452 The Marketing Book
it facilitates competition, rather than inhibiting
it; consumers appreciate the added value it
can confer on a product; in a generally pros-
perous economy, ‘experts’ have no right to tell
us what we should or should not want, and
ordinary people are in any case quite bright
enough to recognize it for what it is, and act
accordingly.
It is furthermore highly arbitrary to single
out promotional expenditure as the economic
culprit. White (1993) points out that: ‘When
economists say that customers are paying for
the advertising when they buy the product,
they are guilty of a false analysis – unless they
also say that the customer is paying for the
sales forces, the delivery vans, the warehouses
and the order clerks.’
Likewise, it is not typically promotion
that monopolists use to erect barriers against
competitors, but rather price wars and satura-
tion of distribution channels. Furthermore,
effective advertising is not a matter of simply
quantity: quality counts heavily when con-
sumers are sophisticated and know how to
play the game.
White puts it well again: ‘In fact, the
possibility open to new challengers of using
media advertising, with its rapid coverage of
mass audiences, tends to make monopolies
more rather than less vulnerable to attack.’
The newspaper circulation wars in the UK in
the 1990s are a case in point. The Timestook on
the tabloids by slashing its price, not by
spending millions to advertise its intellectual
superiority.
The insistence that consumers should want
reasons and hard facts, not emotional involve-
ment or intangible satisfactions, reflects the
long-standing economic model of ‘rational
man’. Yet it was a noted economist who
remarked, half a century ago, on the ‘tremen-
dous spiritual satisfaction in buying a trusted
brand of cocoa – not a shovelful of brown
powder of uncertain origin’. His choice of the
adjective ‘trusted’ expresses the idea of an
intangible added value. The danger of the
economists’ line of argument is that it denies
legitimate subjective satisfactions. Shoppers do
not need to buy the best if the second- or third-
best pleases them more. Nor must they always
buy the most economical if they trust the
promoted brand more. That is why shoppers so
often buy Cadbury’s drinking chocolate instead
of a supermarket’s own brand, of course.
Readers keen to pursue the economic case for
and against advertising will find an excellent
review in Lind (1998, pp. 10–33).
Not only economists have strong views
about promotion; it is regularly subject to
cultural and ethicalcriticism. The main charges
in this case are that it ‘dumbs down’ society –
that is, debases cultural values – and controls
the news media through their reliance on
advertising revenue. These critics also deploy
the wants-versus-needs argument.
The first of these rests on the implicit belief
that relatively powerful advertisers can manip-
ulate relatively powerless audiences, which in
turn hinges on the ‘mad scientist’ view of
advertising people. Those who take this view
normally cite the immensely influential book,
The Hidden Persuaders, first published in 1957
and reissued with an added introduction and
epilogue in 1981 (Packard, 1991). They do not
always mention that the author was a crusad-
ing journalist who wrote a series of trenchant
critiques of American business, or that the cases
he reports all took place in the 1950s, when
times were distinctly different.
If the manipulators of the promotional mix
do have special powers, whether based on
psychological principles as Packard suggests or
derived from whatever else, these remain the
most closely guarded of secrets. Even those
who work in the business cannot explain what
they are.
It is, furthermore, an uncomfortably con-
tradictory fact that, on average, four in every
five new products fail in the marketplace
despite introductory promotion. Either the hid-
den persuaders are very bad at making use of
their special powers or modern audiences are
better than the critics think at resisting the
promotional hype.