You may think you are above the simple allure of advertising and marketing, that you can tell when you are being manipulated and that you are no rube, not you, not the alpha in the pack, you can’t get taken in, nope, not gonna happen… but you do get taken in and in fact you do in such a way that you don’t know even know you gave them everything they wanted.
The first way they get you is through sheer force of numbers, ads are everywhere, you damn near can’t go anywhere in this country without SOME kind of ad getting absorbed by the brain. Newspapers, TV/Radio commercials, flyers, billboards, jingles, magazines, street signs, buses, t-shirts and even things IN the things being advertised, you watch a TV show or a movie and within the story structure there are ads, even if you didn’t notice them your brain did. The cops are going to bust the drug dealer and they are walking down the street, the same street with the posters of movies owned by the production company, the street lined with business logos and signs, the street where a bus passes with a perfume ad on the side… and you may not have registered it, but it was still registered TO you subconsciously. Maybe before the character goes on the big date which will inevitably end with a huge misunderstanding… they are getting ready in the bathroom while talking to the dog… and standing in front of a shelf lined with health and beauty products, health and beauty products paid to be there by the company. To you it just looked like a regular bathroom, maybe even YOUR bathroom, but you were just stealth marketed to. You see the actor/character that you identify with using the product and that is the equivalent of the cumshot into a porno. TOM HANKS LIKES DR. PEPPER, WELL I LIKE DR. PEPPER TO… SCARLETT JOHANSSON USES PERT, THEN I USE PERT…
Stealth marking is when they tried to sell you some bauble in such a way that you failed to notice, hence the stealth part of the term. Sometimes they do this by literally paying large work places to only allow their brand of whatever into the facility. You come to work and the fridge is stocked with Ice Mountain water and only Ice Mountain water… well Ice Mountain paid your boss to do that, and you, you just go and get a water not really paying attention to the label or the brand… but then you are at the store later that week and see Ice Mountain and you buy it because it is now familiar to you and the human brain will always seek the path of least resistance so it goes with what it knows. You have just been stealth marketed. Many companies are doing this kind of thing these days, you might notice that your building only has Coke machines in it and all of the vendors in the commissary only sell Coke products, that is not an accident, that is by design and you are part of that design. You are very much a cog in this machine and knowing that you are this cog is the first step to breaking the cycle and more importantly to fouling the machine itself. All you need do to block stealth marketing is to KNOW that you are being stealthed, it then becomes more obvious to you and it then becomes something you can fight against.
Repetition is actually the most effective way to market as it worms the product/jingle/logo into the minds eye and just like that song you hate but can’t get out of your head it sticks with you. Repetition is actually the most effective way to market as it worms the product/jingle/logo into the minds eye and just like that song you hate but can’t get out of your head it sticks with you. Repetition is actually the most effective way to market as it worms the product/jingle/logo into the minds eye and just like that song you hate but can’t get out of your head it sticks with you. Repetition is actually the most effective way to market as it worms the product/jingle/logo into the minds eye and just like that song you hate but can’t get out of your head it sticks with you.* As something is repeated the grey matter tends to give that noise/phrase/word more weight because, well if it is being repeated then it must be worth remembering right? I mean, repetition is how we learn in school, how we play video games effectively and even just how we hold onto memories, we repeat them to ourselves until we CAN’T forget them, advertising and marketing are no different. If you see the same movie poster 40 times in a day from the magazines, to the billboards, to the buses, to the commercials… the mind WILL retain that image and come time to decide how you wish to spend Saturday night… well that has now become familiar and what did I say earlier? The brain is lazy and will default to the familiar. Want an example? Say you see a guy on the street who has an interesting face, well those 3 pounds bouncing around in the skull will try to relate that interesting face to something familiar (I am back on that again), so now this man’s interesting face looks like Mickey Rourke before Satan threw up on it. Mickey Rourke does not look like this guy, but this guy looks like Mickey Rourke because your intellect needs to make everything into something familiar, the same rules apply to being marked to, hence repetition will trick you into becoming a brand loyalist.
Another way that they get you is they manipulate your emotions, they make you think you can’t live without their crap and that if you do, well then you are to be shunned from those good people in society that are customers. Marketing has convinced you that you should buy shit that you don’t need and that you will be worse off for not having bought that thing you didn’t need in the first place. Besides the obvious fluffing of the product to make it look and act far better than it ever will in reality** the commercials themselves are timed out and focused to an inch of reality all in an effort to subtly make you want it. Wonder why so many commercials are essentially the same thing with different logos? That is because the advertisers found the one that works and you don’t change something when it is working, then you run the risk of losing the monkeys and the monkeys are all you have. Every beat, every edit, the lighting, the actors, how large the product is in the frame, how the music tags the product… all of it is designed to trick YOU into leaving logic aside and spend, spend, spend.
Don’t be taken in by slick shysters using your mind against you, fight back, know that you are being marketed and make the conscious decision to refuse that manipulation. In summation here are some real quotes from the people that work at marketing firms who pull the strings of your life:
Ask yourself, what simple twist on a familiar theme will entrap your audience?
The largest enemy of change and leadership isn’t a ‘no,’ it’s a ‘not yet.’ ‘Not yet’ is the safest, easiest way to forestall change.
Relying too much on proof distracts you from the real mission – which is emotional connection.
We don’t smoke it, we just sell it. We reserve that right for the young, the poor, the black and the stupid.
No great marketing decisions have ever been made on qualitative data.
A market is never saturated with a good product, but it is very quickly saturated with a bad one.
*See what I did there?
**I used to shoot commercials… if you can, watch one being shot, these things are actually MORE fake than movies in that they make this useless product do things it has never been designed to do. The best (worst) are the food commercials, just let this image linger with you, that amazing looking pizza or burger in the ad? That is actually fluffed to look like that with chemicals and… um… other things… those actors that have to take a bite, they have puke buckets just off camera because that amazing looking food item will trigger that in the form used in the ad. If you always wondered why the burger in the picture looked so much better, trust me, you do NOT want the one in the picture.
Tell me to shut the fuck up at 1201beyond@gmail.com