Post No.: 0668
Furrywisepuppy says:
What comes between fear and sex?
Fünf!
…Ich bin eine kleine Rottweiler – that’s zwei I like drei humour :|. Woof!
Fear and sex both grab attention. People pay prioritised attention to sources of fear and sex because these instincts aid survival and reproduction respectively. So businesses routinely exploit these basic instincts through their commercials and sales techniques (e.g. by using provocative imagery) to try to sell stuff. (It must be noted though that provocative imagery in adverts can sometimes distract viewers from the product being advertised itself.) This is even when the foreboding they highlight is exaggerated or even fabricated, or no one is actually going to get laid more for buying their products!
‘Attack ads’ in political campaigns can work very well because fear can persuade better than positive messages.
The fear of a vengeful God, and of the notion of a hell (whether it’s fiery like Hades or frosty like Helheim) and a heaven (including one where there’ll ostensibly be virgins, presumably up for sex, waiting for followers if they do certain things in this life – depending on what religion one believes), are great drivers of behaviour too.
We’re more likely to intuitively follow anything that’s emotive. We tend to behave less critically to stories that express fear – we’re more ready to accept those types of stories without question. In fact, those who think critically and question those apprehensions are often accused of behaving irresponsibility, as if they’re not heeding them.
Businesses and campaigning political parties (especially non-incumbent parties) therefore tend to highlight present problems in life or society so that they can put themselves forwards as the ones to solve them; whether these problems are real or exaggerated, and whether they can or will be able to solve them or not.
Appealing to fear, or guilt, can be very effective as long as you give people specific steps they can take to avoid or alleviate that feeling, such as ‘buy this product’ i.e. offer hope. Commercial advertisements regularly exploit anxieties (e.g. in the form of making people feel (more) insecure about the way they look) so that they can sell their (supposed) solutions to those (supposed) concerns. Hope is what chiefly converts sales, but emphasising a fear or guilt will amplify the perceived necessity and desire for that hope.
People are accordingly most suggestible regarding stuff they want to hear and believe in, such as simple cures, get-rich-quick schemes and things that claim to make them more attractive. Get-rich scams prey on both the vulnerable and greedy. They promise to make their clients rich but they only make the scammers rich. Those who fall for frauds aren’t always uneducated but their main downfall is their desperation or avarice. Overall, both fraudsters and legitimate marketers find it easiest to target and exploit the greedy, lazy, insecure, scared and/or horny!
Paranoia is relatively easy to foment. We might study history and wonder how large sections of populations fell for certain paranoias of their times (e.g. witches), but we might wonder what paranoias large sections of the population are falling for today (e.g. 5G telecommunications masts). Suspicion is a form of control, and the source of this control is seldom who/what we’re suspicious of but who/what feeds our suspicions about them/it.
So a very common approach by businesses is to overplay a fear, and then push a product that they happen to be selling that’ll, allegedly, solve that distress for the consumer. And maybe the consumer will have to keep on buying this product in perpetuity too otherwise their worries will return i.e. ongoing treatments are better money-spinners than cures or most vaccines because the former produce constant repeat business whereas the latter only generate limited or one-off sales.
Thus companies prefer us to not ever be fully cured by a one-off purchase but merely treated with ongoing, and ideally escalating, purchases. Some threats are real and don’t need any exaggeration, and some solutions won’t realistically be permanent after a one-off intervention – but it’s most profitable to play on people’s concerns in conjunction with not really solving their problems in either the short or long term. This demonstrates how an industry’s long-term rational self-interests aren’t always aligned with even their own customers’ long-term rational self-interests (see Post No.: 0644). Customers would prefer to have their problems solved once and for all – but businesses would prefer them to keep coming back, keep upgrading, keep buying new, keep buying more (which can be bad for the environment too). That’s their ideal business model.
Classic examples are making people feel ugly when they’re not, as if having bodily hair, spots or wrinkles aren’t normal. Industries invent or stoke up a problem like ‘you’re not light/dark-skinned enough when you should be’ or ‘you’re not thin/thicc enough and others are judging you negatively because of that’ or ‘your current car or house is embarrassing’ and then they’ll sell the supposed solutions to such problems or ‘problems’. Unnaturally whitened teeth are currently expected in the ‘developed’ world, especially if you work on TV (even though bleached white fangs can be weaker than naturally off-white fangs precisely because of the whitening process). Take a prophylactic (precautionary or preventative measure) too, like a non-prescribed vitamin tablet, just in case you get ill.
Marketing therefore sometimes has parallels to ‘negging’ – making us feel bad about ourselves so that we buy something in order to retrieve other people’s approval of us. It’s about making us feel (more) insecure to increase our desires to feel better about ourselves, and retailers coincidentally just so happen to sell that hopeful and promising tonic that’ll make us feel better about ourselves. And if what they sell only gives a temporary effect then even better for them because then we’ll need to keep repeatedly purchasing it. Customers experiencing short-term successes but long-term failures or plateaus mean upping the dosage or frequency of use rather than realising that it’s not the long-term answer.
