Shahan Ali Memon

samemon@qatar.cmu.edu
Course : 76-100

"Slaughtering Consumer Choices : Our Choices, not ours anymore"

Our choices are what define us and our personalities, but what if our choices are
slaughtered or manipulated ? Stewart Ewen (1976) in his article "Captains of
consiousness : Advertising and the social roots of the consumer culture" discusses how
business coporations use advertising as a tool to manipulate our choices for their own
means. According to Ewen, such coporations use tricks to influence the psyche of
consumers and trigger them to buy their products. Author Naomi Klein (2000) in her
book "No Logo" also talks about manipulation of choices and discusses how different
brands and megastores use their size and market dominance to limit the number of
choices available to the public. Through this strategy, they gain market over other
independent stores and wipe off any possible competition that exists. This ultimately
leaves the public with 'no choice' (Klein, p. 140) but to buy from those dominant
stores. Hence, both the authors together make it vivid how our consumer choices are
being manipulated artfully by big coporations for their own means, either via
advertisements or via brands and megastores. The manipulation of our choices
creates unneeded desires which makes us to spend more than we should which
ultimately contributes towards the culture of consumerism. Moreover, the limitation on
choices caused by the monopoly of big brands kills individualism and rather makes all
of us clones of eachother by just following handful of brands. Therefore, to refrain from
being fooled by advertisements and brands, we need to refrain from basing our
decisions on ads and brands,but to do this it is very necessary to understand how they
work and how they influence us.
Advertising is supposed to be a source of informing people of the existence of
products that they might be interested in buying. The truth, however, is not that

Shahan Ali Memon

samemon@qatar.cmu.edu
Course : 76-100

simple. Ewen says that "Modern advertising must be seen as a direct response to the
needs of mass industrial capitalism" (Ewen, 21). Through this, he elaborates that
advertising is not used to describe objective reality about the products, but is rather
used by corporations for 'creating consumers' (Ewen, 24) who can buy their
products. For creating consumers, just emphasizing the positive aspects of the product
in the ads did not work for the corporations in the past. So, they had to do something
else to mobilize peoples' instincts and create a desire in them to purchase their
products. For this very reason, "..the ad men welcomed the work of psychologists in
the articulation of these general conceptions" (Ewen , 24). Through these
psychologists, the corporations started designing ads which appealed human instincts.
The advertisements used values like "social prestige", "beauty" , "acquisition" , "selfadornment" to create a desire for the products in peoples' minds. Through this way,
corporations created "fancied needs" for the consumers. Now consumers were
tricked to buy products that they did not need at first but due to advertisements were
forced by their instincts to buy. This culture of manipulation of our desires is still
prevalent today and works for big businesses in fooling us. The problem is not with
advertising because advertising is necessary for business and sales. The problem is
when it makes us to need what we don't want and tricks us into making choices that
we would not have made in the first place.
Klein,on the other hand, discusses how brands and megastores are limiting
choices for us. She tells us the recipe that has made Wal-Mart the largest retailer in
the world. One of the key elements in Wal-Mart's success, she believes, is that it has
been flooding different regions by opening stores close to its distribution centers. She
says that "It won't move into a new region until it has blanketed the last area with
stores as many as forty in hundred-mile radius" (Klein, P. 133). Through this strategy,
Wal-Mart not only saves money in transportation and shipping costs but also develops

Shahan Ali Memon

samemon@qatar.cmu.edu
Course : 76-100

a significant presence in an area such that it does not need any advertising. The
repercussions of such strategy are that slowly and gradually these retail stores
become so powerful that "..they almost instantly kill the smaller competitors" (Klein, P.
134) in that particular area. The strategy used by big chains like "Starbucks" is no
different. Klein says that "Instead of opening a few stores in every city in the
world,..Starbucks waits until it has blitz an entire area and spread .. like head lice.." (p.
136). She calls this strategy 'cannibalization'. The idea behind cannibalization by
Starbucks is to flood an area with so many stores that sales drop even in individual
Starbucks outlets. Through this expansion strategy, although the sales decrease at
individual Starbucks outlets, but collectively, the sales increase at a doubling rate. The
irony however, is that independent coffee shops and restaurants, who can only profit
from one store and have no chains, fail to stand infront of Starbucks. Such local shops
thus, due to big loss, rule out of competition as Klein says, "..the chains' aggressive
strategy of market expansion has the added bonus of simultaneously taking out
competitors" (P. 137). Ultimately, we as consumers are left with no choice but to buy
from these big stores. Hence, our choices are actually being limited and manipulated
by big brands and megastores.
One of the ways our choices are being manipulated is by the creation of desires.
Big companies play with our emotions and make us believe through advertising that a
particular brand defines our lifestyles and personalities. In this regard, Ewen quotes
Carl A. Naether,
"An attractive girl admiring a string of costly pearls just presented to her would in
no few cases make the one seeing her in an advertisement exclaim: "I wish that I,
too, might have a set of these pearls and so enhance my personal appearance." (
30).
What Ewen means is that when we see a person in the advertisement benefiting from

