Overcoming Cynicism in the Market Place

Businesses have to overcome one of many obstacles in order for marketing to be effective:
cynicism. They need to expand their market and communicate outside of their own core supporters/
buyers. Additionally, they must have the willingness to allocate enough funds to effectively
communicate their message.

Cynicism has crept in the American consciousness for the past fifty years. This cynicism affects
private industry and the environmental movement. The populace within the United States has become
jaded and now exhibits signs of not believing many of the messages that emanate from elected officials,
companies and the media that is used to distribute those messages. People do not trust what they hear
anymore. On the private industry side this is reflected in the declining effectiveness of retail sales
events. Our firm has seen sales events decline in level of effectiveness for the past ten years.
Consumers have been bombarded for years that the price of items will go down and become a great
bargain only during a pre-selected time period. This time period is promoted as a sale event. For
example, look at a Sunday newspaper showcasing all of the great deals one can have at a department
store, car dealer or furniture store. Really, how many “One day sales” can JC Penney have in a month?
People do not believe anymore that it is such a great opportunity to purchase products during the sale;
sale events are so frequent that the novelty of the event has decreased. People are bombarded with
over 3,000 advertising messages a day, more than double what they were a decade ago. (Condon, 2007)
Everything from the toothpaste packaging in the morning, to the ads on the radio driving to work, to the
billboards on the highway, and the pop ups on the internet. This cynicism has risen over the past fifty
years due to the manner in which media has related information. This is relevant to effective marketing
and overcoming consumer apathy due to the fact that media is the device used to communicate to
broad and targeted expanses of the public.

Cynicism started to be noticed in the 1960’s. After World War II the consumer age took hold.
Returning servicemen took jobs in manufacturing facilities where prior those facilities were utilized in
the war effort. They had to be converted for domestic use and the federal government subsidized the
capital expenditures during the war production era. These facilities were ready to go to produce
consumable goods. Jobs were needed as well to fuel the cycle. The World Bank and the International
Monetary Fund funded projects worldwide. (McMichael, 2004) The boom of industrialization fueled
increased consumerism. Those consumable goods needed to be brought to the marketplace and
showcased so that the population would buy them. This was also one of the great booms in the
marketing industry (Hopkins, 1966). Increased use of media occurred to promote the products. At the
same time media shifted from primarily print forms to the introduction of television.

On the national and international stage things started to change, people could now see and hear
what was occurring from around the globe. Although events have always unfolded politically, now the
public could witness them. Thus the population began to become more informed. Media itself has two
functions, to entertain which brings the audience and to inform which brings the advertisers. These
relationships are symbiotic; you cannot have one without the other in a capitalist system. With these
two converging functions of entertainment and information dissemination, many political events were
now covered in the news and on the media. The greater number of events covered led to more
information being disseminated. Political and national events covered by the media began to
proliferate. Due to the nature of combining entertainment and informing, consumers naturally lumped
both components together due to the fact that the entertainment and informing emanated from the
same source, television.

Over the past five decades the American public has been made aware of so much information
that they are starting to become de-sensitized (Rademacher, 2003). This is why marketing techniques
are becoming ever more sophisticated and persistent. It is no longer enough that an advertisement runs
during prime time programming on Thursday nights, but the ad must be “streamed”, “blogged”, “you-
tubed” and “downloaded”. Marketing as an industry has diversified to find more outlets to disseminate
information.