Valentines Day is a huge cash cow for card and candy manufacturers, florists, and soft toy producers that revolves entirely around the concept of love. However love is not the only "feeling" up for grabs, as other abstract emotions such as pride are used to sell products varying from sports brands to breakfast cereals.
Pride is a huge human emotion that marketing and advertising executives abuse to prise consumers from their hard-earned cash. Pride that comes with supporting a particular sports team and the pride felt in belonging to a certain country or province are just two examples. The "Buy New Zealand Made" campaign taps into the pride of being a kiwi and its logo can be seen slapped onto products such as locally sold furniture to the internationally recognizable brand of Vegemite. Meanwhile supporters of New Zealand rugby teams snatch up their franchise's merchandise, including team jerseys that change every year, to coffee cups and calendars.
If you thought there would be a few rules to using human emotion to sell everyday products, you would be wrong - there are no rules. No human emotion is deemed sacred. Fear is often used in the pharmaceutical world to sell preventative medicines, targeting at people's fear of falling ill. Hatred is also an emotion used to sell. In America armed service recruiters focussed on Americans' hatred towards Osama Bin Laden by displaying his image on posters, flyers and other visual displays, when trying to persuade young people to enlist.
Although some may see this as exploiting our emotions, there really is no other way to sell things. Imagine a world where emotions were not allowed to be engaged by advertising or the products themselves. Colors would be banned and all packaging would be a dull shade of gray in case the colors used made us feel happy or alternatively depressed.
Only factual descriptions would be used to describe and promote each product, with each description attributed a certain length and size so that fairness reins. “Play Lotto and Win!” slogans would appeal too much to the emotion of greed, and so would have to be replaced with “If you spend $10 on a Lotto ticket, you will have a 1 in 1 billion chance of claiming the main prize.” All laid out in white writing on a gray background of course.
So as you can see, unless you prefer your world to be duller and grayer, advertising and products appealing to our emotions does have its value. Valentines Day may be a massive money maker for many, but it also appeals to our emotion to love, and surely this is one emotion that the world needs more of.
