The government has 'only just' realised that attractive cigarette packaging has the effect of making people buy more cigarettes, and that, conversely, plain packaging will cause people to buy less. (It makes you wonder why, before their 'realisation', the government thought companies used attractive packaging. Did they not think to ask? Or were they persuaded by cigarette companies not to ask? More on that later.)
Says
this Guardian article:
"We are going to follow what they have done in Australia. The evidence suggests it is going to deter young smokers. There is going to be legislation," said a senior Whitehall source said.
So, they've finally owned up to knowing what has been public and obvious knowledge since the invention of adverts. My guess is that the reason for their reluctance in this "realisation" is the obvious ultimate conclusion: for-profit advertising should be banned.
We all know that the sole purpose of advertising is to get you to buy something. In entering the product market, companies may be trying to sell their products, but they've already succeeded in selling their souls: They are devoted to pushing their wares as effectively as possible, using whatever means they can get away with (legally and otherwise). Hence supermarkets and their cheap "don't ask, don't tell" meat that turns out to contain horsemeat (now with added harmful chemicals), banks who ruin the economy through lucrative and highly-risky scheming, and huge companies that consistently fall foul of monopoly and anti-trust laws.
As humans are the ultimate customers, so of course it is essential to get into their minds. On the face of it, this is innocent enough: Get to know what they want, make it, and sell it to them. They call it "demand" - although this is a marketing PR word designed to make us believe that we're in control, when in fact it's the other way around. And this brings me to the hidden aspect of getting into customers' minds: The psychology war.
There are many reasons why it really is a war. The word "competition" is too simplistic, too ambiguous. It's really a series of ongoing battles, ostensibly primarily with competitors. Selling products has to be agressive and ruthless: After all, that is
the nature of commerce. He who dares wins. Smaller companies get annexed or assimilated into bigger, more powerful ones. Corporate spies are used on rivals. And of course, there is the invasive propaganda - or "advertising," as their PR departments misleadingly and passively call it.
I'm sure that even the
supposedly-pristine Messrs. Branson and Dyson can't have got where they are
now using entirely moral means: The market is finite, and so any advantage one company has is necessarily to the disadvantage of another. The survival of the fittest process ensures that the most agressive and ruthless succeed, and that the others are weeded out. And since failure means corporate death, companies are forced to do what they can, using the mantra "if we don't do it, someone else will," which surely is about as justifiable as "I was only following orders."
One psychological aspect here, in outwitting the competitors through domination, is outwitting the customers through PR. And that means paying for positive attention in the press (usually advertising, but also behind-the-scenes deals amongst themselves), avoiding being sued by competitors and avoiding being fined by the state. (The key word here, of course, is avoidance, which is of no consequence to morality.) This way, they aim to provide you with a smiling face and pleasant demeanour at the neoproverbial till, while garotting everything that's sacred under the neoproverbial counter.
So for one, advertising is a psychological war between corporations, as they struggle to get the upper hand and avoid collateral (financial and reputational) damage. For another, it is a war for control of your mind. And this is where advertising as we know it lies. This war is between their advertising agency and you. The grand prize is your brain, which determines whether you go out and buy that product (if they win), or whether you see reason and decide that you don't need it (if you win). You, as a human customer, are at your most vulnerable (and most likely to lose the battle) if the product is related to a vice, obsession or disorder that you are prone to.
The obvious ones are cigarettes, alcohol, gambling and junk food, but the vast majority of products are related to vices, obsessions or disorders. Do you really need that antibacterial hand-wash? Are you sure you haven't just got an obsessive-compulsive disorder compelling you to go over the top with cleanliness? Do you really think that that porn, or buying those expensive branded clothes on the internet, or that computer game, is an effective substitute for actually going out and interacting people in the outside world? Have you actually done any research into whether you really need the vitamins in those tablets, and that they contain all the ones you need in the right quantities?
You might say that you are an innocent victim, that you trusted the sellers' claims. But both you and I know that that's crap. What you actually mean, is that you're too
lazy to use your eyes to see. You
deliberately took the adverts and the packaging at face value, knowing it was all crap, pathetically letting yourself be seduced by it. You
wanted to reserve the "but they told me that it was OK" trump card for when it all goes pear-shaped. They know this, and that's why they do it. If you are clever enough to know better, you're aiding the enemy by causing them to do it more. Guess what: You
deserve to have lung cancer from smoking, to feel sick from knowing that you've been eating tainted horse-meat, to be lonely having been so obsessed with porn and games that you've missed out on having human relationships. You utter moron.
Humans are habitual, and routine can be a good thing. A routine can lead to an efficient and effective pattern of useful activities. A routine, however, can also become a disorder either when it becomes unnecessary, or when it becomes unnecessarily acute. An unnecessary routine might be instinctively going to the supermarket, when the local market has fresher and cheaper produce, or regularly buying far more food than you'll ever use and then throwing it away. An unnecessarily acute routine might be smoking 30 cigarettes a day, or playing a computer game or watching porn for many hours on end. Some of these examples might be surprising to you in that they're disorders. But think about it: They really are. Call them socially-accepted stealth disorders, if you will. What is most surprising is not only that they will invariably have been instigated by corporate advertisers, but that people have just sleep-walked into it. Advertisers use people's useful, genetic traits against them, creating, inventing and exacerbating disorders for their own financial gain. How is that not at best sick and psychotic, at worst pure evil? And yet The Public in all its genius glory has consciously allowed it.
Advertising works by having an arbitrary appeal. They need to stick in our heads, and so they use colourful graphics, clever plays on words, humour and easily-remembered slogans. They also use
repetition. Learning is done by repetition, of course, and they know this. Repeating something often enough can make a person believe in it, even if that person simultaneously knows it to be a lie. (This is known as
cognitive dissonance.) It's even been used in wartime to turn enemy combatants into traitors. And so their brands are everywhere, on every billboard, in the media, in the shops, in your mind.
All of these psychological tricks are powerful and irresistable and, thus, extremely dangerous in the wrong hands. At the same time, advertising (using these tricks) is the most effective means of companies achieving both goals of PR and customer mind-control. Its goal is not just to convince you to buy, it's to
require you to buy. The tricks in use are so sophisticated that you barely have a choice to abstain. And you are pulled in a million directions, following contrictary "buy this" instructions from competing products, your mind becomes worn down, more unstable and more vulnerable, and the effect gets worse. No wonder OCD is so prevalent.
As we've seen, companies can and will do all they can to make money, and for that reason they cannot be trusted to regulate themselves or conduct themselves in a moral way. And this is particularly the case with advertising, whether it's in the media, on product packaging, or in the way they lobby governments and worm their way into influencial regulating bodies and the legal profession. Now that the government has recognised that cigarette packaging (and, by logical extension, all advertising) causes people to buy cigarettes (or any other product), it would be idiotic to focus on cigarette branding and nothing else. Why not do the right thing, and put a morally-dead aspect of society out of its (and everyone else's) misery? After all, you can't fight a disease by innoculating the population of just one area. It has to be done all at once, or it's useless. It'll just bounce back or mutate, appearing again in a new and stronger guise.
The path to freedom is enlightenment. If you've learned something from the above, and you didn't feel patronised, then great - You are my main intended audience. Act on it. Remember it. Change yourself for the better.
If you
did feel patronised, but (as is likely) you've not acted on what you claim to have known all along, then you're one of the morons I was talking about earlier. You're orders of magnitude worse off than the group described above, despite what you must think of yourself.
For the remaining 1% of the population not covered above: Congratulations. You're certainly better off than I'll ever be.
