Hyperconsumption

Corporate Marketing vs. the Planet

Gerard Hastings

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000569810
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Business

Diving deep into the world of corporate marketing, this incisive and eye-opening work shows how, in the hands of the corporation, business has become manipulative, divisive and disastrously at odds with the needs of the natural world. It calls on us to rethink and rebel.

The corporate marketing blitz is driven by a simple economic truth: profits depend on demand always exceeding supply. A multi-billion-dollar global industry has therefore been created with the sole aim of turning us into devout consumers. Gerard Hastings invites us to explore alternatives to a system that is threatening our survival. He explores what it is to be human, how marketing can be used to do good rather than harm and the potential of alternative models that empower us to be citizens, not just consumers.

Professionals and students in the business, marketing, public health, environmental and political sectors – as well as concerned citizens who know that business as usual is not an option – will value this accessible guide to what is going wrong with our current business models and how these failings can be addressed.

Part IThe Corporate Marketing Machine

10.4324/9781003268567-2

All good rebellions are built on counterintelligence. This first half of the book looks in detail at the methods and tools of the corporate marketer. At the power these deliver to the corporation, and the problems they cause – but also at their flaws and weaknesses. These insights set the scene for the alternatives we discuss in the second half of the book.

Chapter 1Original SinThe Spawning of Corporate Marketing

DOI: 10.4324/9781003268567-3

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.

(Edward Bernays 1928, Propaganda)

Of Confidence Tricks and Rebellion

Business is a thing of beauty. It makes manifest the human need for cooperation. We have always done deals and made exchanges. Our local shops and street markets give us pleasure as well as a vital service. Things only get ugly when power intervenes; when some businesses become too big and dominant. This imbalance is writ large with the modern business corporation, driven by investors’ scruple-free funds and a psychopathic focus on profits.

These corporations have now grown bigger than many countries, can sidestep government control and avoid taxes. We see their predations very clearly from time to time – the too-big-to-fail banks of 2008, the farmers suffering at the hands of bloated supermarkets, the arrogance of the tech giants – but mostly they hide very successfully behind the synthetic charm of marketing. Their logos and slogans, celebrity endorsers, sponsorship, bargain prices, and the rest calm our concerns and pull us into the consumer capitalist project. So instead of rebelling, we join loyalty schemes; rather than man the barricades, we buy the bargains; in place of criticism and recrimination we make sad jokes about retail therapy.

There is Business and There is Big Business

We human beings are sociable creatures. We need each other. If we are to eat, get shelter, have comfortable and safe lives we have to work together. Back on the Savanna we collaborated to survive: if I could hunt and you could cook, together we ate. If the prey was big we would hunt as a team. As human society grew, we started trading, exchanging corn for chickens or furs for iron. We got on by doing deals and making exchanges that benefit all those involved. This early commerce was vital to the development of sophisticated human culture. As Yuval Harari¹ explains in Sapiens, it even drove the emergence of writing. The first written words archaeologists have found are on 5000-year-old Sumerian tablets and they didn’t concern literature or high-minded ideas, but facts and figures about transactions. The first writers weren’t poets but accountants. Their contribution to human progress was nonetheless profound: without these early bookkeepers there would be no poets – or at least no record of their work.

Martin Luther King’s celebrated Christmas sermon emphasised the potential joy of this mutual dependence. By breakfast time, in his words, we had shaken hands with people from France to West Africa, from China to South America.

Did you ever stop to think that you can’t leave for your job in the morning without being dependent upon most of the world? You get up in the morning and go to the bathroom and reach over for the sponge, and that’s handed you by a Pacific Islander. You reach for a bar of soap, and that’s given to you at the hands of a Frenchman. And then you go into the kitchen to drink your coffee for the morning and that is poured into your cup by a South American. And maybe you want tea: that’s poured into your cup by a Chinese.

