The last 50 years of increased consumer spending mean that there is no new “market” to speak of for Proctor and Gamble. There is only complete market saturation, meaning that a new strategy of need creation has been implemented. This strategy creates products that target specific consumer “types” and “categories,” aimed at creating consumer desire for multiple products to suit their “type,” where previously only one or two products were needed. This strategy, now being a fully functional and innocuous phenomenon in our culture, has had multiple effects on the commercial infrastructure of the world. More products to produce means more testing facilities, more byproducts from manufacturing, more distribution super centers, more freight loads, more trains, more trucking lanes, more highways, and more commercial centers. As Deborah Richmond writes, the proliferation of products also means that the home itself grows to accommodate storage.  The strategy of marketing more products to each individual (rather than expanding the base of individuals to be sold a particular product, since this strategy has already been taken to its full extent), and the hulking suburban growth that has accompanied it, is a direct symptom of the Law of Diminishing Returns, which says that, “In a production system with fixed and variable inputs, beyond some point, each additional unit of the variable input yields smaller and smaller increases in outputs.” The system of consumer supply and demand has expanded at exponential speed and cost to accommodate the diminished returns of static consumer consumption. The crumbling highway infrastructure, rise of gas prices, and impending environmental controls on shipping and production are the biggest threats to Proctor and Gamble’s continued infrastructural expansion to accommodate increased consumer spending. This means that to accommodate the necessary increase in goods consumption, a new model of suburban life is advisable for P&G to subsidize and promote. This model must directly supplant the need for expensive interstate shipping infrastructure, cutting out concerns about crumbling highways and rising shipping costs. Meanwhile, it must reinforce the strategies of “incentives” and “hierarchies” that inflame emotions of envy and ambition in consumer actors (an essential part of the cycle of spending and producing). So, in essence, this project must maintain the perverse psychology of “diminishing return” consumerism while sidestepping looming environmental controls and catastrophic infrastructural decay and subsequent costs. The sheer volume of production now required to increase the profits of P&G disallows the use of traditional supply chain methodology.  

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5. cmpblldllghn reblogged this from annicka and added:

   actually, i’m less “studying” anything than “repeating & rearranging words and phrases i’ve heard you say in offhanded...

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   i think it’s kind...“actual brainpower.” so interesting

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