The latest and greatest sweater, the new and improved ergonomic kitchen whisk, or a new flavor of lavender bath salt. (wow these examples are incredibly random)
The one thing I feel we all need to remember this holiday season is that our economy is run by brilliantly implemented push/pull strategies.
The North American market is covertly and continually 'pushing' us to purchase crap that we don't need. Think about how you feel it to be necessary to buy the improved version of a cell phone, or the larger plasma, or ahem excuse me, the LED tv. We don't require these items for existence, but we feel the internal desire to go out and purchase them because the market has told us, reiterated, and then told us again that we can't survive or be sociable without them. We fall for the bait because we strive for acceptance and short term physical comfort.
Companies pitch new products to be sure that it is understood that clients simply can't imagine being 'established' without them. Take for example - Apple's iPhone 4.0. The pitch included many features that had been amalgamated into one expensively elegant device. Convenient? Yes. Necessary? No. The product was directly pushed onto millions of customers with the main selling feature, social acceptance, in the forefront. This acceptance status and the physical comfort is short term - as there is always a new model in the pipeline.
The economy also churns by utilizing nicely played out pull strategies. A good example of a pull was utilized during a promotional campaign for pre-school toys and educational products. Marketers flooded children's programs with product placements and adverts on multiple children's shows on the BBC.
The marketing team originally placed the items - showing children playing with the action toys or learning tools in brief product introductions. The adverts then moved into a full swing 'buy now or miss out on your childhood' psychological messages that captured millions of children. This then forced parents to shell out over 90 million pounds in the 2002 holiday season to appease their little ones wants.
One may argue that we aren't as susceptible as children - but look at how Christmas, Valentine's Day, and other holidays have been implemented to push sales of unneeded products.
It has truly been a beautiful scheme that we all play into swimmingly. Maybe we can at least take a step back this year, and be aware of what is taking place.
The title of this entry is a DalaiLama quote, but it ends with a bit of a twist - "Material development only brings us physical comfort; mental development depends on training the mind. "
Maybe we all should be focussing on training our minds instead of the next 'necessary' purchase.