Or maybe you desire to have cocoa for breakfast, and that’s poured into your cup by a West African. And then you reach over for your toast, and that’s given you at the hands of an English-speaking farmer, not to mention the baker. And before you finish eating breakfast in the morning, you’ve depended on more than half the world.

This is the way our universe is structured. It is its interrelated quality.²

Business is the system we have developed to organise all these transactions, and at its best it is indeed a source of joy. Small shops and street markets epitomise these benefits. We have already met Michael and Morag, who run my local green grocery and provide a great service: quality produce at a competitive price delivered to your door if needed. They are also an important part of our local community: they are friends as well as providers.

But not all business is like this. Indeed in many places Michael and Morag are a dying breed, replaced by a much bigger and less attractive form of commerce. Think back to 2008 when too-big-to-fail swindled their way to extravagant bonuses and then got bailed out. Think of the oil companies’ efforts to downplay the dangers of global heating. They spent decades denying the problem, despite their scientists being among the first to know about it. As long ago as 1959, before the Beatles had cut a record or Kennedy been assassinated, the US oil industry was clearly warned by Edward Teller, the guest speaker at their centennial conference, about the drastic harm carbon fuels were doing to the climate:

Whenever you burn conventional fuel, you create carbon dioxide … Carbon dioxide has a strange property. It transmits visible light, but it absorbs the infrared radiation which is emitted from the earth. Its presence in the atmosphere causes a greenhouse effect … It has been calculated that a temperature rise corresponding to a 10 per cent increase in carbon dioxide will be sufficient to melt the icecap and submerge New York. All the coastal cities would be covered, and since a considerable percentage of the human race lives in coastal regions, I think that this chemical contamination is more serious than most people tend to believe.³

Sixty years later, in 2019 an investigation by InfluenceMap shows that the five largest global oil and gas companies spend nearly $200m (£153m) a year lobbying to delay, control, or block policies to tackle climate breakdown, whilst at the same time parading bogus, “Beyond Petroleum”, green credentials in their advertising.⁴

Or consider the tobacco industry. For decades it denied the dangers of smoking and continues to make enormous profits from an addictive product which kills half its customers. Addiction is such a profitable business model – which is why it is now busily hedging its bets with vaping products. The World Health Organisation estimates that tobacco multinationals are killing five million people a year now and this will increase to ten million by 2030.

Then there is Big Tech’s dominance of the digital world. A recent US Congress investigation into Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google said it had found in Silicon Valley “the kinds of monopolies [last seen] in the era of oil barons and railroad tycoons”. The European commission has fined Google a total €8.25bn for three separate antitrust violations since 2017 – not that the company will be struggling to pay up as it made profits of $34bn last year alone.⁵ Or think of Facebook, the so-called social network which actually makes 98% of its revenue from advertising. It is not putting us in touch with one another; it is teeing us up for advertisers.

Enter the Corporation

These were not just businesses, but corporations and are financed by investors – shareholders in the UK, stockholders in the US. This means that corporate execs are always spending other people’s money so, to keep things straight, the “fiduciary imperative” requires that the corporate marketer always prioritises the interests of their investors. All too often these interests are narrowly defined as financial returns, so profits come before all other considerations – fairness, the climate, health, privacy. It is this single-minded focus on the bottom line that led to the corporation to be diagnosed as a psychopath over a decade ago. Joel Bakan, with the help of a leading psychiatrist, concluded that the corporation’s institutional character has all the key symptoms, including being: irresponsible, manipulative, superficial, lacking in empathy, asocial, and shameless.

This does not mean that everything corporations do is wrong. They can bring jobs, support good causes, provide useful services, and (sometimes) obey the law. But they do these things for selfish reasons: because they are good for profits. When there is a conflict – for example, research shows that tobacco kills or fossil fuels are wrecking the planet – the response will inevitably be denial and cover up.

