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Mass-Marketing Goes Platinum
Hawkers of consumer products are embracing the growing gulf between rich and poor Americans.
In today's fast-moving world of consumer styles, when you're out, you're out. Not just out-of-style, but so far out that you no longer interest the big marketers.
Thus it is that advertising authorities have deemed the middle class itself (roughly 60 percent of us, depending on where you draw the income line) to be unworthy consumers. We're too poor to matter, they say. 
Indeed, even though America's workaday majority has produced a phenomenal rise in wealth during the past decade, that majority's income has shrunk — and there's no improvement in sight. Where did the gains go? Practically all of the new wealth flowed straight up to the richest 10 percent of America's people, who own more than 80 percent of all stocks and bonds.
Instead of deploring this widening disparity, major hawkers of consumer products are choosing to embrace it. Advertising Age, the marketing industry's top publication, has curtly declared that "mass affluence is over." Nearly half of consumer spending today is done by the richest 10 percent of households, and the richest of these richies are deemed to be the most desirable of consumers.
"Simply put," says Ad Age, "a small plutocracy of wealthy elites drives a larger and larger share of total consumer spending and has outsized purchasing influence."
The magazine goes on to inform us that households with less than $200,000 in annual income are henceforth on the outs, holding little interest for advertisers. Sure enough, corporate executives in such diverse businesses as airlines, movie theaters, banks, and health care are focusing more and more on platinum-level customers.
Gosh, does this mean they'll stop inundating me with ads and a flood of other come-ons? I could live with that.
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29 Comments so far
Show AllSo as far as the Rethuglibagger portion of the tri-partisan neo-liberal Republicratbagger Machine are concerned, the only REAL Americans are the ones with household incomes over $200,000 a year. Can you say SUPERSIZED BANANA REPUBLIC?
In 20 years I've never previously heard Jim Hightower close an article or a radio commentary without a serious or humorous suggestion about how to improve the situation he was commenting about until now. This last comment of his sounds pretty dejected to me. It doesn't offer much hope:
"Gosh, does this mean they'll stop inundating me with ads and a flood of other come-ons? I could live with that."
The only REAL Americans are Corporations - just ask the Robber's Court.
Maybe we will have a 35 year old U.S.corporation for president in 2012.
"Oh yes, corporations are people, my friend."
And people own and run corporations. They have names and addresses. This "corporations are the problem" is a cop-out. Rich, fat, martini swigging, country-club golfing capitalists are the problem - and their mansions have addresses.
Thanks for the insight, Mitt.
"Supersized banana republic" is about right. Go to Managua or Tegucigalpa, or Ciudad San Salvador and you will find stores with every luxury that you would find in the richest US neighborhood - but it is understood that only a small wealthy minority has any business entering those stores, and nobody has a problem with that.
While it's true that the drive towards austerity is a matter of the uber-rich winning the class war, truly a disgusting process to behold, I have to agree with Hightower. I think it will be good for people to realize that advertisers don't give a damn about inciting and pandering to us peons, just dangling stuff we can't afford under our noses. It might piss people off enough to get them out of their consumerist dreamworld. And, the consumer frenzy has really been damaging to the US character, IMHO, and maybe this trend will work for the better.
You don't seem to understand what "the uber-rich winning the class war" really means in the 21st century. This isn't the predominantly agrarian Gilded Age anymore, and our land and resources can't just be cheaply grabbed from "indians" wielding single shot repeaters and bows & arrows anymore. It's not a spectator sport or a video game you're playing.
High-tech, systemic, globalized over-concentration of wealth automatically ultra-over-concentrates political, military and police power. In capitalist republics that automatically declines into DICTATORSHIP, typically under fascism. Only now they have the technology and dirt cheap foreign labor to strangle domestic labor and do it right. That type of fascism includes information fascism and will include the rise of new forms of Orwellian "thought police."
The process of people waking up out of their consumerist daydream is happening too slowly--dangerously too slowly--and is only the bare beginnings of what needs to take place in this country.
Then why is my sunday paper stuffed with ads for stuff I should be able to afford.......
Ads for cheap plastic junk from China? There is a new strain of avian flu there--I wonder how well it travels on plastic?
You can see evidence of this everywhere now as more and more small businesses close and all thats left are the Corp. chains and even they're suffering. Borders is gone now, so are all the Video tape stores, record/CD shops and no more corner drug stores photo shops and it goes on and on like that. The Middle class is drying up and going away fast now. The Gov't sector folks couldn't care less as long as they have their jobs for the moment. The top Corp. people won't care as long as we stay out of the way of their limos.
Borders, and the video rental chains were small business?
Nice thing about where I live as things are not quite so bad as quite yet - still lots of small, family-owned shops - especially in the poorer neighborhoods where rent is cheap.
If you live in America, then you live in an area that is very much the exception, not the rule now.
