Clay,

Gotcha.

But that's not an advertising or even marketing problem, its an economic problem about the price that clears the market. If no-one really cares about bleach sufficiently to pay for it then you give it away. If that doesn't suffice then you make something they do care about (sufficiently to pay for).

I suspect that people do care about bleach in the sense that they care about clean linen, but that they don't care for CPG spamming on their idiot-boxes. There's nothing an idiot likes less that being called an idiot, didn't you know?

Are you really contending that the only solution to the problem of a warehouse full of product essentially indistinguishable from its competitors is to lie about its qualities to squillions of people in the hope that a percentage of them will be credulous enough to pay you for it?

Is marketing really just sophisticated bullshit?

Marketing is (correct me if I'm wrong) about: How do we let people know about us and our stuff?

How does traditional CPG marketing do this? Is it effective?
(Not being clever, I really don't know and want to know. My personal view of most such advertising is that it is counter-productive, but I recognise that the people paid zillions of simoleons for doing it aren't likely to say so. I just get on with my life and mostly ignore it.)

Coke for instance, I drink because I like the taste. I like the caffeine/sugar rush, and I hate Pepsi, it's just too chemical a taste for me. I also like the fact that Coke leaves your teeth feeling clean. (I dislike the knowledge that this is because its base is such a powerful degreaser that the people who haul it have to have a HazChem licence, but hey! life's not perfect.)

Anyway, the point is that Coke ads are completely wasted on me, for the most part (the small possibility exists of a new flavour being of passing interest, but history would deny even this, since most such efforts have been catastrophic failures) as are most competing product ads, since I LIKE COKE!.

I further suspect that most of the target markets of such ads are not too different from me.