In every aspect of our lives we are bombarded with marketing and advertising. It's a sad fact, but it's true. You can't do anything any more without seeing an ad. In a recent movie, the first 15 minutes prominently featured shoe products, skin products and cola products. Whew, that was a hard sentence to type without naming the movie or the products.
Take the political campaigns for example. How much of what GWBush says on camera is true? How much of it is deliberately designed to make the American people jump to their own conclusions? How much of what John Kerry says is true? Does he have a better truth in advertising record than Bush? Here's a cool website for monitoring political "spin".
People are going to believe what the marketers want them to believe. For example, today I read another post saying that "even though Apple computers are more expensive, they sometimes can justify their costs." Now, I'm not blogging to bash PC makers or Apple, but I decided to compare a couple of things on the websites of the Apple store verses the Dell store.
Funny, the bottom of the line Apple notebook is more expensive than the bottom of the line Dell notebook (also the front page of the Dell site shows a cheaper price by $100 for the cheapest notebook than you actually get when you click on it – I wonder how they get away with that?). Keep in mind though, that the bottom of the line Dell is stripped considerably of useable components (like no modem, no ethernet, tiny hard drive, etc etc). If you configure low end Apples and Dells the same way (wireless cards, same size screen, same size hard drives, ethernet, modems, etc) they come out very similarly priced.
When you step into the higher-end notebooks (again, configured with the same kinds of options – more memory, DVD burners, larger hard drives, wireless, ethernet, etc), the Apple products are 10 to 20% cheaper than the Dell products. So when is somebody going to say that Apple computers are cheaper than Dell computers? Somebody besides me, I mean.
So my question is: Why do the American people continue to allow the press to say whatever they want without backing anything up?
One Comment
Easy answer: because the press isn't held accountable for what they say – especially in the marketplace.