Awareness-driven awakening and advertisement- driven allurement by various Departments of Government and manufacturing sector players offering a wide variety of consumer goods respectively bring home response from the target sections among the land’s masses in diverse extent and nature. Mysuru’s Urban Local Body and the city’s residents, estimated numerically at more than 1.3 million together testify the inverse relation between the effort on the part of the former to create awareness about pro-actively keeping the city’s space free from garbage and the response from the residents, reportedly accounting for one-fourth of the total headcount living in the city’s slums, apart from a considerable number of residents whose agenda is to indulge in discarding garbage disdainfully in their neighbourhood, roadsides and open spaces, ready to pick up a wordy duel using abusive words when asked to give up their habit. The marketing arms of consumer goods manufacturing industry seem to be leaving no stone unturned while beaming novel allurements, starting from the buy-one-take-two-free slogan to offering attractive gifts with the catch of running up a bill in four figures. Hardly any section of society resists the allurements, not the least some well-marked sections with their pockets jingling.

Unlike the era of reaching the would-be patrons of their products by industry players mainly through dailies, we are in an era of aggressive marketing with the ubiquitous idiot box not sparing anybody who is awake. Glamorously produced handouts, quite often inserted in the pages of dailies as in Mysuru, is the order of the day. Frequently organised exhibition-cum-sale attracts customers in swarms, tempted by irresistible discounts.

Thanks to digital technology’s rapid strides, internet lays bare a whole world of goods and foods that can be ordered while seated in the cool comfort of one’s drawing room. Barring an elephant, one can order any good, often driven by the power of impulse buying, delivered at one’s doorstep, the icing on the cake as it were being cashless transactions, thanks to e-payment system, with the banks obliging. Looking with eyes virtually popping out for offerings of attractive deals in the e-marketing world has almost become an addiction cutting across age-groups and gender. The conventional brick ’n’ mortar trading system seems to be on its way out in foreseeable future.

Research by groups keeping a close watch on the goings on in the business world has revealed that high-income consumers in their fifties are always the best bet for luxury brands. The common view that economic muscle and affordability determine the propensity to buy goods on the internet has been proved as myth. That is allurement driven by advertisement for you.