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On Junk Food and Diamond Rings
ege02
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Going through my daily dose of RSS feeds, I came across this blog post by Seth Godin.
The diamond thing is something that occurred to me before, but I never thought about it from a marketing perspective. I always thought I'd buy my future wife a piece of stone that has some sort of intrinsic, emotional value, rather than something that society says is the ultimate sign of love, or something. But whenever I suggest that in conversations with female friends, I get scoffed at. I tell them that if I really want to show, in the form of a precious stone, how much someone means to me, I'd go mine the stone myself and cut it myself, or other such romantic crap, rather than paying a fortune for an overpriced tiny piece of jewelry that comes in a small blue box (Tiffany's!). They tell me that the diamond trumps all. I don't think there is any substance to what they believe. I think they've simply been brainwashed by marketing.
And of course Seth is right about the food dynamic at social events. I have yet to go to a Super Bowl event where the food consists of salad and soup and fish. Rather, it's always about high fructose corn syrup and chicken wings and shitty beer. Why? How is it that such nasty eating habits have become a tradition, and how is it that no one questions it?
The question is, how do we counter the adverse, unhealthy effects that marketing has had and is having on our culture and habits? My question isn't really about seeking blame; I think that misses the point, and ignores what really matters. Rather it's about recognizing that what society tells us does affect our behavior and worldview, and when it equates positive emotions with shitty habits, it becomes a nation-wide epidemic - as in the case of unhealthy food consumption.
Feel free to discuss these topics, or other things that marketing has thought us and we have never questioned (or were scoffed at when we did).
Seth Godin wrote:Many of us want fun and respect and love and success and kindness and hope. What brilliant marketers do is add the =.
A hundred years ago, food wasn't much of an industry. Today, packaged, profitable, processed food has transformed every element of our culture.
The Super Bowl is a food holiday. Visit (if you must) the local supermarket on a Sunday morning before the big game. That's the primary function of the event... to eat processed foods and beverages while hanging out with a group of people. Bonding via shared junk.
Same with a typical birthday party. Kids get validation from their friends (you came) and from their parents (yay, we get to eat junk.)
It's not an accident that fried corn, sugared beverages, semi-trans fats and white flour have become essential parts of our culture. You can't get elected in Iowa without pigging out at the Fair and you can't host a party without stocking up on the chips. Somehow, food marketing became a story about respect. Few people say, "it'll be fun... I'll make a big bowl of brown rice and serve oatmeal cookies I made from scratch." Too weird. Too risky. People might not like you if you challenge the food dynamic.
There's always been a cultural desire to conform. The difference is that now there's money at stake, so marketers push us to conform in ways that turn a profit.
Marketers, brilliant, profit-oriented marketers, have had a century to teach us to associate respect and kindness and love with certain kinds of food.
And that's why this post isn't just a screed, it's a lesson for marketers everywhere.
...Just as the jewelry and floral people have taught us that flowers and diamonds = love and that a respectable gentleman spends two months salary (!) on an engagement ring. Not an accident, of course. It's too risky, marketers teach us, to send a handmade card or skip the jewelry and buy a research grant or pay for part of a school.
...Just as the car you drive somehow says something about who you are.
...Just as the college-industrial complex has taught us that the best colleges are the ones that are the most expensive (making them the hardest to get into, furthering the cycle),
...you have the opportunity to start down this road with what you make.
So I'm hoping that what you make is worthy. Marketing is a powerful tool especially when it associates a product with a desire and instinct we already have.
Marketing, when it works, transcends any discussion of the benefits of the product or the service.
Marketing, instead, is about the equal sign.
Many of us want fun and respect and love and success and kindness and hope. What brilliant marketers do is add the =.
The diamond thing is something that occurred to me before, but I never thought about it from a marketing perspective. I always thought I'd buy my future wife a piece of stone that has some sort of intrinsic, emotional value, rather than something that society says is the ultimate sign of love, or something. But whenever I suggest that in conversations with female friends, I get scoffed at. I tell them that if I really want to show, in the form of a precious stone, how much someone means to me, I'd go mine the stone myself and cut it myself, or other such romantic crap, rather than paying a fortune for an overpriced tiny piece of jewelry that comes in a small blue box (Tiffany's!). They tell me that the diamond trumps all. I don't think there is any substance to what they believe. I think they've simply been brainwashed by marketing.
