Just how influenced are we all by marketing? What appeals to us–a product in blue, red or green packaging? If we can’t find the product we want, do we settle on a substitute because it’s there at eye level and ‘looks’ pretty much like the product we can’t find?
How often do we believe in public relations and what’s the difference between marketing and public relations? According to Simon Wakeman,
In my mind, both are propaganda. What makes it so easy for humans to believe marketing, public relations, advertising–propaganda? Are these necessary for human survival?
Marketing promotes aesthetic ideals. Buying the marketed products are a means in which the individual can embody those ideals. Not exactly necessary for survival…but aesthetical satisfaction is the next best thing.
Modern marketing is an off-shoot of public relations which was, in turn, the brain child of Edward Bernays, the main founder of corporate public relations in the USA, who applied propaganda techniques to influence cultural practices. Edward Bernays was a nephew of Freud and used Freud’s ideas about the unconscious to fashion his ideas about PR. Thanks to Marshall McCluhan and others, we’re aware of many of the techniques of marketing and advertising, and yet many of us still ‘impulse shop,’ believe newer is somehow better, or that our ‘humanness’ somehow depends on our toys. That’s what marketing and advertising is all about–to keep people spending (even if they can’t afford to) so as to keep ‘money’ circulating and ‘markets’ alive. If you go along with that, that’s what you believe.
But we seem so inured to these techniques that we’re also taken in by the propaganda of the corps and their ‘spin doctors.’ One such ‘spin’ explains that if corps weren’t allowed tax breaks, it would kill small business. Excuse me? Where’s the logic behind such a spin? Another is that if corps didn’t pay their upper management outrageous salaries and/or promise big retention and/or retirement packages, the upper management would leave and go to a company that would. Has that ever been shown to be true? Beyond that, so what if they did?
I believe we go along with the PR we’re fed because we somehow want to. It’s like the Nazi propaganda of the '30s. People in what had been the former German Empire, which included much of today’s Poland, the Czech Republic and Austria had been taught for generations to hate and distrust the Jewish people. When Nazi propaganda gave the people a reason and an excuse, that unfounded hatred became justified.
So what is it that makes us so susceptible to corporate propaganda?
At the risk of sounding like a smartass, influenced enough for them to pay the price to market. Of course, they work the cost of marketing into the price of the good/service, plus the costs of the research that goes into figuring out how effective their marketing is, so that they can determine how much they want to put into marketing…
The consumer pays for it in the end, so effectiveness concerns them only to a degree.
It depends on the product. Obviously, a product that is supposed to be eco-friendly is typically found in green packaging because it makes people think of trees, ergo, environment. That’s one example, there are probably others. In general, you pretty much want to use bold colors, Coca-Cola probably wouldn’t be the hot item it is if it were in a biege can.
I would imagine that is case-by-case. Do you mean in terms of grocery shopping, or what?
That’s about right. For instance, advocacy issues are handled mainly via media outlets, newspapers, press conferences and the like, not so much in commercials.
I would suggest that marketing is almost always purely propaganda and public relations is only sometimes propaganda. They are probably not necessary for human survival, but very important if the goal is to have a Capitalistic (Note: I didn’t say Capitalist) economy.
You don’t ‘risk being a smart-ass’, you probably are one. I don’t know you well enough to say.
My question remains–Why, if we’re aware of the techniques of marketing, advertising and PR are we still taken in by the spin doctors?
Case in point–Rupert Murdoch and phone hacking.
Andy Coulson has now been arrested for allegedy allowing phone hacking while he was editor of The News of the World. Rupert Murdoch needed a scapegoat because he didn’t want Rebeka Brooks to come under fire.
Everyone expected Coulson to be the sacrificial lamb.That was the ‘natural’ consequence of the PR ‘spin.’
Why? What makes us believe what Rupert Murdoch says? Is it because he must be ‘superior’ to us because he took two failing Australian newspapers and turned them into an empire?
