In this edition of Age of Persuasion, Terry O’Reilly talks about the “manufactured need” perception of advertising, and — oddly enough — specifically mentions ring around the collar of an often-cited manufactured need. He counters my point of view by pointing out that nobody just throws an ad campaign, let alone an entire product, out into the marketplace without rigorous testing. Ring around the collar, specifically, became the basis of an ad campaign because when people who were doing laundry were queried about their biggest problems, that came up more than any other.

So perhaps there was an unaddressed desire for a solution to a problem that had not really reached the social consciousness, even though it affected a lot of individuals. If that’s the case, kudos to the marketers; I’m sure they sold a lot of detergent as a result. But there are still two points to be made:

First, ring around the collar is not exactly the same as my other example, yellow teeth. Yellow teeth weren’t really a problem until the solution became available. Only then did some people start to have whiter teeth — thereby making the rest of us look worse, and preying on our insecurities. Consider, too, that the National Institute of Health did not formally recognise Restless Leg Syndrome until 2003; in 2005, Ropinirole was approved for the treatment of RLS. In 2006, the FDA approved Miraplex. Were these drugs developed to treat a previously identified condition? Or was the formal recognition of the condition provoked by groups looking to sell treatment? Maybe that’s just the conspiracy theorist in me, but I can’t imagine the NIH just spontaneously decided to address this issue without some sort of lobby group pushing for it.

Secondly, it didn’t end with ring around the collar. As I wrote above, this was followed by static cling, grass stain, dingey whites, colours than run, colours that fade. There’s always something. Is this truly a response to a continually evolving set of needs and demands on the part of the consumer? Or is there a certain degree of mining for problems, or the seeds of problems, which are then developed into exaggerated problems that require direct address?

I suppose my writing above is more one-sided than I would like it to be. There is definitely a more nuanced interplay between the consumer and the advertiser than I suggest. But I can’t believe that advertisers simply react to consumers — there is a great deal of shaping of our needs and wants, if not, perhaps, the wholesale creation of them. Arguably that is a difference in the degree of exploitation going on, not a refutation that it is happening.

If you’re interested in finding out if advertising does in fact diminish quality of life, look to the Sao Paulo example, they went Ad free a few years ago, but I’m not sure how that worked out for them, and the economy, but the fact that they’ve done it in the first place suggests that the city wasn’t entirely dependent on consumerism. But I guess the place was a little out of control, with no ad regulation whatsoever, I suppose it was bound to happen.

http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/jun2007/id20070618_505580.htm