And of course Seth is right about the food dynamic at social events. I have yet to go to a Super Bowl event where the food consists of salad and soup and fish. Rather, it's always about high fructose corn syrup and chicken wings and shitty beer. Why? How is it that such nasty eating habits have become a tradition, and how is it that no one questions it?
The question is, how do we counter the adverse, unhealthy effects that marketing has had and is having on our culture and habits? My question isn't really about seeking blame; I think that misses the point, and ignores what really matters. Rather it's about recognizing that what society tells us does affect our behavior and worldview, and when it equates positive emotions with shitty habits, it becomes a nation-wide epidemic - as in the case of unhealthy food consumption.
Feel free to discuss these topics, or other things that marketing has thought us and we have never questioned (or were scoffed at when we did).
ege02 on
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Chicken wings are tastier than salad. If food companies could sell salad to people, they would. There's not much benefit for them in having fat people.
People have been giving each other shiny rocks since long before marketers as well.
I've been to many yuppie parties (never been to a "blue-collar" Superbowl party actually) and the food served was always junk food. Hell, my family is upper-middle class and my parents are doctors but when we watch soccer games together on Sunday nights we gorge on junk food. This is despite the fact that we normally eat super-healthy stuff.
Re: reciprocal feasting, yes, it has been a part of human culture for thousands of years, but it was only very recently we discovered that most of the stuff we traditionally feasted on is horrible for our health (not to mention processed food did not exist a thousand years ago). So it's not really about whether or not humans have been feasting for a long time, as much as it is about on what they have been feasting.
But it was never about only one kind of shiny rock reigning supreme over other kinds of shiny rock.
In 1908, food was a pretty goddamn big industry. In fact, the food industry has been a goddamn big industry for far longer than any other industry. From about here the article gets ridiculous. Processed food is popular because it's cheap to make, easy to obtain and tasty, nutrition be damned. In the minds of those that eat these things, the benefits outweigh the detriments. Whether marketers are responsible for pointing this out or not really doesn't matter - people would eventually figure it out anyways. The reason why brown rice is not an awesome party food is because it is pretty dull by itself and difficult to eat with your hands, and I've been to many parties that boast homemade cookies. Blaming shitty choices in diet solely on the evil marketers is stupid.
Holiday meals are famously bad for you in terms of weight gain. MOAR GRAVY.
Different foods are associated with different occasions as a matter of cultural practice. The origin of the trashy party food - sports game connection is likely connected to the blue-collar aspect, imo, but it's hardly unique to have occasions linked to foods.
Sure they have, just in different places at different times.
People snack on snack foods. This isn't much of a revelation.
A buddy of mine used a tungsten carbide ring. Both he and she are huge engineering nerds, though, so the perceived value of the ring is of a totally different nature.
Yeah, didn't De Beers single-handedly create the engagement ring tradition?
No
Good thing he didn't get a diamond, then.
Whoops, meant diamond engagement ring tradition.
No one is blaming marketers, and no one is putting the whole blame on marketers either.
But I guess you have to be more familiar with Seth Godin to get that from the article.
We may have slightly different definitions of 'blame' then. He seems to say that the diamonds=love association is bad, and that marketers are responsible for that association, which fits my definition of blaming.
That said, I think much of what he says is correct. Marketers take something that people instinctually want, such as love or comfort, and associate it with their product to make people purchase their product. As for how to counter this, we have to remind ourselves to look at products to determine if they actually deliver on what they say they'll give; because of course, there's no stupidity in purchasing a product for an attribute that it actually does have. However in the case of diamonds it's fairly unlikely that they would deliver on DeBeers says they'll give us (troo wuv). If you lower your expectations a little, though, then a diamond might be a good investment; for example if you just want a pretty sparkly that reminds your fiancee of your love for them, a diamond would be effective for that. In that case however, you'd want to compare it to other, perhaps cheaper, alternatives, such as a ruby or emerald. By my own guess I'd say that some other stone would be more cost effective than the usual diamond for that purpose, given that diamonds likely have a markup to account for their popularity.
