Social
Impacts of Commercial Promotions
Disintegration of
community: Marketing emphasizes individual materialism over community
values and causes people to ignore their common public interests. The private is given much more attention than
the public.
Injustice: Marketing
promotions use public media to promote trivialities while serious
social concerns are ignored.
Loss of human values:
Promotions drown out the voices that speak of human values, such as
empathy and solidarity, which are the basis for a wise and humane
society. Marketing teaches us values that serve business and ignore
values that serve humans. They teach us to
ignore the needs of our peers and to compete for material status.
Promotion of stereotypes:
Large-scale promotions usually aim for the largest and/or most
profitable target groups. To effectively
convince these mass groups marketers must present ideas with which
consumers are already familiar with. This
often means the supporting of common assumptions even if they are
negative and/or inaccurate.
The objectification of
people, (especially women): Advertising
often portray woman as submissive sex objects with little to know
reference to their personality, skills or intelligence. The heavy use
of models teaches consumers to appreciate people more for their
appearance then the inner qualities. Such superficiality is unfair to
those without natural idealistic looks and does not encourage the
development of pleasant social personalities.
Degradation of culture -
Public social events are degraded by fabricated associations to a
brand, product or service. Rather then
just remembering an event or activity for its social, personal,
cultural and/or intrinsic values, corporate messages, whether
consciously or not, are forced into our mental scheme, tainting the
memory.
Consumerism and
materialism are short sighted, inhuman and unwise values to base a
culture on and will not help us solve global issues such as over
population, violent conflict, disease, malnutrition and global warming.
Source:
Goods and Services
|
return
Greed
Profit Consumerism
|
|
