"Demand creates supply". Is it so?

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

In comments on the Internet, you can often find the phrase "Demand creates supply." And in most cases, we are not even talking about conversations at economic forums, but about discussing various antisocial phenomena in our life. For example, as soon as you try to say that TNT, under the guise of humor, is promoting everything base and vulgar (remember the same show “House 2”), they will answer you that “nothing can be done, so there is a demand for it”. And it seems like the TNT management turns out to be in no way and is not to blame, it just creates a product that is in demand. The editors of the TV channel also have to say “thank you” for their concern for society … But let's think about it: is this so? Is the supply formed by demand, or is it often quite the opposite in our life?

We won't go far for examples, but let's figure out how the army of spectators of the same television project “House 2” appeared. His audience is quite large - it is pointless to deny it. All of these fans of the show today were once ordinary young children, and it is logical to assume that they had no desire to watch "House 2" or similar content. In principle, they did not even know about its existence, and they felt quite comfortable. Accordingly, there was no demand and demand either. But as they grew up, they saw an advertisement for the television project "House 2", learned from the news about the life of the so-called "stars" of the project, heard from friends about the TNT channel, periodically watched TV, voluntarily or involuntarily getting on this program - and, as they say, got involved accustomed to consuming immoral content. As a result, by today for many of them it has really become a necessity - every day to observe through the keyhole the lives of other people. What conclusion can be drawn from all this?

The demand was formed under the influence of the external environment

Moreover, if it were not for the program "House 2" or its analogs, then there would be no one who wants to watch such content. What does an African aborigine from a wild tribe care about TNT? Yes, no. Because he has never heard of it and does not know what it is. Why does a huge part of Russia's youth care about the products of this channel? Because there is a supply that forms the very demand. And not just an offer, but a very intrusive campaigning - each new series or TV show of TNT (funded, by the way, by Gazprom) receives the broadest advertising campaign both on the Internet and on city streets. And the task of such advertising campaigns is precisely to attract a certain number of viewers to view, creating a need for them that they have not even heard of before.

Besides, how can one say that “demand creates supply”, if in the modern world there is such a science as “Marketing”? Every year hundreds of Russian and world universities graduate tens of thousands of marketing specialists, whose main task is to skillfully create demand for promoting all kinds of goods or services. In the overwhelming majority of cases, we are talking about various methods of informational influence on the audience, both in order to attract attention and in order to form new views or needs. Summing up, we can say that supply and demand are formed under the influence of many factors, and in various situations, both the first and the second can be primary. As for modern Russian television, it is obvious that its pronounced degradation orientation is a consequence of a certain goal-setting of the owners of large media resources, and by no means a reflection of the demand of the society itself. More details about the goals for which Russian TV channels work and their methods are described in the films and videos of the Teach Good project.