John Berger on marketing

On marketing:

It is true that in [marketing] one brand of manufacture, one firm, competes with another; but it is also true that every [marketing] image confirms and enhances every other. [Marketing] is not merely an assembly of competing messages: it is a language in itself which is always being used to make the same general proposal. Within [marketing], choices are offered between this cream and that cream, that car and this car, but [marketing] as a system only makes a single proposal.

It proposes to each of us that we transform ourselves, or our lives, by buying something more.

This more, it proposes, will make us in some way richer - even though we will be poorer by having spent our money.

[Marketing] persuades us of such a transformation by showing us people who have apparently been transformed and are, as a result, enviable. The state of being envied is what constitutes glamour. And [marketing] is the process of manufacturing glamour.

• John Berger, Ways of Seeing, Penguin, 1972. (Note: “marketing” is “publicity” in the original.)