This is a guest post from Paul Toth at Violent Contradiction
Today’s “consumers,” also known as humans, live in a tyranny of the senses, an almost-invisible net of influences that equates living under a more obvious tyranny. Every stranger could be the equivalent of a state security agent. For example, guerrilla marketing campaigns hire alluring salespeople who sit at bar and offer occasional strangers a drink. “Try it out. It’s my favorite vodka.” The seduction begins, but it’s not leading where the customer hopes. It’s never leading where the customer hopes. The customer has been placed under arrest without need of handcuffs. We’re seduced into arrest in the way that sheriffs’ departments detain those with outstanding warrants: by being offered a prize if we show up at certain locations. Wherever they go, consumers move under the shadow of “subpoenas.”
I first began wondering how this seduction operated when I noticed how music affected me while I was shopping. Why, I wondered, do supermarkets play what I considered objectively-depressing music (ala post-talent Elton John ballads and the like)? Friends to whom I put that question claimed to never notice music in retail settings, but I hear it everywhere: in offices, stores and almost every other public space.
Creative Retail Communications states in its FAQ that as a Business Music Provider (BSP), it “supplies businesses with licensed content for background and foreground music” and has “music experts that [sic] program the content into playlists to serve specific market demands.” In other words, music is programmed to suit a specific demographic. But what is the demographic of most public spaces? All demographics. Thus, all consumers must suffer the music of whatever demographic reacts favorably to post-talent Elton John ballads, even if they don’t notice the music.
I began to surmise that retail outlets play sad music to create an atmosphere in which one begins to seek comfort as a form of self-defense. But the truth is far more perverse, as Daniel Leviten, author of The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature, told U.S News & World Report, “Sad people are so often made to feel better by sad music.” He likens this phenomena to enjoying the blues, and we’re back to Elton John and his I Guess That’s Why They Call it the Blues. The article paraphrases Leviten’s view that “senses make use of complex systems of muscle and bone, as well as finely tuned neural circuits in the human brain.”
That presents dueling options: one involves my untested proposition that sad music promotes comfort purchases, and the other proposes that sad music itself provides the comfort while the customer associates comfort with the items she buys. It’s a short stretch to the conclusion that this effect is enhanced by by the consumer’s very unawareness of background music.
Because most such background music is now provided via satellite, stores often have limited choice in devising playlists, as they must secure rights to the music, unless that service is provided for them. However, some stores, especially smaller outlets, use MP3 technology to design far more specific “set lists,” and in those shops one will more likely hear “hipper” soundtracks. CDs featuring the background music are often displayed near the cash register: shopping itself for sale.
Interestingly, how the shopper perceives the shopping environment may determine his likelihood of returning to a retail outlet. This study indicates that “emotions have stronger effects on shopping satisfaction when the feelings are attributed to the store rather than being internally attributed” [my emphasis]. One can reasonably extrapolate from this study that shoppers have been conditioned to be conditioned by retail outlets; that is, they expect their emotions to be positively affected by the shopping environment itself, with their preexisting emotions secondary and ripe for comforting.
How do retail establishments accomplish this effect? The Seattle Journal of Commerce explains: “In many cases, successful stores sell lifestyle more than product. Why choose The Gap when you can buy jeans and a T-shirt at every other apparel retailer? Because Gap is Gap. It’s clean, it’s hip, it’s simple, it’s American…The Gap has become a transcendental, category-defining icon. Such icons, the article continues, “have reached the pinnacle of consumer consciousness.”
Notice the key word: transcendental. Thus, the customer has transcended consciousness and is therefore unaware of why she attributes her feelings to the shopping environment rather than herself. I call this the conspiracy paradox, in which any agency may avoid conspiracy by simply rendering its actions so obvious that no one notices the implications of those actions or even the actions themselves. A quasi-conspiracy is as effective as an actual conspiracy and avoids the threat of legal implications, at least until the last ghosts of consumer protection limp to their demise.
However, another paradox may exist as marketers fail to realize the implications of their own quasi-conspiracies. The Seattle Journal of Commerce concludes the essay quoted above by stating an obvious contradiction: “Using the science of shopping in store design will not ‘manipulate’ shoppers psychologically to make them buy products. A shopper may not buy a dress simply because a store smells like roses and plays music from her youth. If she feels better about herself and more comfortable in the environment, she is more likely to buy. This is the goal of a successful retail store design.” Of course, if a store “smells like roses and plays music from her youth,” the shopper may very well feel “more comfortable in the environment” and thus become “more likely to buy.”
The combination lock to the vault containing the entire theory behind modern marketing techniques has now been cracked by its own proponents. Feeling a bit like Geraldo Rivera, I open the vault door with anticipation. There it is, the concept aglow in neon: comfort.
For reasons beyond the boundaries of this piece, the consumer culture is an an anxious culture. Sufficient for now to state that the conditions necessary to a consumer culture generate anxiety, which of course benefits the sale of comfort. The anxiety results from the ever-growing difficulty in procuring enough money to purchase the comfort that work itself requires, just as the purchasing of comfort produces the need for more and more money and thus more and more work.
Stand forth, comfort addict, conditioned to become an addict. Consumers are not born “sinners” who must “take responsibility for themselves” but products of a culture that views everything as a product. With “labor” a product involved in the production of products, reducing “labor” becomes the most obvious means to cost cutting. When the actual people who comprise “labor” become economically distressed as a result of layoffs and other economic circumstances, no worries, for what else will they seek but comfort?
Yet comfort cannot sustain itself, just as the comfort industry cannot sustain itself. Like any addiction, comfort levels must be intensified. To increase profits, an increased “demand” for comfort must also be created. The easy-to-guess outcome of this process is a comfort addiction treatment industry, which includes alcohol, cigarettes, “illicit” drugs…the whole range of human desperation. When these desperate measures fail, one seeks help. Thus, pharmaceutical comfort rises to meet the problem if failing so shake hands with and solve that problem. Indeed, the solution of the problem, if available, would demolish the treatment and comfort industries.
However, dissolving the human need for comfort can rightfully never be resolved or eliminated. Only the psychopath, if not already absolved from the need for comfort by whatever genetic and environmental circumstances created him, would desire such an outcome. For the consumer, the way to outwit manipulation and achieve comfort requires neither psychotherapy nor pharmacotherapy. It merely requires seeking comfort from others rather than products.
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