This is n=anecdote; but I’ve noticed a strong correlation between periods of heightened depression and making pointless purchases of stuff I don’t need and won’t actually pull myself together and use despite the full knowledge, during the purchasing process, that this is exactly what I’m doing; that it has never helped before; almost certainly won’t help now; and will merely cost me money and leave me with more clutter that will serve as a constant reminder of my pitiful little attempt to delude myself into thinking that I might actually execute whatever project or plan I bought the stuff for.
Fully depressed consumers are, of course, useless, they tend to be too listless even to shop and probably unemployed and broke anyway; but the ones that are still in the ‘futile struggle’ phase of the behavioral despair test(yes, it’s an actual thing)? Why who else would be more likely to have a nice aching void in need of filing; or be sufficiently short on options that they’ll resort to trying to fill it with some random consumer good that is effectively certain not to work?
If selling products that target personal hygiene applications; postpartum depression may also provide the synergistic potential of standard depression plus conveniently pre-cultivated body image issues surrounding failure to repair pregnancy-induced aesthetic depreciation as fast as celebrities with personal trainers, unlimited access to childcare assistance, and good photography and post production cleanup do.
We’d need some market research to upgrade this from ‘speculation’ to ‘actual hypothesis’; but it seems like a pretty plausible strategy.
Even better, unlike just directly belittling and shaming the consumer; this stuff can be pitched as ‘empowering’ in the usual cynical sense of the term used by an advertising agency looking to do a run of feel good portfolio-bulking for some charity that ‘raises awareness’(and money) but not much else; so the potential for blowback is substantially lower than going with the direct approach of just outright stating that the target customer is an odorous, repulsive failure without our product.
Buying stuff for myself does cheer me up, but not as much as when I get to buy stuff at work. There’s all the fun of picking out the exact model and spec that I want, but I don’t have to spend my own money
Not that I have the cash or need for thousands of pounds worth of server, but it’s still fun to buy.
I used to use this brand of deodorant / antiperspirant until I realized it’s all a scam and if my armpits need to sweat I should just let it happen and not be ashamed of it.
Buying The Thing gives you a little squirt of rewarding dopamine. Which, like anything that gives you a squirt of dopamine is very self-reinforcing.
And the dopamine even makes you feel good for a little while.
That’s what marketing is all about at a chemical level. “how do we trigger the consumer’s reward system? All the good stuff like crack and cigarettes are already taken.”
…then what does the sound of one hand clapping do to the hedge at the end of the garden?
Answer: Mu.
The only race the Italians belong to is the human one.
Those of basement dwellers who like pictures of women’s crotches?
When you need drain cleaner you need it a lot more than most people need deodorant.
Sartre: La Nausée. Your experience is part of the human condition. If we weren’t all like that, we’d have bulldozed all the shopping malls by now - or never built them in the first place.
When nobody looks at your pointless website, Twitter is what your social media people think will “drive traffic to your site” because nothing fixes being ignored on your .com better than being ignored on Twitter. When that fails, they want to spend money on your FaceBook presence. I guess at some point they suggest paying people to walk around town wearing sandwich boards.
Yep, I get both of those too. I think they just follow a bunch of random people in hopes that the accounts are set to automatically follow back (is that still possible?).
I tweet some–not as much as I used to. But I mostly read. I can’t imagine why I would ever want to follow a deodorant, even if it’s the one I use!
That’s so nicely written and nicely beond Twitter length. I’d feel cheered by Creative Commons licensed social media campaign counterpoints to depressing consumer branding.
For an answer to emotionally abusive and presumptuous ads, maybe try sunny bright yellow letters, “Lemon juice works & volunteer with friends at the farmers’ market!” Use the same hashtags plus #FreeSpeech and #PeopleLikeYou.
