Consumers ‘NotLambs’

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31145, 23 August 1966, Page 12

Consumers ‘NotLambs’

(N.Z. Press Association! | WELLINGTON, August 22. Very often the consumer is made to appear an honest, innocent lamb and the advertiser a veritable satan, a Seminar on consumer education was told in Wellington, yesterday. Making this comment, the senior lecturer in economics at Victoria University (Dr. D. Sloane) reminded the seminar of the advertisers’ need to allow for the consumers’ bad debts, unpaid bills, and shoplifting. “In all fairness, the consumer’s morality is not any better than the advertiser’s said Dr. Sloane. The two-day seminar, arranged by the Victoria University Adult Education Department, examined consumer education and assessing its worth and potentialities in New Zealand. , “To acquire and keep up to date the education that would enable us to dispense with expert opinion in all our purchases would leave us no time for living,” said Dr. Sloane. “If you are to make tomorrow’s consumer a better spender of money than today’s consumer then it will have to be done through general education. It has got to be done in the young while tastes are still forming, while people are still experimenting.” “There seems to be remarkably little scope for general consumer education as ‘distinct from general education,” said Dr. Sloane.

The chairman of the Consumer Council (Mr G. E. Wood) asked the seminar not to be too critical of the advertising man—“We live in a very naughty world,” he said. He said there was concern that the language of massmarket advertising was at the lowest common denominator.

Concern was also felt at the lack of useful information and the half truths. But half truths in advertising might seem comparatively innocuous compared with the technique used in other fields, such as politics, said Mr Wood.