contemporary hucksters.
Clearly, obsolescence occurs with or without 'planning.' With respect to things, obsolescence occurs under three conditions. It occurs when a product literally deteriorates to the point at which it can no longer fulfill its functions – bearings burn out, fabrics tear, pipes rust. Assuming the same functions still need to be performed for the consumer, the failure of a product to perform these functions marks the point at which its replacement is required. This is obsolescence due to functional failure.
Obsolescence also occurs when some new product arrives on the scene to perform these functions more effectively than the old product could. The new antibiotics do a more effective job of curing infection than the old. The new computers are infinitely faster and cheaper to operate than the antique models of the early 1960's. This is obsolescence due to substantive technological advance.
But obsolescence also occurs when the needs of the consumer change, when the functions to be performed by the product are themselves altered. These needs are not as simply described as the critics of planned obsolescence sometimes assume. An object, whether a car or a can opener, may be evaluated along many different parameters. A car, for example, is more than a conveyance. It is an expression of the personality of the user, a symbol of status, a source of that pleasure associated with speed, a source of a wide variety of sensory stimuli – tactile, olfactory, visual, etc. The satisfaction a consumer gains from such factors may, depending upon his values, outweigh the satisfaction he might receive from improved gas consumption or pickup power.
The traditional notion that each object has a single easily definable function clashes with all that we now know about human psychology, about the role of values in decisionmaking, and with ordinary common sense as well. All products are multi-functional.
An excellent illustration of this occurred not long ago when I watched a little boy purchase half a dozen pink erasers at a little stationery store. Curious as to why he wanted so many of them, I picked one up for closer examination. 'Do they erase well?' I asked the boy. 'I don't know,.' he said, 'but they sure smell good!' And, indeed, they did. They had been heavily perfumed by the Japanese manufacturer perhaps to mask an unpleasant chemical odor. In short, the needs filled by products vary by purchaser and through time.
In a society of scarcity, needs are relatively universal and unchanging because they are starkly related to the 'gut' functions. As affluence rises, however, human needs become less directly linked to biological survival and more highly individuated. Moreover, in a society caught up in complex, high-speed change, the needs of the individual – which arise out of his interaction with the external environment – also change at relatively high speed. The more rapidly changing the society, the more temporary the needs. Given the general affluence of the new society, he can indulge many of these short-term needs.
Often, without even having a clear idea of what needs he wants served, the consumer has a vague feeling that he wants a change. Advertising encourages and capitalizes on this feeling, but it can hardly be credited with having created it single-handedly. The tendency toward shorter relational durations is thus built more deeply into the social structure than arguments over planned obsolescence or the manipulative effectiveness of Madison Avenue would suggest.
The rapidity with which consumers' needs shift is reflected in the alacrity with which buyers abandon product and brand loyalty. If Assistant Attorney General Donald F. Turner, a leading critic of advertising, is correct, one of the primary purposes of advertising is to create 'durable preferences.' If so, it is failing, for brand-switching is so frequent and common that it has become, in the words of one food industry publication, 'one of the national advertiser's major headaches.'
Many brands drop out of existence. Among brands that continue to exist there is a continual reshuffling of position. According to Henry M. Schachte, 'In almost no major consumer goods category ... is there a brand on top today which held that position ten years ago.' Thus among ten leading American cigarettes, only one, Pall Mall, maintained in 1966 the same share of the market that it held in 1956. Camels plunged from 18 to 9 percent of the market; Lucky Strike declined even more sharply, from 14 to 6 percent. Other brands moved up, with Salem, for example, rising from 1 to 9 percent. Additional fluctuations have occurred since this survey.
However insignificant these shifts may be from the long-run view of the historian, this continual shuffling and reshuffling, influenced but not independently controlled by advertising, introduces into the short-run, everyday life of the individual a dazzling dynamism. It heightens still further the sense of speed, turmoil and impermanence in society.
