Valentines Day. Christmas.  Birthdays. These are all excuses to be materialistic fabricated by very talented marketing. It’s interesting how it is a social norm to buy something for someone on any one of these days

–        Roses or stuffed teddy bears for your significant other on Valentine’s Day

–        A gift for every close family and friend for Christmas and maybe even a Christmas Stocking to go along with your gift

–        A cake for someone’s birthday along with some kind of personalized meaningful gift

Companies make big bucks from these fabrications.

If you want to buy roses on Valentine’s Day you should be prepared to pay double or even triple of the regular price of a rose, but why do you have to get flowers on Valentines? Why is there such a high demand for this one day?

Christmas is that time of year where you are too broke after buying everyone gifts. Take a step back. Realize that Christmas is a Christian holiday that is to celebrate a savior being born into the world. In fact, if you wanted to practice a gift giving holiday we should call it Hanukah, not Christmas. During Hanukah, you have to give a gift to close people in your life for seven days straight.

Birthdays are supposed to be a celebration of how strong your mother was bringing you into this world.

It’s just interesting to take a step back and realize that if everyone consumed like us (in the North American context) that we wouldn’t be able to sustain all of our consumerism. I guess all I’m trying to say is that if you are really close with friends, family or a significant other, you should not need any holiday or excuse to act differently as a consumer. They are special every single day. Super corny, but how much less waste would the world have if you didn’t get all of your Christmas presents last Christmas? Seriously – do you even remember everything you got for Christmas? Do you still use everything you got from your birthday? These Fabricated Materialism days are great for encouraging unnecessary consumption that will most likely end up in a landfill.

For this reason, I don’t give gifts unless I see something practical that someone I know needs.

As an active business student I go to events that have booths all the time. In fact, this morning I went to a career fair. It’s always interesting to see what booths are at these types of events – even more interesting is the types of swag that they offer. I feel that they use swag to lure students to their booths. Swag is the first point of marketing contact and could make the difference between any student going to a booth they’ve never heard of.

Companies that pride themselves on sustainability have standard prizes. Every business student has some kind of :

–       reusable bag with the company logo to discourage use of plastic bags

–       pens (that might be made out of recyclable/compostable materials)

–       Notebooks made from recycled paper

–       Water bottles with the company logo on it to discourage consumption of plastic water bottles

It’s interesting that all of these companies are almost lacking innovation in this area. It’s the first point of contact with students, and yet even a simple thing such as swag has been standardized and can’t really be differentiated.

However, I found the anomaly today at a career fair. I walked up to a booth where one of the representatives of the company presented me with a small package, “We don’t believe in swag, because it’s just more consumption. Instead, here is one dollar. You can keep the dollar or write your name and number on the back to have it put into a pool of money where half the money will go to charity and the other half will go to a random draw of someone who donated to this pool of money with the dollar.”

I was so impressed. I was hooked. Screw swag – this was the way to go to show your values. My bag was already filled with too much stuff from other companies. They differentiated themselves in a way that I could appreciate. Needless to say – I will be contacting Traction on Demand because I know they have a culture I can respect. (Plus they get free marketing from this blog post from an impressed student who loves social sustainability.)

I sincerely hope companies can follow suite in something similar that provides as much value and as much of an impression as this company.

We discussed in class how there are certain industries that have been associated with sustainability for a while, such as household cleaning products. However, industries such as technology are still trying to set benchmarks with how fast the industry is changing from day to day never mind incorporating sustainability.

I have a little bit of knowledge in the technology sector which I find that a lot of people don’t realize that might affect their perspective with technology and sustainability. This blog post touches more on the social side of technology rather than the resource side of technology. I think this is relevant to marketing because of the research phase that consumers do, or don’t do that might affect their decision of what technology to use or how to use it.

Google is a company that exists for profit. The browser, Google Chrome, is competing against not-for-profit search engines such as Mozilla Firefox. As a consumer I find it kind of scary about how much information Google is amassing with each search, action, email, etc. (never mind what websites you go to!) So I personally use Mozilla Firefox which was created by the people for the people.

Privacy is an interesting transparency that online companies now have to consider. Companies like Facebook got into a lot of trouble for almost hiding the fact that whatever you post on Facebook does not belong to you, but to Facebook!

In the business context, a company’s social media profile puts pressure on them to respond faster to complaints. One wrong word from a company on their Twitter account or on their Facebook could cost them a lot of consumers because of how viral the internet is. However, the internet is a powerful marketing platform. An example is the crowd sourcing ability with technology for political campaigns.

On the flip side, it’s also interesting how consumers also have to consider their own actions when interacting with technology. Before, you could get away with doing something because social media wasn’t around to spread it rapidly around the internet. In modern times, however, whatever you put on the internet is not as secure. A lot of companies actually look at online profiles before hiring an employee to fit with their culture.