| Blog entry: Kunkelfruit |
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| Written by Sean Miller | |||||
| Sunday, 15 October 2006 | |||||
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Last night Shveta and I were out celebrating a friend’s birthday at a dive bar in St. Mark’s Place. This friend, Lauren Schell, is the director of a nonprofit organization called City Kids, which offers after-school drama and community activism programs to disadvantaged high school students in NYC. We got into a heated debate about what I called a show of bad faith when it comes to companies that, in marketing their products, knock off a cent, a nickel, or a buck from the price to make it seem cheaper.
It is not too much of a stretch to argue that a significant chunk of marketing strategy employs a comparable approach--attempts at subconscious manipulation through the use of techniques that play on an asymmetry of information between producer and consumer and that betray a certain cynicism with respect to the customer--that they are herd animals meant to be prodded into action. Most companies would shrug their shoulders at such an accusation and retort that, hey, it’s the nature of the market--the rules of the game, so to speak. This made me think of that well-known passage from Benjamin Kunkel’s novel Indecision that imagines a situation where a product’s origin and history become magically transparent to the consumer:
I found myself asking the question last night, why should this be a mere ‘magical’ conceit? Why couldn’t this actually be realized as a body of knowledge available to consumers? And the answer should and must be, it absolutely can. The technology is already in place to facilitate this, namely, Wikipedia. We could collectively create a database of histories for all top selling products, a resource that consumers could go to in order to see the entire history of a product--its story, so to speak. This would include: * a pie chart breakdown of costs of the product as percentages of sales price, for example, how much of each purchase goes to a celebrity endorser, to executive compensation, to manufacturing labor, to marketing and advertising, to transportation costs, to raw materials, etc. * a narrative that follows the entire life history of the product from raw material extraction, to manufacture, to distribution, to retail placement, sale, and ultimately, disposal * pictures of the factory where it is manufactured, the workers who make it and their general living conditions (i.e. photos of the houses/neighborhood they live in), along with information about their wages, the cost of living in the country where they live, etc. The principle of this wiki would be a simple, clear story of each product that encapsulates the essence of that product as something made by human hands from the fruits of the earth. It would make the process of manufacture and journey to market transparent to the consumer. That would be the spirit of such a database: transparency in doing business. It would help to rectify the asymmetry of information between producers and consumers, between corporations and individuals. It would be a collaborative project that emphasizes objective reportage, not politicized spin or axe grinding--much in the same way that Wikipedia calls for accuracy in its content. High school students could do team homework projects to create entries. Intrepid travelers in the country of manufacture could provide photos of the factories and workers, the land from which raw materials are harvested or extracted. Consumers could research easily the real content of the products that they purchase, as well as their purchase’s impact on the economy, on the ecosystem. I proposed last night--and propose now--that we call such a database, Kunkelfruit, as in, I did a Kunkelfruit search on Nike Air Jordans...on Johnson & Johnson baby powder...on USDA hamburger patties...on a Motorola RAZR...on a Microsoft Xbox... I’m creating today a template article in Wikipedia about this. It’s called, aptly enough, 'Kunkelfruit'. Have a look. And please spread the word.
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| Last Updated ( Thursday, 19 October 2006 ) | |||||
This technique, of course, derives from a well-known body of marketing research that shows that a consumer will subconsciously find, say, a two-figure price more attractive than a three-figure price, even though the difference in the amount is, from a profit perspective, insignificant. I argued that what this really reveals is that, right off the bat, such marketing ‘voodoo’ is actually a show of bad faith. It’s the manufacturer tacitly saying, ‘we're going to try to manipulate you to buy our product from the get-go’.
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