THE BIG FISH SYNDROME

"THE BIG-FISH SYNDROME"

Somebody close to your house cares for your needs.

In that Mom And Pop Store (some call it General Store) in your town you get a lot of things you need. You have  just to cross the road, walk a little distance and there they are, the friendly people of a family, handing you over the things of your daily needs, for a reasonable price. And you get to meet other town-folks there and chat. It feels so convenient, comfortable and homely.

The other day I found a comment in the internet about the popularity of these mom-and-pop stores. Let me share it with you. (quote):

"I live in a tiny town,
and the mom and pop
store here has a little bit
of everything. It's really
nice not to have to drive
twenty miles to get gas, a
snack, or some over-the-
counter medicine.
The couple who owns the
store decided what to sell,
and they thought of
everything that people
might need urgently and
tried to keep it in stock.
It's awesome to be able to
walk down the street and
pick up some headache
medicine or a bag of flour,
and if I'm about to run out
of gas, it's great not to
have to run on fumes to
the nearest big station."
- kylee07drg

It was not always like this. And it will not always be like this.

You must have seen the cartoon where a #BigFish is about to eat a small
fish, but there is a still bigger fish about to eat both of them ! That is what modern retail marketing is. Big business houses are out there to swallow  up the small stores, changing the face of retail marketing.

If you look back you will realise that our ancestors toiled hard for even the basic needs of shelter,drinking water and food. They had to collect firewood from the forest to cook the food they collected. And they rubbed flint and iron to make a fire.They had also to make their own weapons, their own footwear, their own clothing, their own medicines! It was an awesome task , an unending toil.

And then came the age of marketing - at first it was quite simple, convenient and elementary. John made several extra pairs of footwears. Paul made  lots of hunting knives and Peter made  so many cooking pots. Each one made what he was good at. The extra products thus made by people became 'money' as they paid for the things of their need by giving these extras in exchange. This kind of marketing, known as the barter system, continued for a long time until standardised coins came into use.

Marketing then became more organised. And gradually more sophisticated. And as time rolled on  it  became more and more complicated until, as we see now, it has become extremely cut-throat and war-like.

There was a time, a hundred years back, when everyone knew the most trusted brands of products. And this was  without the help of the modern persistent aggressive advertising, Classic examples of products that needed little advertising were alarm clocks and radio-receivers sets of Germany, T-model ford of USA, the Harris tweeds and the Raleigh bicycles of Great Britain, the Swiss wrist-watches, the Sheffield knives - made in Sheffield , a city in
South Yorkshire , England.
And so on.

It was not without reason that Ralph Emerson had then famously said (quote):

"If you build a better mousetrap, the
world will beat a path to your door".

And they did beat a path to the manufacturers.

That was, as they say, in the good old days. It is not so any more.

I have an issue of the Readers Digest of the year 1949 from my father's collection and you will be surprised to know that it is without any advertisements - (Father Forgets, one of the most celebrated articles ever, appeared in Readers' Digest in that year).

And then in early fifties came the Business Management Schools and the army of MBAs And they turned the world upside down. Now the focus shifted to making as much money as possible at the cost of the society and maximization of the company's profit. They developed mathematical models - the dy/dx of manufacturing, to cut down costs and  they systematically brainwashed the consumer through advertising models based on the theories of Abraham Maslow,  Frederick Herzberg and others. They developed new tricks of marketing, they built new supermarkets and Huge Malls, giving a new definition to retail trade. And they drove daylight out of the friendly mom-and-pop stores.

The change is  welcome to the teenagers of today who are allured by the glitz of the malls but older people were more comfortable with, and are nostalgic about, their friendly neighborhood mom-and-pop stores.

The inevitable cannot ofcourse be stalled. As Lord Tennyson maintained, “The old order changeth yielding place to new " . Change is indeed the way of life.

Fifty year from now the teenagers of today will be old. They will then look back in nostalgia to the times of big Malls of the early 21st century. But a more fiercely competetive new order will then replace these malls with a different face of retail marketing for a yet another new generation ! The Shylocks of the world of marketing will grow stronger and stronger, richer and richer in the name of the so-called democracy which is a far cry from Jefferson's dream of power of the people !

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