How Stupid Do They Think We Are?
Sometimes an epiphany is the result of something major, but most often a flash of insight results from a minor inconsistency or flaw in the expected. In my case, it was a mailed advertisement.
It was addressed by hand and delivered in a plain white envelope, which is why it escaped the normal pattern of "pull-from-mailbox" and "put-in-trash." It might be some sort of correspondence, I thought, and so I opened it. Inside was a single sheet of paper, with black and white line art graphics of furniture and appliances and simple page-layout text describing each item and price. And I just stood there looking at this thing. Like a time traveller, I was holding an artifact from the past in my hand. Then it went in the trash, but my subconscious mind continued to ponder this strange document and its odd effect on me.
It was the utter lack of guile. It was too simple. There were no embedded messages to decipher. My modern consumer mind is now so hostile to attempts at invasion that I regard all messages with extreme suspicion and defensiveness. And this thing slid neatly under the radar—in a plain white envelope. This is about a lot more than advertising, it's about everything.
A case in point would be Britney Spears hawking Pepsi. You've seen the commercials. They play off association, sexual urges, conformity drives and fears, repetition, branding, reinforcement, tradition, color attraction, movement, music, sound, and graphic design. The approach is multi-layered and "sticky" because of all the hooks the ad bristles with. Tiger Woods driving a Buick in New Orleans works the same way: In addition to the music and whatnot, images of death and horror are interspersed with magic, sex, and fortune, implying that a Buick defeats the Reaper and placates the libido—resonating to the over-50 set.
We expect to be treated this way. The message needs to be slick and polished and we respond deeply, feeling the tugging at our primal urges and appreciating the advertisers' ability to quicken our breath and tingle our groin. Sometimes we smile, and sometimes we actually like and remember the pitch because it felt satisfying.
Anyone reading this who has taken Marketing 101 is probably laughing right about now, "Of course, Dude. Like this is news?" The intermeshing of psychology and free-market capitalism has been going on so long that we don't even notice it until somebody without the requisite training tries to get in the game and sends you a plain white envelope and suddenly the shift in perspective makes the overlying structure so apparent that you realize the depths to which you've been conditioned. They know how we respond and they're five moves ahead on the chessboard. Here's something from Kenny & Associates, a psych-marketing firm:
- The key is designing and developing the questions to get around rationalizations and uncover the emotional reasons that will answer your particular question. In other words, what is essential is to design questions that represent an understanding of how people's minds work.
Fair enough. And we expected that. Nothing new here. Find button, push button, get a banana. Here's another take from a company called Marketing Psychology:
- Stimulate their emotions—never overlook powerful emotions like security, safety, acceptance, guilt, fear, longing, and a dozen others, even in business-to-business sales. People often buy on the promise of emotional satisfaction, and justify it with logical reasons.
And even when we act in bad faith, we know full well that we do. We know when we're being manipulated: there's no trick here, because we agree to play along. The pitch was slick enough that we grant permission to execute the buying act. Bear with me, because hell is going to rain down on the Iraqi people as a result of all this. It's just going to take a few more hops to get us there. The smart people at MP continue:
- "People do not want what you are selling." Instead, they want to satisfy a personal set of complex buying motivations, some logical and some emotional. That's why they buy.
Now we're getting around to politics. The candidate is selling himself and wants you to "buy" him with your vote. Or she is running a campaign and wants to "sell" you her tax scheme which you will purchase with your approval. They think of you in exactly the same terms. Here's Multi-Media Services, a company in the biz of ramming legislation through the pipeline:
- We employ state-of-the-art computer technology to provide fast, accurate media plans and buys. Through the use of our licensed media buying software, we are able to manipulate media ratings and costs at the push of a button.
What could be easier? Need to buy a seat or provide a kickback to a patron in the form of a zoning permit? No problemo. Here's a satisfied customer:
- They told us what our opponent was buying before we saw their spots on the air. That way, we were ready with an immediate response. We matched their buy point-for-point and then some."
In the industry, a "buy" is a position or stance that you are in the position of forcing down the electorate's throat. Logic and persuasion are about as hackneyed as that plain white envelope and line-art graphics. Old school. Another firm, Public Opinion Strategies, was called in to help Rob Simmons, a Republican, unseat the Democratic incumbent Sam Gejdenson in Connecticut. Simmons didn't appear to have a chance.
- Our first survey in May showed him losing by 28 points and he still trailed in September by 17 points. Our research tested Simmons' "bio" information to help position his background and which legislative accomplishments to highlight in his record.
They then focused on "Gejdenson's major vulnerability," which was the fact that he lived outside the district. Through non-stop targeted ads on this point, they slowly turned the tide and on election day Simmons nudged ahead 51% - 49%. Which finally brings us to Iraq. Your opinion about the necessity and inevitability of a war with another country is being handled and manipulated by people like this. How realistic is it to expect "straight talk" from the political sector when we've made it clear how we expect to be pandered to in other buying decisions? We've brought 1984 down on ourselves and did it one purchase at a time. We weren't tricked, we demanded it. Now we'll purchase a war on the Iraqis because Bush's "smoking gun/mushroom cloud" slogan was packaged neatly enough to give us emotional permission to make the "buy." QED.
3:19:29 PM 
|
|
Tuesday, October 8, 2002
