Today’s post is just a little thought-provoker, because it’s something on which I’m not sure to give a definite answer myself. As it’s the start of 2012, this post is dedicated to the Mayans, who probably didn’t put much serious thought into anything. How dare they try to scare my planet?!
The topic: Symbolic value – a champion among advertisers, but possibly a grey area among consumers. Symbolic value concerns value that is associated with a product or service by attaching emotions or meanings to it, rather than value that is purely functional. Diamonds are an example of a product that hold a lot of symbolic value. Completely unrelated to diamonds, today’s topic was actually inspired by an article I saw on the website of Richard Dawkin’s Foundation for Reason and Science. Richard is a good man, and is probably sneering at the Mayans as well right now, but more importantly for my blog, cites a recent experiment that fits nicely into the debate on whether advertising has either been of benefit or detriment to the consumer.
Claudia Fritz and John Curtis have teamed up to show that expert violinists are unable to tell the difference between the famous, antique Stradivarius violins and modern violins. (Quick background note: Stradivarius violins have been sold for millions of dollars before, and were always famed to produce a sound beyond the beauty of modern violins, while nobody was quite sure why). Now, surely this means that the value of the Stradivarius is purely symbolic and not functional? This sparks up one side of the advertising debate – is symbolic value just another form of pretentiousness, that isn’t ‘real’ value? And if so, when does it become pretentious? In the case of Stradivarius violins, it would seem that symbolic value was being played off as functional value, turning the subjective into objective, and the violin experts into ordinary folk. Incidentally, that last sentence was one of the most pretentious things I have ever written. Actually, no it wasn’t; it just had lots of symbolic value attached to it.
Ok, enough gibberish. The reason I’m bringing up symbolic value in a contentious tone is because you might have heard the line, “advertising tries to sell you stuff that you don’t need”. Well, I have two responses to that…
Firstly, you simply cannot tell if symbolic value does or doesn’t overlap with functional value until you personally experience it yourself. We all know one of science’s most mysterious phenomena: the placebo effect. If the placebo effect has proven itself to treat serious illnesses (and it has), why on earth wouldn’t it be able to perform the much simpler task of adding real value to a product or service? The same goes for the Stradivarius – simply knowing that you were listening to a Stradivarius may increase your appreciation of the violin’s sound, and lead you to genuinely evaluate its acoustics more than you would for a modern violin. Nobody should be able to tell you how much you enjoyed the sound of a Stradivarius but yourself. You are such a special person; it warms my heart.
Secondly, where do you draw the line between what you want and what you need? Technically, survival is what you need; everything in addition to that depends on a person’s reference point, income, opinion, situation, etc. I’m sure that the same people who complain about advertising selling you things that you don’t need would start screaming and kicking if you tried to take their smartphones away from them. But everyone needs a smartphone, right? Most of these things that we didn’t ‘need’ have contributed to vast amounts of innovation and discovery that have made the world a better place across all sorts of dimensions. Think about it.
However, at the end of the day, symbolic value doesn’t always equate to true value. People often want to seek “the truth”, regardless of what their own subjective views are, while on the other hand, some people are still happy to devote their lives to religion (whoops, did I just say that?). Nevertheless, do you think that the Stradivarius violin will lose its value and charm now that this experiment has come to light? Personally, I seriously doubt it. If you do, then this is an appropriate time to tell you that I’m playing the world’s saddest song on the world’s smallest violin for you. And since I began this post with a thought-provoker on symbolic value, I will leave you with another one…the violin being the culprit, again. If you didn’t agree with anything about this post, at least check out this amazing true story.
