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Consumer As Art Patron

Is the consumer a plain buck-stretching value-seeker? Or also an art patron of sorts?

C' Profile Art smart?

A good way to gain notoriety as a supporter of the dumbing-down that's supposed to have imperiled civilization, is to prefix 'art' with 'm'. Mart. Not as in a mass market for art (ho-hum), but marketing as the business of making money by fulfilling felt and unfelt consumer needs---including the need for art appreciation.

Of course, and let's clear this up straight off, the consumer wants value. Value-for-money. So if it's a Large McFries, it had better pack the potatoes sliced and fried exactly as promised, at just the right temperature, all within the prescribed wait, served in a superhygienic environment-and with a chirpy 'enjoy your meal, sir'. And 'here's your change, sir', for a precise sum of money. Likewise for a bottled cola. It had better do its job as a refreshment. For the precise amount tendered.

Ayes all around. 'Hear hear'. Some table-patting too. Consumers agree. Economists agree. Researchers agree. Marketers agree. Even the US Treasury Department agrees.

Balance the books. Give value-for-money. That's what makes the McWorld go round, keeps the sun shining on the Coca-Colonies and helps marketers keep their jobs. End of story.

End of story?

For literalists, maybe. Not for marketers who aspire to more than their paycheques.

Bring just two suppositions together. One: the cave-dweller who painted the cave walls all those years ago was not fulfilling some contractual obligation ('two mammoths for every square yard'). The poor soul was probably just expressing him/herself. Two: the dweller in the cave down the shrub would have picked the painted cave over the blank cave, everything else being equal, to come barter her newly stitched bodywraps.

Things have evolved a bit, since. Yet, there's enough evidence to conclude that some form or the other of creative self-expression survives till this day. What's more, it isn't absurd to suppose that the modern consumer is no less willing to pay a premium for something that also appeals--- through some medium or the other---to her art sensibility.

Value-for-money? Sure thing. But the consumer, royalty having already been thrust upon her, might also see herself as a patron of all things good. As a person who appreciates the few who care for her agonies and ecstacies. As someone who bestows brands with her preference, but is too self-confidently secure to need a royal throne to exercise power.

Bah, you may scoff, don't pass off elitist wistfulness for market reality. Ordinary folk simply want to stretch the rupee as far as they can to get their work done (stomachs filled, thirst quenched, whatever), that's it.

But then, not everybody is willing to genuflect before this value-for-money thing (as defined). People, being people, do appreciate art. That too, enough to pay for the intangible value they see in it. This being so, and whether or not this proposition is self-evident, it's better for a brand to treat everyone alike as a royal sophisticate than a hardnosed rupee-wringer.

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