I was looking at a college paper my wife wrote while taking a class in advertising. To make a long story (paper) short, it basically said that manufacturers task advertisers to create discontentment with products the consumer currently owns. I'll quote a couple of sentences from her paper.
"Advertising companies specialize in making us feel disenchanted. They create itches that we need to scratch and yet their real job is to create an itch that we never can adequately scratch."
I suppose most companies try to create discontentment. It seems to work pretty well with us in the metal detector community.