Shahan Ali Memon

samemon@qatar.cmu.edu
Course : 76-100

a particular product, we wish to copy him/her. This creates a desire in the form of
'fancied need' where we as consumers fall into believing that we actually 'need' a
particular product. Ewen explains how our instincts are mobilized by advertisements
creating a desire to have something which is totally unneeded. He says that this is
done by creating an image around a product for example an image of "beauty" and
"social prestige". Klein's argument complements Ewens' as she says "..the role of
advertising changed from delivering product news bulletins to building an image
around a particular brand-name version of a product " (p. 28). Klein says that the
strategy is being used by brands on a larger scale to make consumers fall into buying
their products. For this very reason familiar personalities like Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben
and Old-Grand dad are associated with brand names to create an image of familiarity
and comfortness around the brand product. This way people feel safe to buy their
products.
Both Ewen and Klein talk about how people respond to images created around
products and brands. There are some serious pitfalls to such response. These images
around products and brands make people to choose differently than what they might
have chosen in the first place. This way people, in the urge to just be associated with
the image of the brand, create a desire to buy the product. This leads them to desire
for things that they don't actually need. When people spend money on such things,
they contribute to the culture of consumerism which according to Etzioni (2012) is a
"social disease". Also, when we start to spend on things we don't need, we might fall
into debts which would ultimately refrain us from achieving a satisfied lifestyle.
One of the other repercussions of 'manipulation of choices' is the death of
individualism. When advertisements use the psychological methods, they make us to
desire for the "beauty", "self prestige", and such values held by the people in the
advertisement via particular product. We desire to 'copy' the people we see in ads.

Shahan Ali Memon

samemon@qatar.cmu.edu
Course : 76-100

This makes us "emotionally uneasy" (Ewen, 34). Ewen refers to "Middletown", a

study by Lynds, in which they talk about modern advertising making a housewife
acutely conscious of her unpolished finger nails and sending her ".. peering anxiously
into the mirror to see if her wrinkles look like those that made Mrs. X in the
advertisement "old at thirty-five" because she did not have a Leisure Hour electric
washer. " (Ewen, 34). Ewen through this tries to explain how we the consumers react
and relate to the advertisements and try to copy the models. This ultimately kills the
individualism of a person. We start basing our personalities on advertisements. This
also triggers us to form "reference groups" (Schor, 1999) to whom we can look up to
and in this case the reference groups are the people in the advertisements. Another
way through which individualism is being killed is by the killing of local brands and
hence limiting our choices as Klein says that "..in the pages of business section, the
world goes monochromatic and doors slam shut from all sides" (P. 129). Klein argues
that big brands through expansion and cannibalization rule out small competitors. This
leads us to have no choice but to buy from those handful of brands. When those small
and local shops and brands start disappearing, our choices start reducing. With the
reduction of choices, we all start to follow some famous brands only. We as consumers
believe that by buying those brands, we are actually creating our individual identities.
The fact however, is that when we all have less choices to choose from and when we
all start following the same brands, we are in actual becoming clones of eachother as
Klein says, "A clone is a clone, whether it is moulded in the shape of an arch or a
peace symbol, and its purpose is still replication." (P. 151). We are becoming
photocopies of eachother by wearing same brands' watches and having same brands'
phones. In other words, we are losing our individual identities. In this loss, the brands
we follow "..acquire a talismanic power" (Klein, P. 141) where those brands can control
our choices and can control the prices of their products the way they want to.

Shahan Ali Memon

samemon@qatar.cmu.edu
Course : 76-100

Ironically, this not only kills individualism but also makes us to spend more. For
example, our social need satisfied by a branded perfume could be satisfied equally
well by a cheaper and more efficient perfume. But since that cheaper perfume sold by
a local shop could be no more available because the shop could not stand the
competition given by a big brand, we are left with no choice but to buy the expensive
perfume. This shows how our choices are being limited and slaughtered by big brands
and how these limitations make us to spend more.
In these games played by big corporations and brands, we the consumers are
the puppets, and the puppeteers i.e the marketers are wisely and skillfully, steering
our hands into our wallets where the money rests, waiting to be spent and where the
credit card rests, waiting to be swiped. In other words, our choices are being
manipulated and are no more ours. We are becoming forced victims of advertisments
and brands. We are buying what we are buying, not because we are rational but
because we have been injected such consumer habits by manipulating our choices.
This is killing our personal identities and is making us clones of eachother where we
are all following same brands and using same products. Though, it's not easy to refrain
from being puppets in the hands of brands, but it's still possible. The solution to this is
to stop relying on advertisements and stop choosing a product just on the basis of
familiarity because if we do that, we are simply letting marketers choose for us. We
need to realise that our choices are only ours and are very subjective. Only we as
individuals, and not the maketers, know what is best for us. So, before buying a
product, it's absolutely essential to look at the objective side of the product and
evaluate it on both positive and negative sides. Only then will we be able to keep our
identities and refrain from being part of culture of consumerism.

References :

Shahan Ali Memon

samemon@qatar.cmu.edu
Course : 76-100

Ewen, S. (1976). Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the social roots of

the consumer culture. New York : McGraw-Hill. (Chapters 1 and 2).

Klein, N. (2000). No Logo. London: Flamingo. (Chapters 1 and 6).

Schor, J. (1999). The new Politics of Consumption. Boston Review, 24(3).

Retrieved from http:/www.bostonreview.net/BR24.3/summer99.pdf

Etzioni, A.(2012). The Crisis of American consumerism. Retrieved August

20,2013 from http:/www.huffingtonpost.com