Insatiable

 

                                  (image: medium.com)

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 21^st 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.