Manipulation in Advertising

The marketing concept is the philosophy that firms should analyze the needs of their customers and then make decisions to satisfy those needs, better than the competition. Today most firms have adopted the marketing concept, but this has not always been the case. /2./
In 1776 in The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith wrote that the needs of producers should be considered only with regard to meeting the needs of consumers. While this philosophy is consistent with the marketing concept, it would not be adopted widely until nearly 200 years later./2./
To better understand the marketing concept, it is worthwhile to put it in perspective by reviewing other philosophies that once were predominant. While these alternative concepts prevailed during different historical time frames, they are not restricted to those periods and are still practiced by some firms today.

The Production Concept
The production concept prevailed from the time of the industrial revolution until the early 1920's. The production concept was the idea that a firm should focus on those products that it could produce most efficiently and that the creation of a supply of low-cost products would in and of itself create the demand for the products. The key questions that a firm would ask before producing a product were:
Can we produce the product?
Can we produce enough of it? /2./

At the time, the production concept worked fairly well because the goods that were produced were largely those of basic necessity and there was a relatively high level of unfulfilled demand. …