The Ingenious Marketing of Money

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Think about it. The best invention was not money by itself. But certainly one had to find a way to trade something of value for something of value. And throughout human history money has taken on many variations from rocks, to animals, to land, to gold, to paper... To some extent money is not always the traditional kind today. But what am I talking about when I mention the ingenious marketing of money? Quite simply, in marketing in general the entire aim is to get people to part with it. I mean, that is the whole point of marketing. To get you to spend money. But it is not limited to actual products. Checks were invented. Credit cards were invented. Now we have debit cards. Few people carry actual physical cash anymore, and this is by design. It is not about convenience, although any of these payment methods can certainly be convenient. It's about making you feel, when you use these payment methods, less like you are actually spending money. When you are not using physical cash, when you are only seeing numbers, or when you can be enticed to see smaller periodic numbers being doled out through financing options... You either feel less like you are spending money or feel less like you are spending lots of it. It's a trick that works. It is very effective. When you have a $20 bill in your pocket and go out running and break that $20 to buy a soda you very much notice that you do not have that $20 anymore. The more you break down that $20 the less likely you are to spend on other things because you only have so much left that you can physically spend. But if you have plastic you can use, you don't even notice the spending. Either you feel like you have more in your account, or you have credit you can use, and you won't actually see that for at least a few weeks or a month after you spent it... And even then, if it was a credit card you used you don't see the $20 you spent. Or the $500 you spent. You see a bill saying you only need to pay a small portion of that. Money in this way has been ingeniously marketed to make you feel like you are not spending as much money as you actually are. And thus the banks get more from their transaction fees and interest they receive, the credit cards get the same from transaction fees and interest, and the stores and manufacturers and distributors all benefit as well because you are more willing to say why not? and buy something because it doesn't feel like the money is physically departing your pocket. It's brilliant to the point of being Einstein brilliant really, and is probably to commerce the best invention there ever was as light bulbs were to seeing in the dark.