And, interestingly, it is a comedian who finally asks it.
Here you see the famous Boston somedian "Louis CK" appearing on the Conan O'Brien show. He is making fun of the "generation of assholes" who "feel the world owes them something they knew existed only ten seconds ago". The 500,000 views this clip has received on YouTube suggest I am not the only person who thinks he may have a point.
And he is asking the very question which should rightly prepoccupy the waking hours of anyone who works in technology marketing, indeed anyone who works in marketing..... actually make that anyone who lives in a market economy.....
What in God's name is the point of all this brilliant innovation if it brings so little enduring joy?
Bill Gates voiced a similar concern when he observed that "people don't how to want the things we can offer them". But I don't have so much of a problem with people not embracing innovation - that's their right, after all. I'm more concerned with the indifference they show towards innovations two weeks after they have adopted them. You could call it the Paul Arden* question: "How can people more fully appreciate the magic and wonder they already have around them?" As advertising experts, we are supposed to be the authorities on adding perceived value to things. So we should ask ourselves why the public's appreciation of most things (especially those things provided by private enterprise) is so woefully low. Ask people about their mobile phone, their Sky+, their broadband connection.... goods which would have seemed miraculous to our grandparents.... and within a minute or so you'll be listening to morose complaints about the monthly bill.
It seems to me that, if we were seeking graitude rather than money, most capitalists would have given up the game decades ago. Sixty years ago, under communism, a few million Russians were happy to die for the right to queue for a potato. Today, in a market economy, people who buying a microwave oven for £70 at two o'clock in the morning complain if they have a three-minute wait.
It also occurs to me that the premise of most consumer journalism may be completely wrong. Implicit in the activities of organisations such as "Which?" or programmes such as "You and Yours" is the assumption that consumers are blameless and rational individuals who are in permanent danger of being misled by evil corporations. I am reluctantly coming to the conclusion (as are a few scientists, I might add) that corporations do an okay job: it's the individual human who needs more serious investigation.
The rich (or anyone richer than average) are worse offenders than most, here. If you are wealthy, you will find the price of almost all consumer goods set at a level to sell in large quantities to a mass market - in other words at a price aimed at people much poorer than you. This means that a man earning £50,000 a year pays a price for his new flat-screen LCD TV that has been set be within the reach of people earning £20,000 a year - a price typically several hundred pounds lower than the rich man would be prepared to pay. This difference (known as the consumer surplus) seems to bring no added happiness at all. It's as if rich people were given a £200 refund every time they bought a major puchase, and merely shrugged it off. I recently asked a professor from Caltech and a couple of other behavioural economists why this is no. No-one seems sure - but they admitted it is a major loss of potential happiness.
The brutal question underlying all this is simple. For all the talk about "value not price", do people have any genuine appreciation of value at all? Or is our only conception of weath and fortune not absolute but merely relative (do we inhabit a world where, as one economist famously observed, "a rich man is anyone who earns more than his wife's sister's husband.")
This is a vitally important area of study for us. Partly because, if only at a small level, brand value might be one rare example when products are successfully imbued with a certain amount of added emotional enjoyment. But we need to know much more about this issue.
Do you think the problem is societal? Or is it innate? And, either way, what can we do about it?
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- * I call this the Paul Arden question after a story from William Burdon, which appears on the tributes page to Paul Arden ".....On the way home, we were getting pissed at Bordeaux airport, and asked
each other what could be the greatest gift you could give your
children. Moray and I gave some kind of inane account-man answer -
"Ferrari", I suspect. Paul's answer was "a sense of wonder."
