"Fetishism of the Commodities"

This is part of my compilation of approximately 45 minutes of video, distilled from 6+ hours, documenting my experience of the marketing of interactive marketing to marketers.

It happened in 1993 and it includes predictions for the future (now). This was 15 years ago and it bears reviewing the planting of the seed that has wrought so very much change so very quickly.

-Selah


Yankelovich Rep

ah - when you talk about choice, there's a number of issues there because - ah, Karl Marx had a term "fetishism of the commodities", and those of you who remember back to your political science in college days may recall that the concept behind "fetishism of the commodities" is that, at some point in time under a capitalist society - you probably think this is a strange thing for someone from Yankelovich to be saying - (Hee Hee Hee) - ah the choices are going to become very superficial and very meaningless never the less under some - some sense of ideological indoctrination consumers are going to be led to believe that these are very meaningful choices and we're going to spend a lot of time preoccupying and selecting among the choices.

Building off a point that David made about the lack of talent and the lack of creativity, I would submit to you that if you take a look at the range and variation of most products and the range and variation of most media, 95% of those differences are within one and a half to two standard deviations. There is not the true type of choice out there and differences and -we and I don't think we don't have a right to assign the virtue to choice -ah based on the state of marketing and based on the state of media.

Perhaps interactive media will create the true opportunity for those choices to arise - and maybe this is more of a philosophical point than a marketing point but as I keep on hearing people talk about choice you have to step back and say well, what types of choices are we really talking about? Does the state of the free world hinge on these choices and what are the real practical consequences of negotiating these choices in the context of consumers lives and in the context of consumer satisfaction.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Interactivity
• Myth
• Psychographic
• Profile
• Media
• Cable
• Television
• Telecommunications
• Mindfuck
• Communications

[angelbeta]

great analysis and use of commodity fetishism.