This picture is of a shop, in a street few meters away, from the main road in a city. It was early afternoon and all the decoration lights were on. It is a city which has ten or more hours of power cut each day. All the shops selling clothes were similarly illuminated.
Later that afternoon an engineer working in the state electricity board mentioned to me that industry or merchandise firms consume almost forty-five percent of the electricity. Only the rest is available for domestic consumption, agriculture, educational in situations, hospitals, etc. Some states are chronically power deficient.
I wondered why this illumination was necessary in the middle of the day! One shop keeper mentioned to me that in a competitive culture every shop has to outdo others. There were about twenty shops selling clothes in that street with even more illuminating lights outside.
To me, this is one of the direct adverse effects of marketing. It is not the quality of the product that often attracts the customers, but how the products are marketed.
Marketing has many subtle ways to trap customers. The advertisements interrupting any TV programme, almost every three minutes or so is another example of how they use the media to entice people to buy a product, in superlative language. The truth is concealed, distorted or presented only in part. The marketing technology is a business strategy and often trivializes business ethics and good practices.
Let me suggest that with the on line shopping becoming popular, the customers would have an advantage to make up their mind independent of the advertisements.
The culture of good practices is yet to become the standard practices in many business transactions.
I wonder whether more of us can give feed back on the un ethical advertisements so that our voice can become a restraint!
M.C.Mathew(text and photo)
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