I'm concerned about the disappearence of books; except for two very small bookstores, my vicinity has nothing. Two years ago we had a Barnes and Noble, two Borders, and a very large regional store within five miles of my house. I remember when every mall had a bookstore with some quality stock, and you could even pick up a good book at the drugstore. The problem is that out of sight, out of mind phenomenon. Someday everything will be on Kindles and then zoop!--there will be some censoring, as when Kindle removed everyone's 1984 and Animal Farm. That may sound paranoid, but I have a dark vision.
Your instincts are spot-on and it's worse than you think:
Can Authors Survive and Are Books Dead?
by Ewan Morrison
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/aug/22/are-books-dead-ewan-morrison
What you get for your Kindle is a license to download a book. It can be revoked. I prefer buying and keeping my books.
It could be an opportunity. Here is why.
If we stop patronizing major corporations (as best we can) and do business only with independent retailers and small banks etc. we could recreate our own economy.
I think they did something like that in Argentina during their major fiscal crisis of the early 2000s.
Any more ideas?
Actually, what the Argentinian workers did was break into the the closed factories, hotels, even some resorts that they were dismissed from, organize workers cooperatives, and put them back into operation.
Also, the late President Kirchner simply told the WB and IMF that they simply would not pay back their odium debt obtained under blackmail conditions.
Neither of these things are likely to work in the US.
They might if the system gets degraded enough. From 2010 for the foreseeable future there will be roughly 300,000 public sector workers laid off every year. That includes more and more police at the local level, especially in small towns. Project that forward for 10 or 15 years and factor in the degree of economic suffering on the present course by then and we may see some effective Argentinean style micro-revolutions such as the ones you mention scattered around the country. What could the neo-lib/neo-con/pluto-libertarian mindsets offer to those people that would be any better? What we need is an intelligently organized larger version of that process that includes many other ideas about shifting to an environmentally sustainable, more socially just and economically fair model.
A big danger for big box sellers is the emergence of the "niche" market. Because the big boys and girls need volume to keep themselves going they need people to conform to what they are selling which, not withstanding attempts by Amazon and others to personalize sales, is more of a one size fits all product line. Usually this creates a space for niche markets that small vendors and local groups of people can take advantage.
If groups of the dis-enfranchised can detach from the "American Scam Dream" and provide their own needs locally then a new kind of marketing can grow up under the belly of the beast. The idea is to starve the beast. We don't need the beast.
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both."
- Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis
The preponderant neo-liberal counter-weights to what you are suggesting are (1) the Amazon.com model of nationwide online/shipped sales, (2) the domestically attritive Walmart Chinese import model that still exerts preclusive pressure against local, small independent mom'n'pop businesses nationwide, and (3) booming "free trade" middle-classes in India, China and Brazil whose growth comes directly at the expense of the middle- and lower-classes in America and concentrates "free trade" stock dividend wealth generated by dirt cheap foreign labor in the hands of the American upper-middle- and upper-class. What you are suggesting does nothing to reverse course on this now systemic process of wealth over-concentration at the top that, left to its own devices, must inexorably lead to the anti-democratic over-concentration of political power in capitalist countries known as FASCISM.
Intelligent revolution that overthrows the present neo-liberal/neo-conservative system and replaces it with a better system is the only real solution. We risk our lives, our futures and those of our children either way: Either by submitting to the present over-concentration of wealth and political power or by intelligently organizing to resist and overthrow it. The question is: Which path would you rather put your life on the line for? Because our lives and those of our posterity are on the line either way whether we like it or not.
That begs the question of how well Walmart and the big boxes will fare with an ever constricting marketing base. I am not sure how many of the top ten percent shop there. How many movie tickets do the wealthy purchase? Are we going to end up with more empty malls, and reservation only movie theatres only in wealthy neighborhoods?
Does nothing to halt systemic over-concentration of wealth and political power in the upper-class and parts of the upper-middle-class.
I haven't used a credit card for more than fifteen years - and have more money in my bank account than I ever had!
Move it to a credit union ASAP. I'm serious.
Statistically speaking, the appearance of detailed perspective, multiple times in one thread reflects something like 500,000 instances in real life, already extant, of similar perspective. I think this actually identifies a phenomenon already underway.
Does that mean we'll be hearing less about the teaparty and people like Sarah Palin....they obviously can't apeal to the new "niche" market of elites? I could live with that.
"The magazine goes on to inform us that households with less than $200,000 in annual income are henceforth on the outs, holding little interest for advertisers. Sure enough, corporate executives in such diverse businesses as airlines, movie theaters, banks, and health care are focusing more and more on platinum-level customers."
Most of us were priced out these markets years ago. It's hard to afford a plane trip vacation, thirty dollar theatre tickets, high banking interest, and health insurance when you can hardly afford to pay for the gasoline it takes you to get back and forth to work.