Profitability does not depend on "what the consumer wants". It depends on what you can sell. Usually selling the consumer what they want is the most naive and least profitable way of doing that. If business were only concerned with giving consumers what they want, advertising agencies would go out of business.
If you want to maximise profitability, you need to make the consumer want things they don't need, then sell it to them in the most unfulfilling way you can get away with at the least cost to you. This is why the game industry is so desperately moving to subscription models (following the greater trend in software) and why Amazon is full of thousands of nearly indistinguishable brands selling you the same flawed goods. The benefit of this model is that you can also better compete on price (because you don't have to compete on quality) and normalize buying the same damn thing over and over again instead of having it last half a lifetime. If you do need to seem like you compete on quality, just add flashy new features of questionable use and remove old ones - often enough you can just cycle back after a few generations.
And if you're really lucky you can frame your product as a lifestyle or fashion good. Like there's now literally a current trend of people buying a specific travel mug as a fashion and lifestyle item. Filling their storage cabinets with dozens of these things in different colors or buying useless accessories for their accessory travel cup. This isn't driven by the consumers wanting travel mugs, this is entirely driven by selling the idea to consumers that they must own this specific travel mug and must have at least one in every color that is necessary to match their outfits. If it wasn't for advertising, nobody would buy them.
Nobody is holding a gun to the customer head and forcing them to buy travel mugs. They want them. They want them because of a trend and advertising, but they want them nonetheless.
As proof, I submit the fact that I don't want one and don't have a cabinet full of them.
Companies don't care what people want, as long as they want something. That could be eco-friendly free range coffee mugs, but the customers aren't interested in that
> They want them because of a trend and advertising
Yes. Humans are not rational economic actors. Humans are social creatures that can be manipulated through social engineering. That is my point. Holding a gun to a person's head is the most blunt and crude form of manipulation and also happens to be illegal. Modern advertising is a lot more refined than that.
What I contested was this:
> It is profitable because it what the consumer wants.
If you mean "it's profitable because it sells", then that is nearly tautological and I have no idea why you'd feel like you'd have to say that. What I assumed you meant was what people usually mean, i.e. "it is profitable because it fulfills a pre-existing need consumers wish to satisfy". My reply dissected that (common) claim at every step:
1. It is more profitable to induce a perceived need than to find a pre-existing need.
2. It is more profitable to only fulfill a need temporarily so you can sell to the same consumers multiple times.
3. It is more profitable to fulfill a need inadequately so consumers don't stop looking for a new way to fulfill the need after the purchase.
Implying that consumer choices are made freely in a vacuum without manipulation (i.e. what "not holding a gun to your head" implies) when we literally have billboards on the side of walls and advertisements blaring from every screen all the time and an entire caste of people literally referred to as "influencers" to appear authentic while trying to make you buy things is a bit disingenuous. And that doesn't even factor in the actual options available to consumers and how they are limited or their ease of how their access can drastically vary with zero relation to the underlying resource cost.
The reason we don't have eco-friendly free range coffee mugs is (aside from that not being a meaningful descriptor) that the coffee mug market is extremely saturated and coffee mugs are a solved problem because it's cheap to make long-lsting coffee mugs and the number of coffee mugs each consumer needs is very limited. The reason everyone's buying these overpriced coffee mugs is not that they need coffee mugs, it's that they have an induced desire for what that specific brand of coffee mugs represents.
> As proof, I submit the fact that I don't want one and don't have a cabinet full of them.
Either you're the one perfectly rational human who is more immune to social cues than the most autistic introvert, or you've just discovered that you're not part of the target audience of fancy fashion lifestyle coffee mugs. There is more than one consumer identity.
Heck, there are even consumer identities for people who think they're immune to advertising and influencers. Who do you think all those Che Guevara t-shirts and "nuke the whales" posters were sold to in the 1990s (before they became "ironic" fashion-wear)? The Devil Wears Prada had better media literacy than that:
https://artdepartmental.com/blog/devil-wears-prada-cerulean-...
