Lead Us Into Temptation- The Triumph of American Materialism - Literature review Example

Book review of Lead us into Temptation - the Triumph of American Materialism ‘Do you drink VOSS or water? Do you wear Hermes colognes or deodorizes? Do you jump that high with a Nike sneaker as Michael Jordan does? How premium is Super? How much is a Starbucks Grande larger than a Costa Primo?’ Since the First World War, the upsurge of the consumption of goods and services in the United States has induced a new national culture and identity that once brought yearning, motivation and prosperity to American society but now seems to make people squander and suffer. This book stands on the side of materialism and projects a genuine and extensive elaboration on the phenomenon as well as the causalities from historical, personal, social, psychological and spiritual angles. As the author suggests, customers rarely have a hypostatic sense of value and so there are too many signifying systems that exist in order to keep adding value and meaning to goods. Ultimately, this is the central character of American materialism. The author, James B. Twitchell, looks at both romanticism and American commercial culture. He is very much a fancy rhetoric expert who gives a great deal of sarcastic critiques throughout the book. The real-world examples, hippie-like metaphors and remarkable comparisons he gives are pitched to resonate with readers due to their thought-provoking nature. To start with, this book provides a unique explanation about ‘is the leisure to buy things how we make work necessary’. It is partly true that the action of purchasing is self-satisfactory. However, more importantly, while people consume the underlying meanings of products, trust, prestige, confidence and what maximizes peoples’ satisfactions are the pushing-up of limits of their consumptions levels. Meanings cluster people together and people can change their clusters by exchanging goods. Does this occur because ‘goods’ are all ‘good’? If so, do Americans interchange this word for ‘things’? No, this is the result of the powerful allure of blatant consumerism, hollow commercialism and crashing materialism. Consumerism is the filling-up of the generation gap by inversely driving and passing popular culture from young to old and down to top. Historically, men have earned money, bought some things and also put something towards savings. But thanks to credit cards and instalment debt, the younger generation can get their hands on literally anything before they reach middle age. Commercialism is grounded upon this modernized consumerism. It further branches into two simultaneous processes: commodification, which exploits every possible value associated with a product, and marketing, which endues a product with the ability to communicate its value. Materialism has greater psychological substance in the sense that the judgment of a person is solely based on his or her lifestyle and behaviours. The previously recognized American Dream may now be just a description of poverty by the greedy middle class. It emphasizes that ‘even the simplest of things in America have taken on a meaning well in excess of our materialistic lives.’ James’ attention to the effects of advertising is critical in learning how peoples’ perceptions to branding, yearnings to things and attitudes to life can be and have been changed by massive coverage of commercials. The book offers comparisons between money spent and the number of units of advertisements made in different historical periods. Also taken into account is the rationale of advertisement-driven magazines, which statistically clarify the degree to which people are affected by advertising as exponentially increasing. As to whether advertisement language is misleading in time, it answers this frequently asked question within the framework by providing explanations that engage in the different contexts of peoples’ habits, which are often psychologically invisible. The author attaches great importance on the synergy of celebrity endorsement. He is of the view that a celebrity rents his or her glory to endorse a product and in so doing makes him or her better known. The ability to quickly generate celebrity effects and attach that value to products is the hallmark of modern American materialism. Recall the famous advertisement that had the tagline ‘Michael Jordan wears Nike, he jumps high. I wear it, I get there too’. However, from the reviewer’s perspective, the fact is that the magic power people expect to happen for them is never contagious. American customers stand at a historical plateau of materialism, of which the mainstream social resources are invested into the creation of supervacaneous demands and judgments. Yet, the universal philosophy keeps changing and so does mode of thinking for humankind. In Karl Marx’s thesis, the world is moving from ‘single to complex, from private to common and more presumably, from artificiality to spiritualism’ (Löwy, 2012). Will there be as many endorsement effects if this world reaches the supreme phase of theory? Whenever people choose not to use their money, they instead exchange things freely in a whole communism society. Also, the entire argument of the ‘triumph’ of American materialism that based on the past may be seriously undermined. An equally important strategy of advertising is through subliminal seduction. This exists when an advertisement is captured by the sub-consciousness of people without being actually aware of it. The first two examples of subliminal seduction are classic depictions of how it can affect customers’ purchasing habits (see Appendix 1). The third picture is self-made and intends to make the terminology more explicit. It consists of two totally irrelevant pictures, but a connection can be made when the words ‘what do you think?’ are added. This line makes the advertisement ‘suggestive’. After this, brand extension is introduced in order to address the fact that commercials have little to do with the three –isms per se, but it is the perception of commercials that upholds this existence. Companies that insert similar DNA of their existing famous products into an analogous product will create brand extension. Coke and Coke Cherry are basically very similar in taste, as are Porsche 911 and Porsche Design watches. In the book, the author states that customers of Coke and Porsche buy what they mean rather than what they really are. However, what the reviewer would disagree with is the absoluteness of meaning-directed purchase. Less than one quarter of Coca-Cola’s customers consumed the aura, such as trust or legend, around derived Coke products. The majority of consumers make decisions based on sensible comparisons, such as taste or packaging (Coca-Cola Annual Report, 2012). Within the psychographic framework of demand, the reviewer particularly appreciates the Values, Attitudes and Lifestyles Paradigm (Stanford Research Institution) (see Appendix 2), as it portrays shapes and substances of consumers in the U.S. by segmenting consumers into eight types of simplified movements. This is usually used to explain how different consumers perceive the underlying meanings of what they buy and, in turn, what particular marketing strategies should be employed to grasp a specific group of customers. In some circumstances, companies will use distinct rhetorical branding strategies on almost identical products and sell them based on different associations with eternal values, such as beauty, health and youth. Unlike the competition between Procter & Gamble and Unilever in terms of selling almost the same products by endowing different semantic tricks, luxury goods are even more noticeable to understanding supply side materialism, as the middle class consume pro-rata a higher amount of luxury goods. At the same time, the middle class buys the brand myth associated with the product, but they also make conservative decisions on their limited budgets (Chadha & Husband, 2006). At the bull market of luxury cosmetics, which can mark-up 50 percent on the top of total costs, customers are still tempted to buy products with the highest profitability. A study by Meyers (1995) showed that producers mark-up most heavily on the smallest but most visible products. For example, lipsticks, which customers use most frequently and carry with them everywhere, have the highest profitability. On the other hand, face cleansers, which people hide in the bathroom with a bunch of other stuff, have the lowest level of profitability. The distortion of the American capitalism status quo is the distortion of a so-called scientific justice of pricing strategies, as it is not based on the actual cost of production but rather the aggregate allure to exploit the hidden value by consumers. It is the American consumer’s love of things that leads them into the temptation of contemporary consumerism, commercialism and irreversible materialism. Marketing allows products the space to talk, but the author highly doubts the necessity and primacy of the ways in which it does. Finally, James concluded his essential opinion on the triumph of materialism as attributed to the ‘triumph of popular will’. Though he presented a voluntary simplicity movement, and the reviewer strongly believed in the curative effect to the social disease (affluenza), he suggests that America will lead the world for at least two centuries and the popular will (i.e. consumerism) that embedded in the American culture will surely lead the world forward. About the Reviewer Being an overseas management undergraduate student with Chinese origin, the reviewer found that the prosperous Anglo-Saxon culture of the 1990s waved a tremendous movement of American-style materialism from the west to the east. Though James spent little time on markets other than American, it is inevitably true for China, and its emerging companions in Asia, such as India, South Korea and Hong Kong, that most of their people are tempted to work overtime to helplessly celebrate the triumph of materialism. Appendices Appendix 1 – Subliminal Seduction The author very much doubts that a rational society is supposed to be interested in consuming meaningless advertisements. However, subliminal seduction may be even more effective than traditional advertising. No one can really understand why people eat popcorn and drink Coke while watching movies. It was said that there was a movie theatre in the U.S. that showed a picture of popcorn, Coke and film every time before a movie started. Later on, popcorn sales surged and this situation infected the whole world. The way in which advertisements add meaning to a product can be seen through the third self-made picture. It attempts to correlate two irrelevant pictures subconsciously. Please look at this picture for 10 seconds. Now compare your first glance of this picture with it. Has anything changed in your mind? This is known as subliminal seduction. Appendix 2 – Values, Attitudes and Lifestyles Paradigm This is a view of the typology of consumers’ motivations in acquiring products, services and experiences. The more resources consumers have, such as wealth, health or energy, the more likely it is for them to move upwards within a group they are associated with. Reference List Chadha, R & Husband, P, 2006, The Cult of The Luxury Brand- Inside Asia’s Love Affair of Luxury, Nicholas Brealey International: London Coca-Cola Annual Report, 2012, http://assets.coca-colacompany.com/c4/28/d86e73434193975a768f3500ffae/2012 -annual-report-on-form-10-k.pdf, [accessed on 10th Apr, 2013] James, T, 1999, Lead Us Into Temptation- The Triumph of American Materialism, Columbia University Press: New York Meyers, M, 1995, Cosmetics Purchases Provide an Insight Into Shopping for Status, Minneapolis Star Tribune, 27th Jan, pp 2. Read More