Marketing is offering significant benefits to organizations and to society, while the fact that marketing is a business function operating in close contact with the public where extensive criticism is subjected to this functional area, some of this criticism is justified: much is not.
The function and practice of marketing has been criticized because it is claimed that it creates partial truths about products and services by emphasizing the gap between a person’s reality and their expectations in such a way that people feel lacking in either self esteem so that they feel compelled to close the gap by unnecessary spending.
The philosophy of Milton Freidman and the belief that the “ends justifies the means” endorses the marketing way or its aim. In other words businesses are accountable to shareholders and shareholders alone where marketing is the tool.
Social critics claim that certain marketing practice hurts individual consumers and society as a whole.
Marketing’s Impact on Individual Consumers
Consumers have many concerns about how well the marketing system serves their interests. Many surveys shows that consumers usually have slightly mixed or unfavorable attitude toward the marketing practices because they accused marketing of harming consumers through followings.
Firstly, there is an increasingly growing perception that marketing is responsible for huge costs that consumers pay for products and under “sensible” systems, these costs would be much lesser. Aspirin, a heavily advertised and promoted product, a few dozen tablets of the same sell for higher price than 100 tablets of the same non-branded or non-identical brand.
Secondly, consumers point their fingers on marketers for their various deceptive practices. Too often, marketers through pricing, packaging or promotion practices would deceive their customers making them think that they will get more value than what will they actually do. For example, too often we would see a catchy advertisement, which would tell you price figure, most probably the lowest possible. The advertisement would promise you that the only thing you need to do is use this product or service for availing this amazing discount offer or limited time low price offer. However, majority of these ads provide limited information to deceive the consumers. You need to watch out for the small print at the bottom, which would probably, only be visible with a help of magnifying glass. This is where the catch is hidden since all other associated costs are mentioned there. Moreover, deception by promotion is extremely common. Marketers try to portray the functions of their products in exaggerated and inflated manner. In addition, these tricks are also a part of packaging where through subtle design, misleading labeling and misquoting of size are used as means of inflate the package contents.
Why do companies have sales people? To pressurize consumers for undertaking a purchase who would not buy the product otherwise. For products like insurances, real estates, used cars and others, high pressure selling would mean that the sales person would torture you either by being extremely pushy, assertive and loudmouthed or by flattering you with his smooth yet deceiving talks. In both the cases, a purchase would not mean guaranteed value for you but at least for the sales person since his hard selling would make him win additional bonus.
Recently, there have been many campaigns regarding the safety and health issues arising by the use of various products and services. Despite knowing the fact that obesity has become a major problem in the US and the likeness of finding an obese person in a sample has quadrupled over the last few decades, yet Hardee came up with their Monster Thick burger with 1410 calories and 107 grams of fat. Important here to note is that these figures for one burger are much higher than the recommended fat intake for the whole day. For the past few years, Consumer Magazines have highlighted issues like injurious design of automobiles, Carbon monoxide poisoning by room heaters, electrical dangers in appliances, injury risks by lawn mowers and others.
The fifth criticism of marketers in regard of individual consumers would be planned obsolescence. Marketers deliberately design their products in such a way that they go obsolete before the actual need of a new model or replacement arises. Refilled printer cartridge industry is the perfect example. One can refill the printer cartridges for almost half the price of cartridge, eight to ten time, for the same or improved performance. However, printer companies have it difficult for the refill industry to operate by continually introducing new models, tweaking inkjet cartridges and laser toner containers. Commenting on this planed obsolescence, owner of a small cartridge refilling company names Laser Logic said, “It’s kind of a Mission Impossible; at the end of this tape, the toner cartridge will self-destruct”. Many marketers keep on continually changing consumer concepts of acceptable styles so that earlier buying could be encouraged. Clothing and fashion industry is an example. On the other hand, other marketers would deliberately hold the new models until and unless the current ones go obsolete. There have been various such allegations of Microsoft and Intel in this regard that they have been holding their next generation computer models, chips and softwares to reap the highest possible profits from the previous ones. Nevertheless, Marketing managers are also charged guilty for selecting materials for their products that would rust, tear, break or rot sooner than expected, especially for products where the demand is inelastic. An author summarized it skillfully that “the marvels of modern technology include the development of a soda can which, when discarded, will last forever and a car which, when properly used and cared for, will rust out in two to three years”.
Marketing’s Impact on Society as a Whole
Critics claim that many of the societal evils and havocs are result of unfair marketing practices and due to self-fish marketers.
We live in a society where people are judged by what they have, however, this judgment should take place on rather who we are. Slogans that rose to popularity during the 1980s and 1990s like “greed is good” and “shop till you drop” are a just the right examples to prove this point. Many experts feel that its time to stop wasting resources and should return to basic moral values and socially responsible behavior. However, yet the infatuation with materialism continues. Interesting here is to note that a study of changing American and European life since the Second World War would show a consistent yet astonishing trend. If put on a graph, every line concerning money and luxury would seem to sky rocketing, exponential growth over the years indicating a never ending trend towards materialism.
Consumers are now obsessed and would literally die in the absence of those products and services, which did not even exist a couple of centuries back. Inflation adjusted per capita income of an average American has tripled since 1950s yet the American nation is in debt. In fact, statistics reveal that on average American households spend around 1.22 US dollars for each dollar that they earn. The question here is that who is to blame? This obsession with materialism and endless desire to have everything is not an inbuilt tendency or a natural state of mind but something created by the marketers over the past few decades. Marketing no loner satisfies the needs, wants of people instead it creates new desires and needs, and then fulfills them.
Secondly, businesses have failed to maintain a balance between private and public goods. For example, automobile is a private good but as the ownership of cars has increased, people are requiring public services such as roads, highways, traffic signals, parking space, police services and others. Moreover, there are societal costs associated with these too, for example, in this case, in form of air pollution, car accidents, traffic congestion, gasoline shortages and others. The only thing the marketers have done is to increase the selling of private goods and have completely avoided the public services and costs associated with the same.
Thirdly, the current marketing system is also responsible for creating cultural pollution. Marketers have now started poking their noses in the private lives of customers. In fact, these advertisements are now hunting us. Email boxes full of spam mails, telemarketing calls all day long, magazines full of advertisements pages, commercials interrupting almost every channel, billboards blocking every scenery, these interruptions have are cluttering the unconscious minds of people with messages of greed, sex, symbol, power, status and materialism.