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Kuyang pa! Yes, it is true that we are consumers. But it seems that
we are obsessed of consuming even if we already have enough. What is the reason
why you bought that new shirt when in fact you have around 20 of them? Is the
21st significant or you just played the victim to consume more?
A marketing strategy refers to a
business's overall game plan for reaching prospective consumers and turning
them into customers of the products or services the business provides. Peter
Ducker aptly said that the aim of marketing is to know and understand the
customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself. But it was
Sergio Zyman who intelligently said that the sole purpose of marketing is to
sell more to more people, more often and at higher prices.
Have you ever wondered why cellular
phones are constantly upgrading into new models? This is for the consumers to
continuously buy them. If one stops and be contended with the old one, the business
won’t thrive. Fashion is evolving. Without the new trends, why buy for more?
Products and events are marketed
for the consumers to have more…
Take for instance the celebration
of Halloween (which is not a Filipino tradition but a copied one). We see spaces
being populated by the commercial establishments indirectly telling us that we
must wear costumes. The social media sites are posting little kids doing “trick
or treat” and we fall into that marketing stuff. We even fail to dig deeper why
we encourage kids to be exposed to scary props with decapitated heads. We just
want to do them since others are doing it! Costumes and customized items for
the event are saleable during these induced events.
But, what is really is the deeper
motivation of this?
It is said that without GREED we
would still be living in caves but, left unchecked, the insatiable desire for
more and better material things can be destructive.
The definition of greed is an
extreme or excessive desire for resources, especially for property such as
money, real estate, or other symbols of wealth (Taflinger, 1996). In basic
terms, "excessive" is possessing something to such a degree it's
harmful. But how could a desire for wealth be harmful? Every person needs a
degree of wealth to survive: you need to buy food, pay the rent, clothing,
transportation, haircuts, and cable TV. Without money, you could starve or
freeze to death.
People who are consumed by greed
become utterly fixated on the object of their greed. According to Neel Burton,
M.D. (2020), their lives are reduced to little more than a quest to accumulate
as much as possible of whatever it is they covet and crave. Even though they
have met their every reasonable need and more, they are utterly unable to
redirect their drives and desires to other and higher things.
These people are fixated to their
desires and will forget to be humane. They see others as competition. They
compare their possessions to others. With the social media sites where people
display their acquired wealth, new clothes and travels, the need to have more
intensifies.
The FOMO (fear of missing out)
was theorized with the coming of the information technology. It refers to the
feeling or perception that others are having more fun, living better lives, or
experiencing better things than you are. It involves a deep sense of envy and
affects self-esteem. It is often exacerbated by social media sites like
Instagram and Facebook (Scott, 2020).
Greed, Burton continues, is also
associated with negative psychological states such as stress, exhaustion,
anxiety, depression, and despair, and with maladaptive behaviors such as
gambling, scavenging, hoarding, trickery, and theft. By overriding reason,
compassion, and love, greed loosens family and community ties and undermines
the bonds and values upon which society is built.
The psychologist Abraham Maslow called the bottom four levels of the NEED pyramid ‘deficiency needs’ because a
person does not feel anything if they are met. Thus, physical needs such as
eating, drinking, and sleeping are deficiency needs, as are security needs,
social needs such as friendship and sexual intimacy, and ego needs such as
self-esteem and peer recognition.
On the other hand, Maslow called
the fifth level of the pyramid a ‘growth need’ because it enables a person to
‘self-actualize’, that is, to reach his or her highest or fullest potential as
a human being. Once people have met all their deficiency needs, the focus of
their anxiety shifts to self-actualization, and they begin—even if only at a
subconscious or semiconscious level—to contemplate the context and meaning of
their life and life in general.
With these theories, one can
conclude that people who are still on their “deficiency needs” are the ones who
are trying to accumulate more. They often feel empty even if they have enough
since there is the absence of MEANING to their existence. Self-evaluation is
necessary to transcend towards the next stage which has the “growth need”.
By doing so, the hunger to have
more will be replaced by the need to have meaningful relationships,
contribution to the society, humane and altruistic, and the spiritual awareness
to be one with the universe.
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