Encouraging Consumption

Sharon Beder

Our enormously productive economy... demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption.. We need things, consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced, and discarded at an ever increasing rate.

Victor Lebow, Retailing Analyst

Advertisers spend 100s of billions of dollars a year worldwide encouraging, persuading and manipulating people into a consumer lifestyle that has devastating consequences for the environment through its extravagance and wastefulness. In his book Earth in the Balance, the Vice-President of the US, Al Gore wrote:

Our civilization is holding ever more tightly to its habit of consuming larger and larger quantities every year of coal, oil, fresh air and water, trees, topsoil, and the thousand other substances we rip from the crust of the earth, transforming them into not just the sustenance and shelter we need but much more that we don't need: huge quantities of pollution, products for which we spend billions on advertising to convince ourselves we want, massive surpluses of products that depress prices while the products themselves go to waste, and diversions and distractions of every kind.

Advertising expenditure has multiplied seven times since the 1950s. It has grown faster than the world economy and three times faster than global population. And almost half of that expenditure is targeted at Americans. The average American is exposed to about three thousand advertisements each day. More money is spent persuading Americans to be consumers than is spent on higher education or Medicare.

Whilst each advertisement may be outwardly aimed at selling a particular product, it is also promoting "the interests and ideology of its corporate sponsors." And the persistent avalanche of advertisements that television watchers and others are exposed to sells a consumerist way of life that offers personal fulfilment through acquisition and accumulation of commodities.

Even if they fail to sell a particular product, they sell consumerism itself by ceaselessly reiterating the idea that there is a product to solve each of life's problems, indeed that existence would be satisfying and complete if only we bought the right things. Advertisers thus cultivate needs by hitching their wares to the infinite existential yearnings of the human soul.

Most advertisements tell little about the product they are selling, rather they seek to create an impression. They attempt to associate their product with the unarticulated desires of their audience. Advertising exploits individual insecurities, creates false needs and offers counterfeit solutions. It fosters dissatisfaction that leads to consumption: "Consumers are taught personal incompetence and dependence on mass-market producers." They are taught that being a citizen "means no more than being a consumer."

Vance Packard, in his classic 1960 book The Waste Makers documented the various strategies US retailers were using to promote consumerism and increase sales. After the post war spending boom, manufacturers were faced with the "spectre of satiation" where most homes had the requirements of modern living. In such circumstances it was hard to see why people would keep buying goods&emdash;such as furniture, fridges, toasters, vacuum cleaners, cars&emdash;that they already possessed.

A recession in the late 1950s drove this problem home and politicians and business people began urging people to consume for the good of their country. At a press conference President Eishenhower told the public that in order to remedy the recession they should buy. When asked what people should buy, he replied "Anything". Marketers used slogans like "Buy now&emdash;the job you save may be your own" and "Buy, buy, buy; it's your patriotic duty".

The central problem was to stimulate greater desire and to create new wants. And this was becoming a little more difficult each year... Old fashioned selling methods based on offering goods to fill an obvious need in a straightforward manner were no longer enough. Even the use of status appeals and sly appeals to the subconscious needs and anxieties of the public... would not move goods in the mountainous dimensions desired.

What was needed was strategies that would make Americans in large numbers into voracious, wasteful, compulsive consumers....

Packard outlined some of the strategies used for this purpose, including the production of throw away single use items, the introduction of credit and layby, the manipulation of the consumer through 'bargains' and 'sales' and 'trade-ins' and the introduction of planned obsolescence. Obsolescence can occur when an item breaks in a short period of time, when new models outperform old ones, or when fashion changes make perfectly serviceable and functional items undesirable.

'Loyal' Americans were again being asked to spend money in mid-1990 to get the US out of recession. Today, as in the 1950s, sales figures over the Christmas period are a major indicator of economic buoyancy that are reported in national news programs. Capitalist economies depend on consumers spending more and more each year to help the economy grow. The continuing reliance on obsolescence for promoting sales means that economic growth and the viability of many companies are dependent on waste.

