Coronavirus rid society of advertising

Edward Jones, a professor at the University of Michigan, probably had no idea what kind of revolution he was a harbinger of. In 1902, he gave his first lecture course on consumer market research methods. Already later, in 1905, a separate scientific discipline called "marketing" was formed. This direction of research was supposed to improve the quality of people's lives, find out more deeply the needs of the market and satisfy the demand with the necessary supply. But decades later, a beautiful idea turned into a surrogate and became the cause of the emergence of a consumer society.

The fact is that market equilibrium is a natural law of supply and demand. That is, the price of a good or service is formed in a market where there are buyers and sellers. For example, if the quantity of a good on the market does not cover the demand for that good, then there is a shortage, and the price of that good naturally rises until supply and demand are balanced. This balance in the language of economists is called market equilibrium. And it may be vice versa, when the quantity of goods on the market significantly exceeds the demand for it, then the price also tends to an equilibrium market state, that is, it falls.

But where does the market equilibrium and marketing, you ask? But the fact is that producers of goods and services began to influence demand with marketing tools, and starting from the second half of the 20th century, they began to shape it.

Each of us has heard the phrase: advertising is the engine of trade. But hardly anyone imagined that advertising would become a tool for imposing needs that are not. For clarity, I will give just one example. In Apple products, according to various expert estimates, up to 80% of the price is a marketing component. This means that with the price of a brand new iPhone at sixty thousand rubles, forty-eight thousand of them are the costs for us to buy it. This is just one small example of how marketing is shaping new consumer behavior. Nobody asks you if you need an iPhone-10 instead of your iPhone-8. Advertising that has shaped fashion and public opinion obliges you to buy.

Try to analyze your major expenses over the past couple of years. Chances are you'll find that most of them could have either been discarded or an alternative product at a much lower cost could have been purchased. Thus, year after year, a consumer society was formed. We need to buy more, for this we need to earn more, for this we need to work more, and so on in a circle.

And now we are all in quarantine. Endless shopping centers are closed, all catering, the entire entertainment industry, all tourism has stopped, and so on. Only organizations and institutions necessary for human life are working: such as grocery stores, household goods, a communal apartment, pharmacies, hospitals and government agencies serving the population. That is, in a couple of months the whole world returned to a natural equilibrium state. Nature, by its intervention, has cleansed us of all the marketing husks of fictional values.

However, mainstream experts in one voice, interrupting each other, talk about the timing of the exit from the crisis and about when the previous economic indicators will be restored. Only a few expert opinions say that the coronavirus epidemic has changed everything - the world, people, the economy, values.

Obviously, there will be no return to the previous consumer behavior. This means that the demand for goods and services with an “inflated” value will fall sharply. As a result, everything that is not related to the required level of consumption will disappear from the market. More radical voices are convinced that marketing technologies and advertising will be subject to severe government restrictions.