I’m not going to try to give you, the reader, a business lesson. In this piece we are going to examine a mistake of perception instead. Unfortunately for both of us though, in order to spot the mistake we need to begin by understanding all the individual stopping points along the path between the initial idea of a product and the consumption of product, the ‘chain‘.
A person has an idea for a product (this can be physical or service), they then seek capital to make some sort of investment in realising the product they wish to create. They then get the materials, machinery, premises, workers etc they need to produce the product. They now need to consider supply and transport of the produced item to where it needs to be. There may or may not be another consideration here if the producer does not sell directly to retail but chooses to sell to wholesale instead. Next think about desire for the product, the marketing. Point of sale, the reason it is not the last thing to think about is satisfaction, dissatisfaction, warranty and return, these are possible after the product is detached from the vendor, then also we may think about disposals and externalities. There is a lot of different stages between an idea and a consumed product, and not all are apparent or considered by the consumer.
So, now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, where is the mistake?
Think of the things you are led to believe… that 9 out of 10 dentists would recommend the toothpaste you just saw being advertised. That one is an easy psychological trick to spot, all you have to do is look at why it is not exactly a deception but why also it is not really an endorsement of the actual product. It’s this simple, Dentists will encourage you to brush your teeth with toothpaste, it’s part of what they do to support the personal intervention of their customer to look after those teeth. So if the product is a toothpaste, then it is not at all deception to say that statement (9 out of 10), but what is suggested is that it is this product in particular that dentists will favour. Now that isn’t said specifically, but the product as different to other competitors products is not the crux of the statement, though the target customer will be given some sciency sounding reasons why it may be better. It is unlikely that dentists would recommend this product over other toothpastes, dentists will recommend toothpaste always, it’s just that they would recommend this product of course, and always will, because it is a toothpaste, and that is enough for the claim. You see the trickery?
That one is a primary mistake, based on not systematically examining the logic of what is being said, and who has time for such things, but it is your mistake and it’s mine too. We extrapolate from a true statement what is not said within the statement, we misinterpret what has been said and latch on to what is being somewhat suggested. It would be a mistake also to think that the persons behind this advert do not know we are going to do exactly this, they are smart people, they are the professional decedents of the great Edward Bernays (propagandist, nephew of Sigmund Freud). Where else do we do this? When a sports person has a fizzy sugary soft drink sitting on the table in front of them as they are interviewed at a sports event, we assume because the drink producer has insisted that their product is in the media area with the sports star, that the sports star is a consumer of the product, and this is very likely not to be true. Sports persons drink water because there is nothing better in liquid form than water to aid human athletic performance. It does not matter that it is unlikely, there they are with the product in front of them while they hold your attention.
A food manufacturer highlights, as a primary feature, that their product has an ethical slant that will fulfil the consumer’s need to, as Slavoj Zizek states, “purchase their own redemption”. Zizek accuses a well known shoe manufacturer of this, and a well known coffee seller/producer of the same thing, but it is often seen in the advertisements of many products. The coffee seller wants you to think that they pay their producers properly, the shoe manufacturer wants you to think they pay for education, and these things are actually true, they do. But, and it is a big but… This is one facet of the “chain“. I personally have noticed that a well known fast food vendor tries to make a lot out of the fact that they use 100% beef, but I also know that the definition of beef is not certain to avoid the organ meat such as liver, kidney, tongue, heart and others, yet this is not the problem. The problem is in a different part of the chain. The favouring of, and production involved in, one very special potato type that is ubiquitous for the brand means that some people have claimed environmental harm is being done. This particular brand uses wholesome images of farms quite often in its advertising to suggest that it is doing environmental good.
Talking of farms… another producer in the UK, one that has mastered their market because they have acted to control the whole chain also, makes the suggestion, not the claim, that their food is farm produced, by labelling it with a fictional farm name. This we might think of as misleading until we consider other products that make similar suggestions or are ridiculously suggestively named. These aspects highlight the close nature between a non-truth (a deception), and something that is merely inferred or suggested, and they play on the fact that we the consume will mistake one for the other.
The energy drink that suggests consuming it gives you the ability to fly does not actually do that or seriously claim to, the suggestion is to be taken as a metaphor for a short lived period of increased physical and cognitive sharpness. The problem for us is that although we do realise that the toothpaste advert is actually claiming that their product will assist you in your dental hygiene and is correct, and the energy drink will not make actually you defy gravity, we remain in the dark as to whether our sports buddy drinks the sugary nonsense in front of him/her, what the term “Beef” actually covers as parts of the cow, and why mono-cultured vegetables are inherently environmentally detrimental. This is because the suggestion will work because we will not think deeply enough.
It is our failure to see the wider picture of harm that may arise from a different part of the chain that is possibly problematic in ethical terms. While our awareness can being pointed toward one part of the chain there may be another part that we are failing to see. A very well known global company, one that has a lot to do with water, was once exposed by Mark Thomas in his program “the Mark Thomas Project”, and according to the investigative journalist that firm was causing a lot of environmental and financial problems all over the world, yet it looked to all the world like it was on a mission to provide water because of its successful marketing.
The powers of suggestion and misunderstanding cannot be underestimated. While omitting the full picture and concentrating on only the preferred highlights, the ones that create positive vibes, a firm can easily suggest that it is ethical without actually being ethical measurably outside a certain link in its productive or distributive chain. This is a human trait, that we like to accentuate the positive and ignore the negative, even in each other, we like to feel good so we like to ignore what might give us pause or cause us turmoil of the mind. Our primary drive is to feel good rather than bad, so we watch movies where the good guys (as we perceive them) will win, we choose heroes, we teach our kids nonsense about fairness and reward rather than the realities of the rat race with all its inequality and greed, we read books like “The Secret” that tells you how to make the world what you want it to be (like you are not just suffering the slings and arrows that Shakespeare warned of), and we cognitively externalise every bad thing that has ever happened to us (at least until that day in therapy when we realise we are actually making decisions).
We bury our awareness of reality so we can feel a dissonance toward a reality that we do not wish to be true, or may have given up thinking that we can affect, and this impetus makes us reach for the Harry Potter book rather than picking up anything maybe useful by Kafka, Nietzsche, or Schopenhauer. It is possible that we have deliberately fostered the circumstances where we avoid knowing the harmful aspects of the chain, just like we do with a lot of life, even if we know that we would realise them if we considered them. I assume that modern farming or meat producing practices would be abhorrent to all that were aware of them, that fishing is depleting the sea faster than it can recover, that coffee farming is destroying rain forests, that children are making our clothes for the price of a bag of rice, and I might set out to highlight that by writing or speaking about it. But what I may have already realised is that people DO know these things, yet have chosen to consciously un-know them. That might seem a strange concept at first, but realise that the term “to bury ones head in the sand” does not indicate the avoidance of unknowns, it is the avoidance of information that we already know, but we consider may harm our ability to make the decisions we are faced with and arrive in clear conscious at the point where we consume a product that makes us feel or look good.
What we have looked at here is a problem of composition, as if one player is outstanding in a team but they are poor as a team, or a team has nobody outstanding in it but is great overall, I wonder which team you would choose? Ours has been to consider the aspects of production, consumption, and redemption in the same vein.
pinkfloydpsw's Blog 
Leave a comment