In an economy where consumers (not to mention businesses,
banks, and state and local governments) must micromanage their spending, one
reality stands out: You live, therefore you pay. Yes, the sum total of who you
are, in bad times as well as good, can rightfully contain a price tag,
conceived and valued by marketers. In short, our lives are a
commodity-based-existence.
Advertising Age underscores this matter in a series
called “Bright Spots” of the down economy. One of these “bright spots” is that
sales of sleeping pills and antidepressants have gone up recently because of
the public’s anxiety over money. Here’s what they say:
“According to IMS Health,
prescriptions for major sleeping pill brands rose 7% last year, while
antidepressant-brand prescriptions jumped 15%...The economy, it appears is
keeping us up at night, according to a new “Sleep in
America
” poll pout this week from a
Washington-based National Sleep Foundation…”
In fact, according to one study, sleep is a $23 billion a
year industry, with purchases ranging from sleep therapy to mattresses. One
marketing vice president I know recommended, on behalf of his sleep-industry client,
that people change their mattress every five years or so. When I expressed my
surprise (I change my mattress at a regular cycle of hardly-ever-at-all) he
shrugged. “Well, that’s what they say. But, you know…” Such is the way of
commodities.
No surprise – it’s not just what’s in and of us – but what
we demand to keep us alive. Food is a commodity, Michelle Obama’s organic gardening
aside. (Besides, those organic manures and seeds have to come from somewhere, right?) Shelter (think
foreclosures) is a commodity. So is water.
According to food writer and bottled water expert Michael Cervin,
the water-as-commodity matter hits people especially hard. “We think water
should be free, probably because it’s so pure….Many people are used to getting their
water from the tap and resent paying for the bottled kind. They forget that
there’s an infrastructure to support water that they pay for in local water
bills or taxes.”
Water also supports the reality that in the commodity-based
universe, one person’s problem is another person’s economic gain. Many
municipal water sources are of dubious taste, for example, and tainted by
drugs, pesticides, heavy metals and other containments. Others, like the water
in my community, has cancer causing chemicals, as evidenced in the fine print
warnings that come with our water bills.
Marketers have made much of this need and the big guys, as
usual, are ahead. Cervin says there are approximately 500 water bottlers
nationwide, but mega-names such as Coca Cola, who bottles the Dasani brand,
swim at the top. Many have come under fire for portraying their brands as
“fresh” and “clean”, as in spring-fed and mountain-nurtured. In reality, many,
Dasani included, are actually purified tap water: think smog and concrete. No
matter, we’ve got to drink, right?
And speaking of problem-solvers: a bad economy offers plenty
of them. Perhaps the killer is one of Advertising Age’s “Bright Spots”: that
gun makers and retailers are experiencing an economic surge. In fact,
background checks have bumped up 42% last November to 1.5 million applicants.
The article is quick to point out that the increase in
firearms results, in part, from Obama’s presidency, which threatens to place
new restrictions on gun ownership. But other incentives include hunting, a
relatively inexpensive sport which also fills holes at the dinner table, and
self-defense in what some perceive as an increasingly unsafe world. In other words, touch my house or my
belongings and I’ll blow your head off.
Even better, this bright spot may have trickle-down economic
advantages for the doctors, physical therapists, and funeral directors who get
new business when the bullets fly. Something for (almost) everyone!