But the more they beat us down with tactics the more we evolve – quickly. Within a couple years advertisements will be much more seamless, topical – eventually, if we continue along this trend, we will reach a point where advertising simply blends into the fabric and our very existence is just a communication.
For the most part, I don’t know that we really are. For instance, look at pop (a.k.a. soda), if you’re going to the store and you intend to buy pop, you’re going to buy pop. It turns out, however, that most brands of advertise to some degree, so I don’t think we’re, “Taken in,” by advertising if we choose to buy pop. The information age has caused it to be such that most products cannot falsely advertise or over-embellish anything, anymore, (except within limited parameters) so I don’t think advertising serves to try to get us to buy something where we are getting a worse deal or inferior product than what was promised. Basically, most advertising now is just about telling us what people have.
I’ll admit that I haven’t followed anything about that to an appreciable enough degree to give an opinion.
If we all know that ‘Pop’ is nothing more than aerated sugar water–and we should know this by now–is bad for our teeth, affects our mood, and adds to obesity, why do we continue to buy it? If we know so-called ‘energizing’ products are primarily caffeine and sugar, why do we buy them?
If we know we’re being manipulated by advertising, marketing and PR, why can’t we stop the manipulation? Do we somehow want it? IOW, do we need to believe rather than to question? Where is critical thinking?
The phone-hacking scandal in GB is, to me, an example of this. Rupert Murdoch"s ‘people’ hacked into messages left on various phones and cell phones in order to develop stories they then presented in The News of the World–a Sunday tabloid. They did it in order to sell the tabloid. Murdoch’s spin doctors are now galloping in to somehow use PR to absolve Murdoch of any blame. So be it.
The sort of thinking that allows such things to happen in the first place is what I’m questioning here.
People buy pop because they think it tastes good. They buy energy drinks because they want the worst for you form of energy possible. Either that, or they are addicted to caffeine.
If you know pop is bad for you, and you continue to (heavily) drink pop, you’re not being manipulated by anything except for yourself.
Oh. It’s hard to say whether or not Murdoch, himself, knew about it.
The mob will always follow the latest trends; modern marketing is only the latest form of indoctrination that’s probably been around as long as civilization has. There always has been, and will be, a minority of rulers, and a vast mob of obeyers. The mob deserve their fate because they lack the techniques to resist such indoctrination. The critical thinking and self-discipline required to unveil and resist the deceptive methods of marketing cannot be possessed by the mob because they instinctively need to be led like the flock who follows the shepherd. The ingrained natural instinct that sees the cat chase the mouse is similar to the ingrained instinct of the mob to absorb the latest fads.
This is what I’m talking about when I talk about ‘spin’ and ‘marketing.’
I don’t really care whether or not you believe the article. I care about how this and other myths have taken over American thought. Or are they myths–or fads?
I really don’t lose any sleep, I simply wonder.
The Republican Party is going to vote against any plan that would result in corps having to pay taxes–and yet billions, if not trillions, of dollars would be gained if tax loopholes and subsidies to those corps were stopped. And there are a lot of other budget items that probably should go–farm subsidies, aid money to militaries throughout the world (including Israel,) humanitarian aid to countries ruled by despots where the money hasn’t gone to build up a political system that makes the country “friendly” to investment. I won’t go on and on.
What’s going to be cut is aid money to American citizens–citizens who have paid into a Social Security system the government has plundered and left close to bankruptcy. Social Security monies have been used by the Federal Government. The bulk of it is in promissory notes issued by the Federal Government and kept in a locked desk drawer somewhere in Maryland, I believe.
I may be totally wrong, and I hope I am. I just haven’t found anyone, anywhere, who can refute what I say.
And what creates that popular support other than marketing?
Am I asking something that can only be answered with circular arguments. Why do people vote for certain parties? Because they have popular support. Why do they have popular support? Because people vote for them. Yay, Wowie-zowie.
We support a cause, vote for a person, buy a product, think of services as products–why? Because we’ve been told to do so. What reason do we have for believing? Because everyone else does.
