appear in media aimed at an adult audience for whom the product might not be appropriate.

Still others feature a corporation's good works and citizenship by highlighting charitable activities and such. Nothing mentioned about the product or the sale or benefits of buying their wares. Only that we're good guys for helping out the disadvantaged in your community or for our activities to restore environmental quality, etc.

In the area of public policy, particularly in the Washington D.C. area there are ads which run during the political commentary Sunday fare by large corporations trolling for government contracts or legislation to protect a certain company's business model. Northrop Grumman and Archer Daniels Midland come most immediately to mind. Almost nobody watching any television show is going to buy a fighter jet except someone who holds a high position at the Pentagon or who reviews military procurement in Congress.

It is said that taxes are an economic inefficiency because that money would be better allocated in the hands of consumers or the private sector generally; governments do just about everything less efficiently than consumers or private enterprise. If that's true I would say the same thing about expenditures on advertisements. Embedded in the price of every product or service, along with the raw materials, labor, insurance, licensing, delivery, warehousing and such is the cost of marketing the thing. And it seems that more and more resources are devoted to this attempt at persuasion which is widely recognized as deception. I'd say that's an inefficient allocation of capital.

Media Innovation and Over-kill

One thing I've noticed in media and advertising is the over-use of a certain innovative technology well beyond its initial appeal. This can go on for years where a nifty little trick is used in the movies or television and while it is intriguing at first, it is often repeated ad-nauseum. Sometimes the new technique becomes the sole focus of an advertisement.

Let me offer an example. Someone once devised a method to film a human figure and apply some graphics technology to alter the mouth and lips to mimic almost any speech that was played as a sound-track to the film. I think it first appeared in the film, "Look Who's Talking," but I never saw the film (only brief snippets) and it could be that this technique had been used even earlier. The movie featured a baby appearing to speak the lines of an adult. I understand it was very popular when it was released--now more than twenty years ago!

Since then we've seen too many derivatives of that cinematographic maneuver. Animals appeared to talk in the movie, "Babe" and many other movies and eventually a series of advertisements for a financial brokerage launched that showed babies conducting financial affairs under the vocal guise of some adult. It's all been a bit too much.

Maybe financial service firms share a common ad agency because there's another film-making trick going around that's getting old fast. The ad features testimonials from individuals who purchase or need to purchase financial services and are considering this particular firm. The people speaking look almost real but their faces are somewhat animated with regard to skin tone and hair highlights. You're looking at an animation but it's clear that the footage you're viewing has been made from video of a real person. But again, it's too much. This company appears to be going on 4-5 years with little more to offer than a neat video sleight-of-hand. Certainly the substance of what the actors are saying hasn't changed much in that time nor the services offered by the company.

I suppose you could make the same criticism of some musicians who discover a particular sound effect or combination of chords and, lacking any real music-composition talent, choose to release song-after-song featuring little more than their new-found trick.

Still someone, somewhere is entertained by these things and they either don't mind the repetition or don't remember it from one occurrence to another.

Creative Destruction in Finance

Economists and economics professors talk about something called, "creative destruction." The phrase may appear to be a contradiction but it basically means that something is dismantled, torn down or otherwise destroyed in the process of creating something better or more efficient that takes its place. Although there is destruction, it is all in the name of building something better