Fast-shifting preferences, flowing out of and interacting with high-speed technological change, not only lead to frequent changes in the popularity of products and brands, but also shorten the life cycle of products. Automation expert John Diebold never wearies of pointing out to businessmen that they must begin to think in terms of shorter life spans for their goods. Smith Brothers' Cough Drops, Calumet Baking Soda and Ivory Soap, have become American institutions by virtue of their long reign in the market place. In the days ahead, he suggests, few products will enjoy such longevity. Every consumer has had the experience of going to the supermarket or department store to replace some item, only to find that he cannot locate the same brand or product. In 1966 some 7000 new products turned up in American supermarkets. Fully 55 percent of all the items now sold there did not exist ten years ago. And of the products available then, 42 percent have faded away altogether. Each year the process repeats itself in more extreme form. Thus 1968 saw 9,500 new items in the consumer packaged-goods field alone, with only one in five meeting its sales target. A silent but rapid attrition kills off the old, and new products sweep in like a ride. 'Products that used to sell for twenty-five years,' writes economist Robert Theobald, 'now often count on no more than five. In the volatile pharmaceutical and electronic fields the period is often as short as six months.' As the pace of change accelerates further, corporations may create new products knowing full well that they will remain on the market for only a matter of a few weeks.
Here, too, the present already provides us with a foretaste of the future. It lies in an unexpected quarter: the fads now sweeping over the high technology societies in wave after wave. In the past few years alone, in the United States, Western Europe and Japan, we have witnessed the sudden rise or collapse in popularity of 'Bardot hairdos,' the 'Cleopatra look,' James Bond, and Batman, not to speak of Tiffany lampshades, Super-Balls, iron crosses, pop sunglasses, badges and buttons with protest slogans or pornographic jokes, posters of Allen Ginsberg or Humphrey Bogart, false eyelashes, and innumerable other gimcracks and oddities that reflect – are tuned into – the rapidly changing pop culture.
Backed by mass media promotion and sophisticated marketing, such fads now explode on the scene virtually overnight – and vanish just as quickly. Sophisticates in the fad business prepare in advance for shorter and shorter product life cycles. Thus, there is in San Gabriel, California, a company entitled, with a kind of cornball relish, Wham-O Manufacturing Company. Wham-O specializes in fad products, having introduced the hula hoop in the fifties and the so-called Super-Ball more recently. The latter – a high-bouncing rubber ball – quickly became so popular with adults as well as children that astonished visitors saw several of them bouncing merrily on the floor of the Pacific Coast Stock Exchange. Wall Street executives gave them away to friends and one high broadcasting official complained that 'All our executives are out in the halls with their Super-Balls.' Wham-O, and other companies like it, however, are not disconcerted when sudden death overtakes their product; they anticipate it. They are specialists in the design and manufacture of 'temporary' products.
The fact that fads are generated artificially, to a large extent, merely underscores their significance. Even engineered fads are not new to history. But never before have they come fleeting across the consciousness in such rapid-fire profusion, and never has there been such smooth coordination between those who originate the fad, mass media eager to popularize it, and companies geared for its instantaneous exploitation.
A well-oiled machinery for the creation and diffusion of fads is now an entrenched part of the modern economy. Its methods will increasingly be adopted by others as they recognize the inevitability of the ever-shorter product cycle. The line between 'fad' and ordinary product will progressively blur. We are moving swiftly into the era of the temporary product, made by temporary methods, to serve temporary needs.
The turnover of things in our lives thus grows even more frenetic. We face a rising flood of throw-away items, impermanent architecture, mobile and modular products, rented goods and commodities designed for almost instant death. From all these directions, strong pressures converge toward the same end: the inescapable ephemeralization of the man-thing relationship.
The foreshortening of our ties with the physical environment, the stepped-up turnover of things, however, is only a small part of a much larger context. Let us, therefore, press ahead in our exploration of life in high transience society.