Baa, baa, baa.
Lead me on to my death, oh trusted shepherd. Whither thou goest, I will go.
unfortunately though pervasiveness of marketing techniques leads some to strengthen against them, some become gotten used to and accepted such that they become more effective over time…in other words it is possible that we may become more easily manipulated over time…IDK
There is a tendency for the subconscious to pick up on things it is not paying attention to, so even not paying attention to ads can result in subliminal coercion…fortunately many are consciously strong enough to resist that urge to eat a burger when they hear the words “do it your way”… though more prolonged association with the saying and burgers might result in strong association on a more conscious level over time such as to result in less avoidance of such urges…Give it a about 20 or so generations maybe…hopefully more…
Ads for cheeseburgers really get me. I just get really turned on by how shiny the patty is. It’s weird most of the time when I watch an ad I’m just analyzing it for subtext the whole time. But if it’s a cheeseburger ad, I just get overwhelmed by the need for a cheeseburger. I don’t even like the Hardees ones that much, more of a Burger King guy, but it never really matters. I know this is not super relevant, but I’m trying to think through an anatomy of how advertising gets you.
When it works it’s got to be involuntary. I think about this a lot when I buy soap. I don’t give a crap about soap, so what I’ve started doing is getting Irish Spring soap and deodorant. My great-grandma was Irish, so I figure I’m the target audience. I voluntarily use the information in the branding to make a purchase decision, but I think as a result of my response to the advertising being voluntary, I feel absolutely no brand loyalty to Irish Spring. I haven’t developed any attachment to the way it smells or anything, which I think I naturally would by now if the brand had gotten a “love-mark” on me. I think for advertising to really work it has to be involuntary.
This question of whether or not people actually believe the spin reminds me of this podcast course I listened to about political campaign strategy. There are a lot of these polls that overwhelmingly find that people hate campaign ads focusing on bad things about the opponent; negative ads. Everyone says they don’t believe what is said about the opponent, it gives them a lower opinion of the candidate who sponsors the ad.
BUT. If you get with your focus groups. You show them positive and negative ads. Then you test them to see what facts and information they retained. People forget immediately the positive things a candidate’s ad says about them. Everyone remembers the information in the negative ad.
So when it comes to giving us information, there’s a sense in which the influence ads have over us is involuntary.
But that point is only really relevant as far as the essence of advertising continues to be disseminating information. i.e. Making people believe facts about a product or issue. But, I think this might not be the case, or is gradually ceasing to be the case in post-modernity.
I would think the more advertising done the more likely that product will come to mind when it is needed voluntarily, and thus the advertisement successfully increases the sell of the product…
I don’t think you have to work on the subconscious to be manipulating people…
What makes it so easy is that it is painful and scary to distrust, question, decide for oneself? Where does one stop? Does one trust what Daddy said? The doctor? The government? The priest? How does one decide? So much reponsibility. Unclear endpoints. Often no direct way of finding out. One must trust one’s intuition to some degree - at the very least to decide when to question, how to go about challenging ideas and so on. Most people do not apply the same rigor to all ideas beliefs facts assertions. Some they accept, some they go at with all their skeptical tools. To really take responsibility and to really question/doubt is terrifying and most people avoid it. This includes skeptics and rationalists just as much as anyone else.
Thanks, Moreno, yours is the closest answer to what I’ve been trying to talk about–which really hasn’t been so much about advertising and marketing techniques as about public relations. In the short time I had teaching as a TA in grad school, I did try to teach critical thinking–something I find lacking in teaching today. A political cartoonist published a panel today titled: An Informed Electorate --Just About the Wrong Things. The first panel shows a typical American talking about the recent Anthony trial–going on and on about the judge doing this and the prosecution doing that. In the second panel, the typical American is asked about the debt ceiling. Caught, the aswer was–“Uh–Does that have anything to do with home improvement loans?” Again, this isn’t exactly what I’m talking about, but it comes close.
