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Above stills from Thomson Holidays TV advert and Specsavers TV advert
Creativity is a wonderful thing and, all over the world, agencies and individuals are striving to find ways to get you and me to engage with their product. If something confronts us as being new,different or in some other way unexpected, I contest that it would be impossible for us not to experience some intellectual response.
The advertising proposition would, or wouldn’t, appeal simply on the grounds of our subconscious need to gather data to inform our response. Some response will be inevitable, whether conscious or unconscious, but this may well be different from that of the person standing next to you and that’s the whole consumer argument wrapped up in a simple sentence: whether we like it or not, and whether we are aware of it or not, we are all consumers, acting in a normal, consumerist fashion. As consumers, we are making hundreds of ‘buying’ decisions every hour; each time we open a magazine, look into a shop window, turn on the TV or open our wardrobes.
We shouldn’t confuse buying with the process of money changing hands – that’s a commercial reality of some aspects of this behaviour – but every time we look at a magazine or open our wardrobe we are making a series of decisions about whether to turn the page now or look for more information, or simply which clothes to wear today. A ‘buying’ decision can equally effectively relate to using things we already have, to planning and holding in reserve information to be used at a later date when choosing or purchasing products or services, to taking the plunge and purchasing something from a seller now, or even to choosing which person to talk to in the bus queue. The same set of synaptic stimuli will be engaged in any of these processes, although the interpretation and/or storage of the information can differ profoundly.
What has changed to make customers think and behave differently from the days when Alf Wight wrote All Creatures Great and Small?
Actually, there has been a huge amount of change, some of it due to reality and some of it due to perception, but rather a lot of it due to a freeing-up of every individual’s ability to spend money. The past twenty years have seen an explosion in personal credit, stoking the fires of economic independence that were lit after the end of World War II.
Of course, recent economic pressures will have made us think twice about casual spending but in post-war Britain, we have had several recessions while the overall trend towards dramatically increased personal wealth has continued despite these cyclical challenges.
In 1945, when the war had ended and the dust settled, people in the UK found that much of the class system that had previously applied had been swept away, leaving widespread support for egalitarianism. Most importantly, every family and individual had shared in the horrors of the war and in the camaraderie and sharing that had affected everyone from fighting men and women to those left picking up the pieces at home. The net result was a nation of individuals who felt that they could succeed with hard work and application and without the rigid class divides that had compartmentalised people according to their education, background and genetics. For the first time, people sensed the optimism that came from opportunity, and with it came a need to regenerate employment to restore the fabric of the country. Increased employment and opportunity created more wealth and higher spending. Higher spending created awareness among a populace eager to be recognised for its new standing, and this fuelled a desire to acquire the same things as friends and neighbours had. Avarice is hardly a newly invented sin and, post-war, the end of a period of abstinence from spending and acquisition, together with new opportunities and higher awareness, created an explosion of desire to enjoy a wide range of products and services that had hitherto been unavailable or, perhaps, only available to a select few.
Suddenly, anything was possible, although the real explosion in consumption didn’t happen until people put away their traditional insistence on saving for spending rather than borrowing the money to facilitate the purchase. Phrases like ‘on the never-never’ and ‘having it on tick’ were new to the UK, whereas the idea of Christmas Club saving can be traced much further back than the 1950s.
This explosion in people’s willingness to borrow money to bring forward a purchase stemmed from the widespread need to borrow money to buy new homes after the war and also from a gradual diminution of the controlling influence of the outside agencies, such as the church and rigid social expectations, in people’s lives. As these influences began to wane, so there was less and less opposition in society to the appeal of instant gratification, and the idea of unfettered consumption spread like wildfire.
Of course, we were not without a great deal of assistance in developing our new-found love affair with acquisition. In the 1960s, the humble trading stamp burst onto the scene in the form of Green Shield stamps. These were offered free of charge by retailers to add value to their market offering and to encourage loyalty from their client base. It was a great way for retailers to differentiate themselves. and suddenly individuals felt that they had increased importance to the retailer and that they were themselves people of means whose business was being actively courted. The craze for collecting these stamps and claiming free gifts from a catalogue of items spread like wildfire, as our avarice and lust for various items grew and the pound in our pockets took on a higher value (though only in our heads, as one needed hundreds of completed books of stamps to be able to exchange them for something quite small but nonetheless free).
For big items of expenditure we rapidly became familiar with the idea of hire purchase, but for smaller everyday acquisitions we had to look no further than the USA, where the credit card had been created during the 1930s and had become well established by the 1950s. Because the UK bought movies and television programmes from the US, it was plain for all to see that everyone in the USA lived like kings, with luxurious houses, huge cars and every labour-saving device known to man.
It wasn’t long before everyone in the UK wanted the same things, and with the advent of independent commercial television in 1955 we soon became used to seeing regular advertisements for things we didn’t know we wanted. There were fourteen regional franchises distributing ITV from Penzance to Penicuik, and our conversion to an acquisitive society happened almost overnight. By the end of the 1960s, we had the desire to acquire things long before we could afford to buy them, encouragement from advertisers and retailers that it was normal to feel this way, and the wherewithal thanks to hire purchase, overdrafts and credit cards to do so.
As savings declined and spending increased, people found it easier and easier to justify their spending both to themselves and to others, and in this process an essential part of consumer behaviour was born. The concept, to quote a hair products advertisement, ‘because you’re worth it’ is a fundamental part of the consumer process. No one can successfully spend money on themselves if they believe that they are unworthy recipients of the goods or services purchased. Instead, we seek solace and satisfaction from the act of purchasing, which acts rather like an artificial endorphin: just as our massive national consumption of chocolate revolves around the notion of self-reward, so the act of buying something, if all the component parts come together into a successful experience, is both satisfying and rewarding. The phrase ‘retail therapy’ reflects this concept admirably.
It is easy to adopt a stereotypical approach to this; all Scots are reputed to be mean, all women want to do is to buy shoes etc but deep down, we all know that that isn’t true. Every single one of us is, to a greater or lesser extent, an avid consumer even though we may not know it. Some of us are innately spontaneous and buy things without any period of contemplation, others research the whole concept to death and, in a time of economic difficulty, it is no surprise that the rise of comparison websites has been astronomical. Now, even those who like to research the minute details are interested in the consumer reviews of purchasers who did so before them.
Ten years ago, few of us would have been interested in what someone we’d never met thought or wrote but now, most of us read the consumer reviews as a sort of filter to check on the product claims and to prepare ourselves for purchase. In a measure of self protection, we even have formed a virtual community of other consumers. With the advent of social media, that virtual community can topple governments – literally.
It is clear that the principal influences on the development of this process of self-reward have been many and complex but the end result has been an explosion in consumerism and the creation of an altogether self-orientated approach to wanting things on our own terms. We should remember, however, that this description fits each one of us too and, even though we may choose to compartmentalise the idea of consumerism as an interesting social construct, it has a massive, daily effect on our own lives, those of our friends and families and the difference between success and failure in our businesses.