4 ms·

I'm not familiar with any of it, but... I would expect any central economic plan to miss consumer needs/desires by a fair margin on a regular basis. Was such

I'm not familiar with any of it, but... I would expect any central economic plan to miss consumer needs/desires by a fair margin on a regular basis. Was such advertising also trying to sway consumer behavior back to what the economic planners had original anticipated (as to avoid shortages/surpluses of goods)?

ivan_gammel 10y ago
Central economic planning does not automatically mean that it will always miss consumer needs. It was a big issue in USSR which some academics were planning to address with advancement in cybernetics (which meant something like what we call "big data" today), but it never received proper attention from the government. Regarding advertising, the customers of advertisement agencies (there were few in USSR) were firms themselves, not Gosplan. Every Soviet firm or Glavk ("main committee" - sort of a business unit in Soviet government responsible for the management of whole market segment) had a plan, that's true, but it was up to them how to implement it, so some did invest in advertisement (examples were beverages, perfume etc etc).
- Pamar 10y ago
  For an incredibly interesting and riveting (even "just" for the fictional parts) treatment of Soviet's attempt at planning the whole economy I always suggest Red Plenty by Francis Spufford. Get it, read it, become a fan.