Introduction: It has been observed that many companies focus on the novelty of what they produce. This is largely due to their desire to generate more profit by manipulating customers. While there may be some positive aspects, I believe this is a largely negative development.

P1: The main reason companies choose to frame their goods as new ones is that their primary goal is to generate profit. They do this by exploiting people’s instinctual attraction to novelty as people are more likely to want to engage with goods and services if they are seen as new. As a result, an updated or improved version of an existing product can be used to make more money for a company. Moreover, it is easier to advertise a new product than an existing one since all previous forms of marketing and advertising can be applied to such goods while older products can only have new forms of advertising applied to them. For instance, classic Coca Cola can only be advertised as classic Coca Cola whereas a new Coca Cola can be advertised as a product in its own right and in relationship with other beverages in the Coca Cola Company.

P2: However, I would argue that this is a negative trend. Firstly, many changes are either not really new or they are meaningless. For example, many new smartphones are advertised as faster than the old versions, but they are only slightly faster than the originals. This means people spend more money on a product which is not much better. In addition to being wasteful of customers’ money, it is also wasteful of the environment. In other words, older products which are almost as good as older products are thrown away in favour of something that is marginally more efficient. This creates an excessive amount of rubbish and environmental damage which could be averted if people did not purchase allegedly new goods.