I'll be fine, just give me a minute, a man's got a limit, I can't get a life if my heart's not in it.
Also, Emeralds are awesome.
And that's not even getting into the horrid inhumane practices that go in the diamond industry. Really, just buy a jug of the blood of an African, it's cheaper and cuts out the middle man.
Steam: pazython
But then it's all sickle-cell anemia and AIDSed up.
I realized engagement rings were dumb when I was like 10. It doesn't make any sense to me. Then again, I prefer function over form. I definitely won't be buying a diamond ring at any point. Especially with the inhuman practices that involve mining the damn things. Count me out.
Pun intended, right?
An article requiring an intimate knowledge of the works of the writer in order to understand the article as the writer intended is a poorly written article.
If one takes what Godin has written at face value, he starts by implying that unhealthy food is a new invention. He goes on to say that this unhealthy food has become popular in North American culture and attributes this popularity entirely to the work of food marketers. Following this is a series of unrelated instances where one thing is associated with another (why is this here?). Lastly, he contradicts himself in the last bit of the article. He states "Marketing is a powerful tool especially when it associates a product with a desire and instinct we already have." This is in direct contradiction with his earlier assertion that marketing caused the initial desire for unhealthy foods.
Of course, this contradiction doesn't mean very much, as his article is built on two false assumptions that render the entire thing false: that unhealthy food has only recently become popular, and that marketing is directly responsible for this popularity. 'Unhealthy' food, food full of sugar and fat, is a type of food we instinctively are drawn to like because it is an excellent source of piles of energy - which our bodies are programmed to horde in case of famine. We have always been drawn towards it and have always consumed it whenever possible, with our conscious ability to realize when we really need to eat that kind of food limiting our intake slightly at times.
Honestly, I didn't notice that when I wrote it.
Steam: pazython
Well, you can go with canadian diamonds to avoid that kind of stuff. But yeah, the pricing is totally bullshit.
took out her barrettes and her hair spilled out like rootbeer
Marketing is mostly about creating an emotional aspect to a product. You associate it with lifestyle and so forth, rather than simply the utility of the thing. Thing is, since people often DO create culture around the products they use... it kind of works out.
See: Fanbois.
Nowhere in the article does he state that the blame lies solely on the marketers.
His point is not necessarily that marketing directly caused the desire for unhealthy foods or created it out of nothing. His point is that it reinforced that desire and created a culture around it. Superbowl food culture, birthday food culture, whatever. In fact, his whole point is that marketing equates an emotion - in this case, a desire for sweet, fatty foods - with products, i.e. junk food brands. Just like it created the connection between love and diamonds.
I think your problem is that you're trying to read too much into what he's saying.
It's a blog post, not a stand-alone article.
I don't think this is why people buy snacks for Super Bowl parties. People buy the snacks because that's what they always do. Rarely do they make their own snacks, so Super Bowl parties are an extension of the routine, not something special.
People who regularly make their own snacks probably make some for their Super Bowl parties as well. I know I do.
For more formal gatherings (staff parties, holiday get toegethers) I always bring Humus, Tzatziki, and Guacamole made from scratch and most of my friends do the same thing. Hell sometimes we make aparty out of the cooking like when we all got together and made sushi at a friends place and ate while playing Rock Band.
Nah, emeralds are pretty brittle, and nearly all of them have flaws or cracks. Now, sapphires are where it's at, or, if you want a cheaper and more common stone, amethysts are beautiful. >.>
You know some dude who caught a hell of a break and doesn't even know it.
So basically I am never spending two month's income on some highly-compressed carbon. And any girl who thinks this is a big deal is probably not someone I'd want to marry in the first place, as pointed out several times above.
No, MrMr! Everyone is a dupe of The marketing Man except for ege! And Seth, apparently! They are stalwarts, defending us against our sheeple tendencies!
