The Holiday Season is upon us. For many it is a time of giving and receiving, a time to reconnect with old acquaintances and reminisce about the year. We receive cards and tokens. Stores stock their shelves with merchandise befitting to the season and there is a general aura of excitement about it.
For businesses, Christmas is a particularly important time of year. For most small businesses, Christmas sales make the difference between a good year and a bad year. Box and department stores are particularly opportunistic when it comes to Christmas although they are not so dependent on the season for monetary survival.
Consumers are often drawn into wild spending habits during the holiday season. People constantly spend beyond their means, racking up credit card debt that will follow them well into the New Year if not further. This is, for a large part, due to marketing. Advertisers use slogans like “Christmas Spirit” and “The Spirit of Giving” as leverage to push consumerism to its absolute limit. Few even think to forgo giving are receiving gifts because of the undesirable sense of stinginess it creates. You’re not greedy are you?
Because Christmas can bring such revenue, corporations milk it for all it’s worth. Especially vicious advertising is employed to create a sense of guilt in the consumer, “Is that DVD really good enough, she’s so important to me after all, I should really get more.” For those who abstain, alienation is the norm and the advertisers paint them with the harshest light possible, SCROOGE! As a result, Christmas has become, for better or worse, a Holy Day of consumer Holidays. But it hasn’t always been this way.
In the 1920s marketing looked much different than it does today; products were marketed to an individual’s needs rather than desires. Products became popular by being durable and an items utility was of prime importance. In the 1930s, things changed dramatically. Corporations began appealing to an individual’s desires rather than needs. Paul Mazur, a prominent Wall Street banker working for Lehman Brothers wrote:
“We must shift America from a needs- to a desires-culture. People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old have been entirely consumed. We must shape a new mentality in America, man’s desires must overshadow his needs.”
People will act irrationally if you link products to their desires and emotions. Advertisers know this and capitalize on it. If anyone thinks they are undiluted by this form of marketing they are mistaken. Edward Bernays, the pioneer of the affective advertising in use today, said that advertisers would give us our thoughts and they would come to us as if they were our own ideas. If you have ever thought that you deserve to go buy yourself something for all your hard work then you can be sure that Bernays’ advertising has worked on you. Consumerism has become the opiate of the masses and it is the true religion of the Holyday Season.
It is for these reasons that I am not giving gifts this year and I have asked others in my life to refrain from giving me gifts as well. I’m not asking anyone else to do the same but what I do ask is that you at least think about why you’re participating in this holiday. Why is it that we give at a certain, designated time of year? Why do we focus endlessly on material objects that are obsolete before they get to store shelves? I think it’s time to analyze why we celebrate in this way and ask who really stands to gain from our behaviour. It certainly isn’t us.
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