Does Advertising Create Artificial Wants?

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Does advertising create artificial wants?

(John Kenneth Galbraith’s “dependence effect” and F. A. Hayek’s response)

Advertising, a form of marketing that serves to drive consumer behavior,

is one of the areas in business that has been mostly criticized (Uyl, 42). The wellknown definition of marketing states that its primary goal is to determine and then

satisfy wants and needs of the consumers (Gamble, 229). Many observers,

however, claim that some businesses involved in advertising go beyond and create

“artificial” wants and needs that people otherwise would not exhibit. They explain

it by an extensive volume of advertising our society is exposed to these days.

This, in turn, makes them think that there is a conspiracy to sell people products

that they do not really want (Uyl, 42). Professor John Kenneth Galbraith being

one of the promoters of anti-consumerism supported and extended this

observation in his “The Dependence Effect”. He says that in the society like ours

all wants are created by the process by which they are satisfied (Galbraith, 358).

In other words, our wants for all types of products in the market beyond food,

shelter and sex would not occur if those products did not exist. A want for an

automobile would not exist if the automobile was not created over two centuries

ago. However, this sort of a proposition is arguable, since it not only tends to limit

our modern society to the aboriginal level, similar to the one in the Stone Age, but

it also ignores the core set of human desires, described in Maslow’s Hierarchy of

Needs. Therefore, this paper aims to discuss Galbraith thesis and prove that

advertising does not create “artificial” wants for types of products because those

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wants are natural and every product entering the market is designed to satisfy one

of those wants. But advertising rather attempts to create a want for a specific

brand of a product to satisfy the pre-existing want. Moreover, this paper will...