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THE INDIVIDUALLY WRAPPED DESIGNER TOOTHPICK WITH MINT FLAVOR
Is it my imagination or are the billboards in the streets getting bigger and bigger, the ads in the paper more obtrusive and the commercials on TV more frequent? Commercialism dominates modern life and has infiltrated everywhere around us. On the bus and in the bus, in the queue in supermarkets standing with your groceries watching other groceries, along the roads and at stations and soon we will hear or see commercial messages when we call or email someone.
The sales strategy is based on sly psychological tactics going hand in hand with an ingenious technology. TV programs that are being interrupted by a hidden method with short messages are already superseded. The process of manipulating minds below the level of consciousness is known as 'strobonic injection'. Occasionally, like earlier in England, it causes a row. As a counter-reaction to this increasing manipulation, the Swedish Ericsson has developed a system, which can identify and report hidden messages. But new methods to reach the consumer will surely quickly rise to the surface.
Of all advertising, which is being dumped daily on us, cosmetics predominate. One usually gives the substance, which contains lanolin for the most of it (which is a mixture of purified wool-fat and water beaten up into an emulsion), a romantic name and creates a deceptive world around it where beautiful, glowing women touch their perfect skin with their long finger-tips, and suddenly the consumer is willing to pay ten to twenty times the amount of the cost price. It's not cream they are selling but hope. Hope based on the universal desire of the woman to be attractive to the other (or the same) sex.
These days sales are being based on fears or seated desires which indirectly have to keep the industry going. We buy beer for companionship and merriment, bestsellers at the local supermarket for some fast cultural elevation, underwear for purity and vitality, unbleached toilet-paper for our environmental conscience and green rhubarb tea with cream for an exotic escape.
It's not the product itself one tries to sell but the concept behind it. Pepsi has changed its packing exclusively for that reason. The company chose the color blue for 400 million dollars because it would incite young people to revolt against the establishment (if that's Coca-Cola, I don't know). The many name and color changes in the corporate world are zapping by.
I close my eyes and imagine a commercial from the near future.
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