I maintain that we believe public relations and political ‘spin’ because we want to. The German people wanted an excuse to show hatred for the Jewish people because they’d been taught for generations to do so. When Nazi propaganda gave them a both a reason and an okay, there was no hesitation in the people. They entered into the pogroms and death camps almost completely wholeheartedly. In GB, now, people want to believe in Rupert Murdoch’s guilt–even if they don’t know what he could be guilty of. The reaction to Barack Obama’s election was, is many ways, racially oriented, it just couldn’t be presented as such, so the rumor mills and ‘spin’ doctors created stories that gave credence to those people’s fears.
Why do so many people want to be led in this way? Why do we need to gather up our fears and put labels on them without questioning either the reliability or the actuality of the fears. And why do we believe the worst about the things we fear the most–rich people, poor people, the disabled, the old, the somehow different?
I thought later that I wanted to add critical feeling to the semi-implicit issues around critical thinking in my last post. Absolutely critical thinking is important, but so is critical feeling. By critical feeling I mean anything from a gut sense that something is wrong with whatever, a policy, someone’s behavior, a law, certain actions, the status quo, a tradition, etc, to feeling personally bad within some kind of system. Of course every time someone feels bad in a system or has a bad reaction to something specific it does not mean that there is an external, current problem. However sometimes it does mean this is the case and we need to allow those critical feelings to have some air…later critical thinking may be able to explain why this feeling is a justified one, but often we cannot work it out right away.
Often when someone has a problem or feels/thinks there is a problem, they are immediately challenged to both prove there is a problem AND produce a solution with less problems. This is an unfair burden. Sometimes one person or a few people have to be disgruntled, then a few more, then when people realize it is not simply their individual failures or ‘bad attitudes’ it becomes easier to look for alternatives and do the critical analysis. But often those first reactions are shut down incredibly quickly because they are not a dissertation and protocol for solutions.
This happens intrapsychically and in dynamics between groups and individuals.
Yes, we are distracted. Commercials and ads tell us what is wrong with us, scare us into being self-hating consumers. Schools tell children that learning is a passive retention activity where ideas are absorbed from authorities - and they wonder why so many people are poor citizens. We are overstimulated and focused on trivia.
I think people allow this because it is comforting. How much easier to think that their salvation is in consumption - deoderant, the right car and haircut and designer clothes - rather than some political or other solutions that require agency, criticial thinking, intuition, responsibility taking, critical feeling and so on.
If your life gets messed up but you trusted the ‘experts’ it is their fault.
If your life gets messed up but you trusted yourself, then it is your own fault and grumbling later or complaining will meet with shaming.
I agree. Germany in that period was an incredibly emotionally repressed environment. Also thinking repressed. Families and businesses were rigidly hierarchical and emotional expression or deviation from the norm was punished in ways we would find amazing today. I think anti-semitism allowed for two things: the pain I am feeling is because of Jews - rather than a system of my peers that I am not allowed to hate - and also because it was so damn satisfying to have the kinds of catharsis in that one single allowed outlet: hating jews. Hell, if I was in prison and forced to be silent for years and finally they said I could go in the yard and scream if I wanted to…but I had to scream something anti-semitic, it would be very appealing anyway. Just to let all that bottled up rage and fear come pouring out somewhere.
And all as distractions. I mean who cares if Obama was born in Kenya if his policies are OK. That his policies follow naturally from Bush’s policies is not noticed since he is supposed to be a Muslim communist.
To me I find it strange how much people fear people who have little power. This reaction of mine does not quite match your list, since I think there is a difference between fears of rich people and fears of poor people or the disabled.
If someone thinks their problems are caused by the relatively powerless, they have been distracted and effectively.
Note: I am not saying generalizing about all rich people is fine or that they are all evil or anything like that at all. But I think power is an important consideration. What the Nazis did was get people to focus on a group that was different, rather than focus on the ingrained power structures in that society which was patriarchal and radically hierarchical. How much easier to think the enemy is a minority and that the government is on your side rather than being part of the problem.
I don’t know you well enough to say.