Advertising has a history of employing various tools and tricks to boost sales. Nowadays, thanks to sophisticated technology, “…businesses, marketers, advertisers, and retailers have gotten far craftier, savvier, and more sinister,” writes marketer and consumer advocate Martin Lindstrom in his book Brandwashed: Tricks Companies Use to Manipulate Our Minds and Persuade Us to Buy.
In it, Lindstrom reveals the many ploys companies use to seduce, soothe, tempt and scare us into buying their products. Here are a few tidbits from the book to help you become a smarter, sharper consumer.
1. They mix amusement with ads.
Some food companies disguise their ads as entertainment, which of course is especially appealing to kids. According to a 2009 report from the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University, the biggest cereal companies, General Mills, Kellogg’s and Post used games to peddle their least nutritious cereals.
For instance, Lucky Charms has a game on their website that lets kids track Lucky the Leprechaun’s various adventures, and Honey Nut Cheerios lets kids create a comic strip with the mascot BuzzBee.
Lindstrom says that using games as ads greatly benefits companies in important ways: “They allow marketers to circumvent the regulations on advertising junk food on television”; “they spread virally…[kids] unwittingly become guerrilla brand ambassadors; and “these games are inherently addictive in nature.”
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I recently did a lot of research on advertising making use of psychology, and I found something similar to your first point, that they mix amusement with ads. Advertisements use humor to distract viewers from analyzing the ads, as well as to cause the viewers to form positive emotional associations with the ads and their products (Strick). They may juxtapose their products with things viewers already have positive emotional associations to, connecting those associations to the products (Dempsey). Advertisements are more effective when a viewer pays only passing attention to them (Dempsey), and advertisers capitalize on this via methods of “alternative advertising”: product placement, video news releases, and guerrilla marketing (Weisberg). Product placement is so common, it’s become a cliché by today and it almost seems like a “sellout” move on the media’s part. However, I had never heard of video news releases before this research, and I knew little to nothing on guerrilla marketing. I think I’d prefer the approach of the joint-study between professor Walter J. Carl III, his research team, and BzzAgent, Inc. They found that the success of guerrilla marketing was dependent on whether the consumers believed the guerrilla marketers were being honest (Carl). I’d prefer advertising that decides beforehand to be honest; I wonder whether that joint-study was taken to heart by any advertisers.
As for your points on using kids to market to kids and advertising to unborn babies, I had not heard much on the former and nothing on the latter. Looking at your previous post, I would have to agree with Walter Dill Scott that humans are “creature[s] of suggestion”.
Sources:
Carl, Walter J. “To Tell or Not to Tell: Assessing the Practical Effects of Disclosure for Word-of-Mouth Marketing – Agents and Their Conversational Partners”. Northwestern University Press, Copy write 2006.
Dempsey, Melanie; Mitchell, Andrew. “The Influence of Implicit Attitudes on Choice When Consumers Are Confronted with Conflicting Attribute Information.” Journal of Consumer Research (December 2010).
Strick, Madelijn; Holland, Rob W.; Van Baaren, Rick B.; Van Knippenberg, Ad. “Those Who Laugh Are Defenseless: How Humor Breaks Resistance to Influence.” Radboud University Nijmegen. Journal of Experimental Psychology 18.2 (June 2012): 213-223.
Weisberg, Alexandria; Pfleiger, Alonna; Friedberg, Jake. “Undercover Agency: The Ethics of Stealth Marketing.” EthicaPublishing, Inc.