Quote of the Day: On advertising

“[T]he product itself simply does not exist for the consumer until its existence and usefulness have been brought to his attention.  It follows that the entrepreneur’s task is not completed when he makes information available to the consumer.  He must also get the consumer to notice and absorb that information.”
~ Israel Kirzner, page 62 of his 1972 book Competition and Entrepreneurship

NB: Don Boudreaux, from whom I got the quote, discusses it over at Cafe Hayek; including the irony that leftists lashing out at advertising reveals their view that “a large chunk of the ‘real’ individual … exists independently of society,” whereas “those of us who are steeped in the Smithian-Austrian-Hayekian-Buchananite tradition understand that people are creations of society.  And so we don’t sound the alarm the moment we discover that this taste or that preference has been ‘sparked’ or ‘changed’ by some activity of entrepreneurs.”