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Author: Sirlei Pitteri
Stanley Kubrick’s movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, inspired by Arthur Clarke’s novel (1968), is an excellent metaphor of the social context of the 1960s, at the height of the cold war, a period in which the power of the organizations involved with innovative and secret issues would result in polemic consequences upon society.
The central plot is developed within a virtual environment made up with satellites and computer networks. The base ‘Earth’, the spaceship ‘Discovery’, the computer HAL, and the spaceship crew are the four components of the collaborative (and competitive) environment designed for narrating the humanity trajectory, from approximately four million years before Christ up to the year 2001, always going over the evolution of species, the influence of technology upon that development, and the “risks” of artificial intelligence.
Although Arthur Clarke explains that the computer HAL was named from the initials of the expressions Heuristic ALgorithm, there is a strong belief that HAL was created with the three letters of the alphabet immediately before those from the IBM, the only multinational corporation in IT business in the 1960s. It is interesting to note that at that time there were no references, fictional or real, to create an administrative environment in which the information technologies would be the key players and enablers of a new way of life that mankind would witness sometime afterwards. From the moment when HAL incorporates human feelings, a rupture within the collaboration environment takes place and the film ends up with the astronauts’ mortal combat against the computer, in which “Good prevails over Evil”.
Such belief still influences our imagination because innovations constantly disturb, disorganize, and destabilize the communities for a certain period of time and the people need immediate answers. In a more concrete sense, the new ways of doing things by using technologies, exchanging people for machines, and maximizing the “espionage” always existed; however, with the proliferation of digital equipment at popular prices, we can feel that we have been living in a situation like the Big Brother or the Trumann Show.
Stimulating consumption in emerging societies
The following example analyzes the facilities and barriers encountered by a multinational, which works with field marketing to internationalize its businesses in emerging countries. This case confirms the tendencies pointed out, and illustrates the debate. The expression field marketing was created by the company itself to denote the set of services offered to its customers (industries and distributors of consumption goods).
Like the industries in the last century, which developed sophisticated methods of increasing the productivity in the factory floor, this business model focuses on mechanisms used to increase the productivity in the shop floor, i.e., in the sales points. In Brazil, this business model emerged in the 1990s, and became known as trade marketing, which has no equivalence in the Portuguese Language.
Although the multinational company has been active since the 1930s, the technological advances and the influence of North-American psychologists and anthropologists have expanded this kind of business model. In essence, the field-marketing business has the objective to attract the consumer’s eyes and hands, that is to say, to divert the consumer’s attention from its competitor’s product and to attract it to its client’s product.
For such, some strategies to observe the consumers’ behavior in the sales points have been noted: direct observations or filming the shelves to assess the flux of people passing by them; to observe how these people behave towards the products; how they react towards the tactile (cold, hot), visual, hearing, or smelling sensations; what difficulties or facilities that the people encounter to reach the products on the shelves; and so forth. Also, some metrics have been created to calculate the percentage of people that felt attracted by the products or that interacted with them in relation to the total amount of people passing by the shelves.
The management practices of the companies that are active in this business model have been improved by the use of technology systems in real time, in which the product category managers perform a scanning of its own products as well as of its competitors’ to identify the most competitive prices and equalize them with the competitors’ prices.
The restless managers monitor the shelves with idle spaces in order to fill them up with products immediately. The concept of empty shelves has changed. Before, shelves with empty spaces demonstrated sales productivity. Today, it means that the company is not selling, once the product was not instantly replaced.
In brief, we can ask: who makes the choice when someone goes to the supermarket to buy a jar of mayonnaise or a cake of soap? Is it the buyer? Or is there a competent marketing team behind those nice cameras installed on the ceiling with a sign that says, “Smile! You are being filmed!”?
The market deregulation and technological advances have introduced new manners of acting of big multinational companies, creating new mechanisms of penetrating unexplored markets, such as, in the Eastern Europe, Asia, Middle East, and Latin America. These regions have experienced intensive consumption practices only in the last decades.
The case of that multinational company illustrates well this question. It searched for emerging countries to expand the business of “diverting the eyes of a consumer from their competitor’s products”. However, it looks as if such strategy has not been successful in Brazil, differently from Russia, China, India, and some Arabian countries.
Unlike other countries that also participate in the art of consumption, Brazilian laws are rigorous both concerning the labor rights and the consumer’s defense issues.
Studies about consumption marketing in the digital society have a still unexplored potential about the effects of local forces that directly interfere with the acceptance or not of some managerial practices. Despite the recommendations of specialists in marketing about launching global products (global standardization), some adaptations are required for each society, since the managerial practices and the life cycle of the products are strongly influenced by cultural factors, including ethnical, historical, religious, and even mystical issues.
Most of the anthropologists (and other social scientists influenced by them) believe that culture is, by definition, harmonious and adaptable and the conflicts and suffering are effects of external interferences.
Thus, the idea of progress is dubious for those who are committed with cultural relativism, in which each culture defines its own objectives and its ethics, and which cannot be assessed as compared to other cultures.
References
CLARKE, A. C. 2001: A Space Odyssey. United Kingdom: Hutchinson, 1968.
UNDERHILL, P. Why We Buy? The Science of Shopping. New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 1999.
VÄLIKANGAS, L. The Resilient Organization: how adaptive cultures thrive even when strategy fails. New York: McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc., 2010.
HARA, C. Logística: armazenagem, distribuição, trade marketing. Campinas: Alínea, 2013.
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This article was developed with the support of CEST (Study Center Society and Technology) of the University of São Paulo (CEST-USP).