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Did You Boycott Gasoline Today Or Are You A Hitler Lover?
By Tim Gross - Internet Business Blog | May 15, 2007
In one of the most useless symbolic gestures in recent memory, today is “Boycott Gasoline Day”.
Not, “Let’s get serious and start carpooling, making less trips, using alternative means of transportation, and buying more fuel-efficient cars” day.
Nope. People are driving about their business as usual, they’re just getting gas yesterday or tomorrow. In other words, when the gas stations total their weekly receipts, they’ll look exactly the same as if nothing happened.
Pretty funny.
I was a kid during the 1970’s gas crunch, and there was a lot of talk about people having a national responsibility to carpool - That we should all chip in to help.
Going back further, in WWII the slogan was, “When You Ride Alone You Ride With Hitler!” (No Joke - You were hurting America if you didn’t do your part by conserving)
The concept of sacrifice seems so quaint now, aye? -But I digress…
Three Points:
1) The supply/demand curve for gasoline in the U.S. is very inelastic at the range we’ve been in, as we’ve learned. The benefit of driving the vehicle we want when we want is worth more than the alternatives.
Alternatives being:
- driving less,
- buying a more fuel-efficient “gutless” vehicle,
- buying less of other non-essentials
Yep - Reportedly, Walmart’s sales are down, meaning for consumers on a tight budget, it’s worth it to them to drive more and shop less.
2) The only way for consumers to lower gas prices is not through a symbolic boycott, but from an actual cutback in their driving habits. (I assume you knew that already - call me Captain Obvious)
3) To make the most money as a marketer, always always always sell what your customers what they WANT, not what they “need”. Outside of oxygen, water, and meager food rations, nobody NEEDS anything.
The craps player rolling the dice saying, “Come on, seven, baby needs a new pair of shoes!” loves gambling more than his baby needs shoes. (Hey, wants and desires aren’t rational, that’s why it’s dangerous to rationalize what you should sell.)
Final Quiz: if you try to sell an ultra-compact car that people “need” and I sell high-end rims that keep spinning after their Escalade comes to a stop, which one of us will be able to afford the most expensive prostitute? (…er, I mean biggest charitable donation 
)
Note: I didn’t address the potential issue of price gouging/fixing of gas prices. Whether that’s occurring or not has no bearing on the above marketing observations, although the trickle-down effect would increase the price of prostitutes.)
(P.S. - These are jokes, people!)
Topics: Personal | Trackback URL
June 24th, 2007 at 4:37 am
Absolutely right, Tim–if you want the price of gasoline to come down, we as a society need to use less of it (which has other advantages, too).
But let’s be careful what we wish for. Ethanol from corn is being widely promoted as energy salvation–it’s not. Burning waste oil form fast food restaurants is one thing–it reduces the waste stream as well as our dependence on fossil fuels. But converting food-producing crop land to growing for energy is a huge mistake.
And don’t even get me started on the idiotic idea to bring back nuclear power.
But…
1. We could slash our energy use with creative carpooling. For example, when my kids attended a school quite some distance from my house, we organized a car pool of three families who lived nowhere near each other, but our routes all crossed the same point before continuing to the school. So we cut the driving by more than half, carpooling from the point where our routes converged. Gained quite a bit of time, too.
2. Visionary engineers such as Amory Lovins http://www.frugalmarketing.com/dtb/amorylovins.shtml have shown that we can slash our energy use with no significant lifestyle changes, by designing homes, factories, retail, commercial buildings, and yes, vehicles for energy efficiency.
3. Ultimately, our energy future must depend on renewable, nonpolluting, inexhaustible sources like solar and wind. Enough solar energy falls on the earth to take care of all our energy needs, but only a tiny fraction is harnessed.
I have posted 35 articles (most of them by outside experts) on sustainability in business at http://www.frugalmarketing.com/dtb/dtb-sustain.shtml
Shel Horowitz, award-wining author of Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First, founder of the Business Ethics Pledge, http://www.business-ethics-pledge.org