To quote Garfield: You're not immune to propaganda.
> They want them because of a trend and advertising
>>Yes. Humans are not rational economic actors. Humans are social creatures that can be manipulated through social engineering. That is my point. Holding a gun to a person's head is the most blunt and crude form of manipulation and also happens to be illegal. Modern advertising is a lot more refined than that.
Agreed
> It is profitable because it what the consumer wants.
>>If you mean "it's profitable because it sells", then that is nearly tautological and I have no idea why you'd feel like you'd have to say that. What I assumed you meant was what people usually mean, i.e. "it is profitable because it fulfills a pre-existing need consumers wish to satisfy".
My point is closer to what you called tautological, and my point is that it is not accurate to attribute choice, agency, or control to the consumer, while attributing full agency, control, and responsibility to seller. If you want to make a critical judgement about corporations selling crap for profit, at a minimum, you have to be open to a critical judgement about consumers wanting crap. There is a duality to it and feedback loop. If people weren't hungry to buy prestige, sex appeal, or fleeting distractions from their problems, crap wouldnt sell, and advertising for it wouldnt work.
Restated, what I object to is holding individual human desires and preference as flawless or perfect, and refusing to acknowledge the causal role it plays in what products are produced and profitable.
You can't simultaneously hold that corporations are exploiting a flaw in consumer psychology without admitting that consumers have a psychological flaw.
>The reason everyone's buying these overpriced coffee mugs is not that they need coffee mugs, it's that they have an induced desire for what that specific brand of coffee mugs represents....Either you're the one perfectly rational human who is more immune to social cues than the most autistic introvert, or you've just discovered that you're not part of the target audience of fancy fashion lifestyle coffee mugs. There is more than one consumer identity.
The fact that different target markets exist is itself evidence that differences exist in consumer desire and response to advertising. People have different levels of response to advertising, and different response to different kinds. I dont claim to be immune to it, but I do think that people can be more or less susceptible, and personally strive to align my consumption with realistic long term self interest.
I think that individuals play a role in commodification and consumerist behavior, and this can be reduced by thought, introspection, and cultural shifts. If there is a "solution", I dont think it is a world where individuals are lusting for crap that provides distraction or short-term satisfaction, and corporate restraint is only thing that keeps it from being produced.
Each of your core claims have corollaries:
>1. It is more profitable to induce a perceived need than to find a pre-existing need.
I dont know if I agree. The world has a lot of real big and expensive problems. Housing, healthcare, human development, sustainability. There is a lot of money to be made if individuals see these as a priority.
>2. It is more profitable to only fulfill a need temporarily so you can sell to the same consumers multiple times.
Customers prefer cheap short term solutions to more expensive or painful long term solutions. Long term solutions are expensive. See #1
>3. It is more profitable to fulfill a need inadequately so consumers don't stop looking for a new way to fulfill the need after the purchase.
Buy it for life products exist, and most dont buy them, for various reasons. Somehow advertising is less effective.
If you want to maximise profitability, you need to make the consumer want things they don't need, then sell it to them in the most unfulfilling way you can get away with at the least cost to you. This is why the game industry is so desperately moving to subscription models (following the greater trend in software) and why Amazon is full of thousands of nearly indistinguishable brands selling you the same flawed goods. The benefit of this model is that you can also better compete on price (because you don't have to compete on quality) and normalize buying the same damn thing over and over again instead of having it last half a lifetime. If you do need to seem like you compete on quality, just add flashy new features of questionable use and remove old ones - often enough you can just cycle back after a few generations.
And if you're really lucky you can frame your product as a lifestyle or fashion good. Like there's now literally a current trend of people buying a specific travel mug as a fashion and lifestyle item. Filling their storage cabinets with dozens of these things in different colors or buying useless accessories for their accessory travel cup. This isn't driven by the consumers wanting travel mugs, this is entirely driven by selling the idea to consumers that they must own this specific travel mug and must have at least one in every color that is necessary to match their outfits. If it wasn't for advertising, nobody would buy them.