Advertisements are deceptive when the consumer is led to believe that he will achieve one good while the advertiser has an intended outcome concealed from the consumer. In most cases, the consumer is motivated to spend to achieve goal A but achieves goal B, which is beneficial to the advertiser. Deception also occurs when the advertiser does not mention other accompanying products needed for the main one to work. For instance, a phone may be advertised to be costing a certain price, but when someone wants to purchase, he/she is made to pay an additional price for the battery or another important accessory. The rule of reasonable person standards cannot be applied as a rule of thumb for all (Schor, 2001). Consumers have autonomy few features cannot be generalized across all people.
The Dependence Effect and Associative Advertisement
The dependence effect implies that wants are created through their routes of satisfaction thereby creating a chain of wanting to satisfy a want. Thus, the consumer is not satisfied in the end but made to desire more and more resulting in manipulation. An enslavement chain is established when a system is designed in such a way that consumers will always want to buy the product even when they do not necessarily need it.
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Associative advertising is the form of advertisement that establishes an association between market products and non-market desires such happiness and esteem (Schor, 2001). The product is tagged with abilities to help one achieve intangible qualities such as happiness and class. With the manipulative strategy, the producer provides and defines the result to be achieved respectively and ends up manipulating the buyers’ psychology.
Price Discrimination; Price Gouging
Price gouging is a concept defining the increase in prices above normal due to factors supply costs or selling the same product at different prices based on the economic strength of the buyers. This is where increased demand comes into play (Schor, 2001). However, it is an unfair practice because it exploits the consumer who does not know the production costs.
Defining Cycle of Work and Spend, Ecological Bias, and Consumer Competition
The concept of the “cycle of work and spend” is based on the work regulation under which employees find themselves in bondage. They are required to work and work longer as the employees would want them and earn only to spend it without having a meaningful break for other leisure activities (Schor, 2001). Thus, the employee is broken by work, expenditure, and lack of enough leisure time. Ecological bias is related to the commoners’ problem where a public resource is misused because no one is expected to pay for it. Thus, an ecological aspect such as air is polluted and no one cares because he or she does not have to account for the wastage or pollution.
Finally, consumer competition fuels the behaviors mentioned above. In consumption competition, because of the desire to achieve status, esteem, and pride, people are driven to consume and consume repeatedly without proper restraint (Schor, 2001). This cycle feeds the need to keep working and to use ecological resources without restraint. Consumer competition is the worst case because of the work, spend, and ecological biases cycle.
References
Schor, J. B. (2001). Why do we consume so much? 1-14
