what can be good and bad effects of marketing on our society ?

[salmansh2k]

is it really a marketing is big motive of social change?

[b-overit]

well with marketing we can elect crap politicians always feel bad about ourself and buy more crap to make us feel better again!

[G A]

If you are marketing and advertising a product which necessarily has harmful health affects, like cigarettes for example, or has particularly harmful affects on the environment, such as vehicles which get very poor gas mileage and wind up polluting the atmosphere as a result of the fuel they burn, those would be bad effects of marketing. They are not direct effects, but they are indirect effects, and its difficult to argue that these effects are anything more than bad.

As for a good effect of marketing on society, think of any number of political action groups which promote the betterment of the environment, or the rights of people to express their opinions. In the USA, the ACLU comes to mind as such a political action group. Worldwide, Amnesty International is probably among the most widely known organizations working toward the protections of individuals rights all across the world. Both of these groups employ marketing, to various degrees, to get their messages across.

Can marketing be a big motive for social change? Absolutely, but it takes a lot of people to get on board for "the big guys" to pay any attention. Its happened plenty of times before, though, so there is no reason to believe it won't happen again.

[greg.gourdian]

Marketing often depends upon creating a perceived need for the products it sells when those products are not truly needed, or in respect to products people generally do want, marketing must then enhance the perceived need of the product.

Unfortunately marketing typically does this by implying that a peson's self esteem, or status in the socio-sexual arenas will be improved by purchasing only the particular brand of a given product that a particular marketing firm is advertising. However this is a dodgy game because often the touted product is in no way superior to its competitors which is where the manipulation of the consumer's perceptions comes into play. And since the product often can not be successfully advertised on its own merit, the point that most advertising firms rely upon to sell products is the ego and self esteem and socio-sexual status of the consumer. Advertising has been relying on this pitch to the ego for a very long time and successfully sells many useless or harmful products in this manner.

The fault with this pitch to the ego is that advertising creates social myths that imply that without the products they are selling the consumer is worth less in their own esteem and status in society. The deliberate undermining of our egos and esteem is crucial to the marketing ploys, so marketing has a vested interest in maintaining the belief among consumers that they are inferior and insecure and worth less in order to then establish in their minds a firm link to a false sense of superiority, security and enhanced socio-sexual status with the products being advertised.

This causes enormous anxiety and dysfunctional beliefs and attitudes among consumers as well as skewing their values to believe that something other than themselves and their good deeds and works can be the basis for their esteem and security. This is terribly harmful because it turns consumers into weak and delusional people who cannot adequately function on their own without buying into the false marketing precepts that are alleged by marketing to restore their sense of wellbeing and personal virtue.

This is how materialism has come to be such a powerful force in our societies and cultures. And while it is true that many people do not buy into all of these schemes to undermine their self worth, the majority buy into some of them and all of us are aflficted. Also, the mechanisms to undermine consumers' self worth become acculturated and passed on to each new generation thereby coming to be accepted without challenge which establishes a firmer foothold for these insidious self-destructive perceptual dynamics in the psyches of consumers.

MArketing is therefor extraordinarily harmful and the so-called economic benefits of marketing do not contribute anything of merit to justify this terrible erosion of our intrinisic sense of well being for the purpose of making it is easier for marketers to sell their products.

An additional harm is that marketing drives consumers to buy worthless products or to replace valuable products more frequently than is required to drive up sales. This increases waste and consumption of resources on a scale that threatens our environment and increases the scarcity of resources which in turn drives inflation by raising the base price of raw materials.

To compensate for the steady rise in costs industry looks to labor and thus jobs are threatened, underpaid or relocated overseas into cheaper labor markets. This steady errosion of consumers' economic security through the loss or devaluation of their jobs further drives their insecurity and serves marketing, so marketing causes direct harm to consumers both in terms of their psyches and their economic potentials.