"Advertising helps to keep the masses dissatisfied with their mode of life, discontented with ugly things around them," reported an advertising trade journal in the late forties. "Satisfied customers are not as profitable as discontented ones." (Heller)
I find it amazing that in the late forties advertisers realized that insecurity-marketing would prevail. By turning body odor, bad breath and acne into plague like issues, they convinced the masses that it was imperative to deal with these common nuisances.
This is still the case over sixty years later and it seems like things are getting worse. In addition to hygiene, we all must have expensive clothes, clear skin, a perfect body and of course the latest in electronics. I realize that technology has significantly advanced my field and I am very grateful that I am not using tech pens and illustration boards, but at the same time I, along with my parents generation, wonder if technology is taking things in the wrong direction. We now have to be insecure about having the right phone, computer and tablet, not to mention maintaining cars and houses.
The costs are adding up and sometimes I think I would have preferred to have been born 50 years earlier when there weren't so many things to buy to keep up with the Joneses.
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