Changing the course of capitalism

I watched "The Insider" again the other night. A great, inspiring movie at the beginning of what has become a hot topic: holding companies to a higher moral responsibility. A responsibility to not cheat their employees out of their retirements, to disclose how it is that CEOs make 400-700 times the average employee and to make their products safer for consumption and the environment. It's not enough any more to simply stimulate the economy; more and more, people are demanding responsibility. Fortunately, many companies are waking up to the economic opportunities of this kind of responsibility.

Most of my career as a marketer, I've believed that selling product inherently breeds bad behavior. In order to generate more profit, companies have to produce a product more cheaply. To increase market share their product has to be more addictive and/or necessary. And to sell a higher quantity, the product has to be consumed at a faster rate. I challenge you to think of a product that can be made more profitable or increase market share without damaging the environment, the consumer or some other poor creature.

(I tried to think of something that must be innocuous, like raising fluffy little sheep and shearing them for wool. This sounds really harmless but then I read this. Yikes!)

See, sometimes companies make something a customer wants, and then have to figure out a way to make it profitable. But many times, they're making something they've deemed profitable and then hire PR/advertisers to make people want it:

When the disposable razor came along, marketers only had to show women a picture of a naked armpit to sell razors to women wanting to be more fashionable. But they had a tougher time convincing them to shave (and bare) their legs. They tried for years without success until a very famous war-time poster came out featuring a very sexy Betty Grable with shaved naked legs and women were told it was their patriotic DUTY to wear shorter skirts and sheer nylons. And off the hair came! (We're still one of the only countries in the world where women regularly shave their hair off.)

Then there were disposable diapers, not a hit for the first five years. Then the PR people hired a pediatrician and cooked up a story about how damaging it is to potty-train children too early. It would make them "anal" to be separated by their poo at too early an age. Instantly, they extended the life of their product by at least a year as anxious moms allowed their children longer diaper time. (By the way, "disposable" diapers will take about 500 years to decompose.)

Sometimes, to make a product more profitable, they have to decrease it's shelf life.

Electronics and appliances have a shorter lifespan than they ever have despite our advances. It just isn't very profitable to make a device that lasts several years. And if you make them too cheap, it isn't profitable either. A CD player now costs let's say $60, which is cheaper than the $250 I paid in 1985, but it only lasts a year. Printers are now less than $100 but only last six months to a year! Cellphones? They're practically "disposable." (Like the diapers, the hunks of junk ends up in the dump when they stop working and probably never biodegrade.)

Sometimes, to make people want a product again, they have to lie.

Cigarettes and alcohol are addictive. Fast food clogs your arteries. How can you increase your market share without telling people otherwise? French fries aren't French fries if they aren't deep fried! Tell the consumer you're using a different kind of oil that isn't as bad. Tell them the alcohol has less calories and the cigarettes don't have additives so they're less harmful. They're all lies but how else can it be done? Since only 10% of smokers start after age 20, they have to get addicted young.

Sometimes, experts are used to show how the product should be consumed.

For the last fifteen years, we've been eating a higher protein diet. We've been told it's the way to be healthy and slim. It's not true. Eating vegetables is much better for you than meat but meat is a booming industry. When it's so cheap and yummy, how can we resist? (Inhumane treatment to animals, declining nutrition of the meat, increased sickness due to bad meat and pollution that was unheard of a few decades ago will eventually turn us off). Did you know that 80% of the ocean's contaminants come from ground pollution running into rivers? Now we can't even eat (what's left of) the fish!

So, our consumerism drives the economy but these products make us sick by ruining our health and the environment. We're running at an accelerated pace towards cheaper, more disposable goods but also stopping along the way the admire a new model of goods - ethically produced, better for the environment and maybe even more desirable.

Ultimately, the consumer has to DEMAND the products we want, produced the way we can be happy about, and the corporations will HAVE TO care as much about responsibility as profit.

While hybrid cars increase in popularity, so do Hummer sales. While we are more conscious of recycling, we also create more trash. While the oil industry is stepping up to be more green, they're also illegally dumping tons of toxic waste in the ocean. Are we going in two directions or one direction that's so complex, it has yet to reveal itself?

It just may be that we're finally seeing our modern way of life as barbaric: torturing and killing animals and each other, dumping crap into the ocean, burying our trash, paving over the earth, pushing products that kill people. We're capable of so much more and I think we're just now beginning to see our potential to rise above our filthy, greedy past to save ourselves.