Look ege, I'll give as far as acknowledging that marketing makes us more likely to accept the cheap knockoff of the real deal, mostly because we usually can't afford the real deal anyways. But suggesting that they're making up traditions for us out of whole cloth instead of exploiting what's been there all along is pretty silly. The notion that we'd all be happy hippies but for that dang capitalism has never gotten us anywhere before, know what I'm saying?
Oh yeah well then why don't tropical birds feel compelled to bring eachother diamonds before mating and serve buffalo wings at celebratory gatherings? They don't! That proves it!
Diamonds come in a huge variety of colours. Pink, blue, black, brown, yellow...marketing just pushes the white diamond above all of those.
Diamonds are very pretty. They are very sparkly and, of course, they're very hard. The reason I don't ask for diamonds is that they're hideously overpriced. There's also the ethical conflict that comes into play (although this isn't a diamond-only problem). I can't say I'd always refuse a diamond, though; if money was not a problem, there are some fabulous pieces of diamond jewellery out there. But while I am an average-wage schmuck, any money spent on a diamond would be far better spent on rent or food or going into savings.
I'd rather have a high quality ring made from cheap materials and gems than spending the equivalent amount of money on a teeny-tiny, flawed diamond set in, say, platinum. Hence the two rings I have (engagement and 18th birthday) are titanium and sapphire and silver and amethyst. But I won't begrudge others their diamonds - provided the gift was given 100% willingly by someone who could most definitely afford it.
So: To summarise, nothing wrong with wanting or owning diamonds, but foolish to bankrupt yourself over and definitely not worth all that much. The diamond solitaire is by no means the only acceptable engagement ring! And I'm surprised at how many people would settle for an inferior gem when one could get a rarer stone that is double the size and has a better clarity/cut/etc. for the same price.
You are confering the idea that "Hey look, I care about you so much that I sacrificed two months salary for you". At least thats how society sees it. Similar things happen in most societies. Its about saying "this is how commited I am to you"
Now I really think all of this should be self evident if you are going to marry someone.
As for junk food, there are plenty of alternatives, like Hummus and grapes, for good tasting healthy food. But this stuff either goes bad(grapes) or takes a little effort to mix together(Hummus, which really should only take about one minute to mix if you buy the boxed stuff). I think people are just being lazy and grabbing for the chips which last forever and are cheap.
Although maybe some of it has some kind of weird unreasonable cultural value. Some of the junk food does take some time to make. But then again who makes it themselves? Quit being so lazy is the moral of the story.
but they're listening to every word I say
I'm not sure why you'd want to marry someone who's willing to blow two months' salary on a thing that doesn't perform any real function nor get you out of paying for two months worth of living expenses. You may love them dearly but if you're marry them you should probably make sure they're at least responsible enough with their money to keep themselves fed and sheltered, maybe able to keep the lights on and the shower working too.
The engagement ring I got my wife was Titanium with sapphires. It certainly did not cost anything even remotely close to two month's salary. Hell, I was working part-time at a video game store when I bought the ring, and it was probably more like two week's salary. IMO, anyone who pays more than, oh, $300 for an engagement ring is fucking nuts. Any woman who absolutely needs that diamond has a very real mental illness and should seek help immediately.
Marketing is certainly something...but the prevalence of shitty food has more to do, as mentioned before, with the availability and cost of said shit-foods.
There's no goddamn excuse for diamonds except sheer human stupidity, though.
Lab made diamonds are where it's at. My fiancee didn't want me to get her a natural diamond. She pointed me to a website, where her bio professor got his wife her ring. For about 400 dollars I got her a beautiful ring that impresses everyone. The 2nd smallest stone was about 15 dollars more than the smallest, and was bigger than stones that would cost 10 times more than that. Everyone oohs and ahs, and then when she tells them where I got it, they think it is really cool and socially responsible. Of course we know a lot of hippies...
Also she got me a tungsten carbide ring. So that is pretty neat too.
Thats precisely the reason. Its like "Look at me, I'm CRAZY for you, you are way more important than money" It functions as a symbolic sacrifice.
but they're listening to every word I say