Nor does it mean that all corporations are equally ruthless. Some, particularly in western Europe, retain a broader perspective. But the neoliberal agenda led by the US in recent decades is making all multinationals focus ever more narrowly on profits. Milton Friedman the Chicago School Economist and guru of Margaret Thatcher summed it up with his dictum: “the business of business is business”. The corporations which do this tend to be more profitable. In a competitive marketplace, this has inevitably triggered a race to the bottom.

From the corporate perspective this system is working just fine. Shareholders and senior executives are making enormous sums of money. As a recent Oxfam report points out a FTSE-100 CEO earns as much in a year as 10,000 people working in garment factories (in the 1970s it would have been a differential of 30) and 70% of profits go to shareholders (it was only 10% in the 1970s), who have become an increasingly wealthy and elite group.

As we have already noted, corporations have also grown enormously, outstripping many countries. The combined revenue of the 10 biggest corporations now exceeds that of 180 countries put together.⁶ Shell and Volkswagen are both bigger than India; Apple is bigger than Switzerland and the Netherlands. And they continue to grow. This gives them great power. They can control the market, and in our materialist times, that means just about everything. If Michael or Morag displease their customers, we can go elsewhere – and they know it. Walmart or Tesco are so big they can wipe out any potential competition, use their commercial muscle to bully suppliers, and lobby politicians to keep the laws supportive. Google now controls 90% of web searches. Amazon is laying waste to the high street.

As corporations get bigger and extend beyond national boundaries they become even more difficult to regulate and control. Minimum wage laws can be side-stepped and wages bills slashed by moving production to poor countries. One jurisdiction can be played off against another, so countries end up competing to attract companies to their shores. Think about that for a moment. A country, with all its democratic checks and balances, its duty to provide for its citizens’ needs – education, health, pensions, its security, and public health responsibilities – is beholden to a corporation whose only concern is to make more money. Perhaps most disturbingly corporations have now grown big enough to escape taxation. Again it is worth pausing. Taxes are the bridge to civilisation; they enable governments to do all the good stuff.

The vast sums involved don’t even make common sense. Imagine you got James Quincey’s job as CEO of Coca-Cola. You now have a salary of just over $16 million – let’s call it $10m after tax. What are you going to spend all this loot on? $5000 a month will cover living expenses according to Investopedia,⁷ even in an expensive city like San Francisco, but let’s add a couple of zeroes onto that to allow for a big family and a bit of luxury. That leaves $9.5m. Your own Lear Jet perhaps? Buying and running one will set you back about a million.⁸ A Ferrari will be another million or so. Jewellery? High fashion? Fancy holidays (but remember you have an important job to do, so time is limited)? The choices are many. Perhaps too many. If you are feeling overwhelmed, you could click on “How to Spend it”,⁹ “a website of worldly pleasures from the Financial Times”. There you could go for a nice Aston Martin, the designer ignition key for which is a snip at £695. Or choose from the “11 of the best shirt dresses” – ranging from £750 to just over £10,310.

And when you have made all your choices and managed to spend the full ten million, remember you have to do it all again next year.

Charm School for Psychopaths

Why have we let this happen? Afterall, big though they are, all these multinationals depend on us – if we didn’t use their services, buy their fags or shackle ourselves to their devices they would soon dwindle. Instead of rebelling, we join their loyalty schemes, wear their brands, and pay to give them our data. We do all these things because the corporations are so persuasive. They have grasped and nurtured the final and most powerful characteristic of every psychopath: charm.

This charm, this ability to please and seduce, is delivered by marketing, an approach to business that has quietly taken over the world. The story begins just over a century ago when two phenomena, which emerged in the US but swiftly globalised, combined to revolutionise business. First, the Michael and Morags were bought out. The many small companies which had dominated commerce up until this point in history were swallowed up by a smaller number of much bigger and wealthier companies.¹⁰ Capital became concentrated in a few powerful hands and the modern business corporation was born.

Hand in glove with this, mass production methods were developed, which further concentrated money and vastly increased the availability o...