Green Marketing

The word 'consumer' comes from the Latin, 'consumere' which means "to take up wholly, to consume, waste, squander or destroy." From this point of view planetary protection via consumerism would seem to be a major contradiction. However, the damage that consumerism is doing to the environment is not a message that corporations want spread. It is not surprising then that the 1990s saw the rise of green marketing, which was aimed at increasing consumption not reducing it. Many firms sought to capitalise on new markets created by rising environmental consciousness. "If we made a lot of money destroying this planet, we sure can make money cleaning it up" said one vice president for environmental affairs of a major Canadian food distributor who has written a handbook on environmental marketing called "Green is Gold".

Surveys showed that a significant proportion of consumers, particularly young mothers in high-income countries, made an effort to buy green products such as pump packs, unbleached papers and items made of recycled paper. About 28 per cent said they were willing to pay more for safe aerosols and biodegradable plastic products, and 35 per cent were willing to pay more for natural foods that were not produced using pesticides.

These trends prompted a surge of advertisements and labels claiming environmental benefits. Green imagery was used to sell products and caring for the environment became a marketing strategy. One survey conducted in conjunction with Stanford University Graduate School of Business found that 45% of US businesses believed that environmental issues were 'critical', most thought they would increase in importance, and 31% had undertaken environmental promotions or marketing exercises.

Green marketing was a way of redirecting a willingness to spend less into a willingness to buy green products. In 1989, at the height of public environmental consciousness around the world, a North American poll found that 84 per cent of people surveyed "would opt for a lower standard of living" if this would help the environment. However, as Joyce Nelson points out:

The spectre of a wide majority of citizenry choosing a lower standard of living is not something that brings joy to the power-breakfast. Voluntary simplicity combined with stringent regulation of polluters is a lifestyle scenario whose possible wide-scale adoption triggers a gag-reflex in boardrooms across the continent.

Green marketing not only ensured markets would not shrink but boosted sales of products that were labelled green. Sally White, in a report advising manufacturers, argued:

In an affluent society such as ours, environmental problems are unlikely to be solved by heavy-handed attempts to make people consume less. The solution lies in redirecting many consumer choices towards environmentally friendly products. The answer is not necessarily reduced consumption but with more thoughtful consumption.

Green advertising encourages people to buy more, by suggesting they should buy a certain product because it is good for the environment. It suggests environmentalism can be solved through purchasing the right products and perpetuates the logic of consumerism that "human fulfilment is still defined largely in terms of the purchase of commodities".

Green marketing can take advantage of the very devices that promote consumerism and waste, such as fashion. For example, a Sears clothing advertisement said: "Now helping the environment can really help you look good." According to Paul Hawken, author of the Ecology of Commerce, "Green marketing by definition is a fraud. The leopard's new spots will wash off in the first acid rain, because green marketing is based on a view of the customer that's just as demeaning as the one that got us into this situation in the first place."

Green marketing encourages customers to replace goods they already have with environmentally sound ones or buy products they didn't know they needed. In marketing jargon this is called "repositioning" which involves "taking the same old stuff and repackaging it according to the latest taste." As Packard observed:

If you are a producer and most families already own your product, you are left with three possibilities for making further sales. You sell replacements; you sell more than one item to each family; or you dream up a new or improved product - or one that at least seems new or improved - that will enchant families that already own an 'old' model of your product.

By marketing a green version of existing products manufacturers are able to take up extra shelf space and offer an extra choice for consumers. In this way they can expand their market share to include consumers that want green products. Since manufacturers still make environmentally damaging products and retailers still sell non-green products on the shelves next to green ones, it is evident that green marketing is merely a way of expanding sales. If they were genuinely concerned to protect the environment they would replace the unsound products with sound ones, not just augment their existing lines.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s various green toys were marketed to capitalise on the budding environmental consciences of children. For example Toxic Crusaders, Eco-Warriors and the Trash Bag Bunch were dolls that fought against polluting villains. These toys, not only promoted the idea that environmental damage was caused by individual villains "displaying a mean and nasty streak" rather than corporations, but also boosted toy sales. For example, Toxic Crusaders were released by Playmates after sales of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were declining because the market was saturated.

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