Even genuine health concerns can spur the sale of fake cures, treatments or prophylactics because merchants are trying to exploit these real fears with false hopes for the sake of profits (e.g. sham treatments for COVID-19).
Pharmaceutical companies try to sell and push drugs even onto the healthy – by marketing them as ‘optimising’ people’s performances (e.g. before exams), by encouraging over-diagnosis (e.g. children as young as four as having bipolar disorder), by exaggerating ‘illnesses’ (e.g. male pattern baldness, in itself at least), as well as by promoting prophylactic measures for diseases that one might get one day (e.g. to prevent the risk of heart disease, even though there are cheaper ways with fewer potential side-effects than drugs, and no such risks can ever be 100% eliminated).
Bad breath existed at least since humans first opened their cakeholes but the term ‘halitosis’ was coined by a person connected to a mouthwash brand in order to give bad breath a more medical-sounding name. And this helped make the product sell by the truckload. Now bad breath may indicate a real, serious health problem like an abscessed tooth, but mouthwash is seldom the solution for such problems, at least on its own. Yet people who just need to brush their teeth better and/or more often (mouthwash isn’t an adequate substitute for brushing or flossing and isn’t required at all if you brush and floss properly and regularly), or need to see their fluffy dentist, may buy mouthwash instead of seek the real or better solutions.
Instead of Big Pharma trying to come up with and sell new drugs for minor worries in the ‘developed’ world – they should work to make and sell existing drugs cheaper so that people in poorer countries can afford them. There’s a huge need there and a huge population. Yet, because poor people cannot pay much, this isn’t as lucrative as another cream for wrinkles or acne, or another cosmetic foundation or hair dye! Likewise, if mainly only people in poor countries contract a particular deadly disease then a pharmaceutical company mightn’t think it’s worth trying to develop and sell a treatment for it because the projected profits will be lower than developing a treatment for something less serious that ‘middle class’ to ‘upper class’ people in wealthier countries might care about (which may mean all that animal testing for relatively frivolous products too).
It’s admittedly typically difficult to find or create new effective drugs, but many large pharmaceutical companies have virtually turned away from looking for new antibiotics (or bacteriophages) due to the cost, time, low probabilities and ultimately (relatively) poor expected returns on investment, despite their importance for humankind’s future. Even most of the first COVID-19 vaccines that were developed around the world needed public funding to help make happen. Instead, they ‘invent’ new anti-inflammatory drugs for headaches, backaches, butt aches, little finger aches, etc. because more people use these sorts of drugs every single day. (They’re often just the same drugs like ibuprofen but marketed for specific rather than general use, which increases the overdose risk too if users have, say, a headache and a backache simultaneously, and take a dose for each ailment.)
Anyway, a large part about marketing is creating or emphasising discontents or anxieties so that people go buy a seller’s (temporary) solutions or ‘solutions’ to alleviate them. And businesses keep doing this without actually truly solving the discontents or anxieties so that customers keep purchasing more. The root problems are often people’s insecurities (e.g. about how they look), and the best ways to solve these don’t require buying anything but individual confidence and cultural change.
Relative to the sheer amount of new products that get released every year – new models/versions of products seldom really improve upon the last, at least in any way that truly revolutionises our lives in how we live or feel. Of course, consumables will always require repeat purchases, and innovation is more often evolutionary than revolutionary. But do we need that many things? Do we need to spend that much to get the same result? And will that minor upgrade really change our life?
Through consumerism and exploiting desire – corporations have control over the public as consumers. Consumers feel free but are slaves to desires, and are trapped in greed and cycles of short-term pleasures that sometimes come with long-term pains (like obesity). Consumers happily obey, like dogs obeying their owners whenever a bit of chimkin is dangled in front of them (which I’ll say is fine if there’s a balanced benefit for both the dog and owner because it trains the dog; but there’s not always a balanced benefit between a business and its customers e.g. when a customer gives the business money whilst the business gives the customer addiction).
Companies tap into our reward systems and extract money from us in return for constant, little, ephemeral hits of dopamine. It’s just a different way to kindle conformity. (It reminds me of the inappropriately named female ‘Despair Squid’ in Red Dwarf, which ejected an ink that made its victims hallucinate hopeful dreams in order to keep them docile rather than fight back… while it tried to suck their brains out or something! The male ‘Despair Squid’ did congruously induce despair as its strategy, to once again prevent its prey from fighting back.) Consumers may think they’re behaving as unique individuals but they fit into market segments where their attitudes and behaviours can be predicted via algorithms fed with a gamut of our personal data. We’re just numbers. That’s how targeted advertising works. So ‘buy this stuff because you cannot express your own individuality without it’(!)
Corporations, governments, religions, conspiracy groups and cults can all feed our fears, as well as our desires like for sex or greed, to make us do what they want.
Woof! If we can control the fears and/or desires of others then we can control their behaviours whilst making it appear like it was totally their own free choice.
Comment on this post by replying to this tweet:
