advertising manipulation essay

Consumer Behavior

How marketing unconsciously manipulates what we buy, the forces behind our impulse purchases are often hidden..

Posted September 29, 2020 | Reviewed by Abigail Fagan

We live in a society where money makes the world go round. If we’re fortunate enough to have a consistent job, we spend an average of 90,000 hours during our lifetimes earning money. And we use the rest of our time spending it.

Nearly everything we do requires money, including paying the rent and putting food on the table. According to a 2018 study , however, the average American spends $5,400 per year on impulse purchases. Much of that goes toward food items we don’t really need (think ice cream or dill-pickle flavored potato chips). But a large portion of people also make impulse buys in the categories of fashion, household items, and, of course, shoes. Stack this statistic against the fact that total credit card debt in the country has climbed to just short of 1 trillion dollars—meaning that the average person owes credit card companies around $6,000—and it begs an important question: Why do we buy what we buy?

Often, we buy things out of need, of course. Particularly during these trying times, meeting basic needs is something that many people are rightly concerned about. But too often, we make buying decisions for less rational or necessary reasons. Marketing and advertising are psychologically advanced industries, with the goal of influencing us—often outside of our awareness—to spend money. That’s the topic of the new book, Blindsight: The (Mostly) Hidden Ways Marketing Reshapes Our Brains , by fellow Psychology Today Matt Johnson and Prince Ghuman.

“As we go about navigating the consumer environment, we make decisions, we orchestrate behaviors, but we’re not always aware of how or why we do the things we do,” Johnson told me during an interview on KPFA Radio’s About Health . “Over the past 20 or 30 years, marketers have become much more sophisticated in how they persuade us to buy certain products and acquire certain services.”

For instance, we may think we’re choosing a particular food from the grocery store shelf because it tastes the best, but the reality may be more complicated. One study involved a blind taste-test of patês. Participants were invited to taste five patês, which had been plated in appetizing ways with a parsley garnish. The catch: One of the samples was actually dog food, ground to a fine paste in a food processor to disguise its texture. After tasting all five samples, participants were asked to guess which sample was actually the dog food. The results were startling: Their guess was no better than random chance.

Similar results were found in a 2001 study by researchers in the department of oenology (wine science) at the University of Bordeaux, France. The participants, who were students in training to become sommeliers, were served red and white wines and asked to describe their flavor. Tellingly, when red dye was added to the white wine, the students often didn’t realize anything was amiss. They used words typically reserved only for red wines to describe the flavors.

“It just goes to show that the reasons why we make a decision, especially around food, oftentimes really isn’t why we think it is,” Johnson says . “We go to a fancy restaurant. We spend a lot of money, sometimes outside of our means, to have what we think are delicious plates of food. But actually the deliciousness doesn’t stem from the interaction that happens at the level of the tongue. It happens in the brain ... And that’s the marketer’s playground. That’s really where they have a lot of influence.”

Some of the major factors that influence our consumer choices besides the goodness of the product include packaging and brand recognition. Most of us are familiar with the famous “Pepsi Challenge” taste test. Even though Coke consistently outsells Pepsi , most people prefer the taste of Pepsi. “They set out on a series of experiments to try and prove that,” Johnson told me . “The apparatus basically was, you’re sitting down and you have two bubbly sodas in front of you. If you believe you are drinking Coke, but it’s actually Pepsi, you’ll actually report enjoying it more than if you are drinking Pepsi alone. ... So, despite having almost universal brand recognition with Coca-Cola, they’ll still spend billions of dollars every single year, because with each new advertisement you see of Coca-Cola, it actually influences your preferences.”

None of this is necessarily bad. Packaging and branding are often part of the joy of consuming a product. There’s something pleasurable about unwrapping the luxurious packaging of a new iPhone and noticing the embossed Apple logo. Nonetheless, many of us might prefer to be influenced less easily by such marketing strategies. For this reason, Johnson and Ghuman offer tips for how we can take back some of our power.

They suggest that, by realizing the sway that marketing can exert over us, we can make wiser and more deliberate choices. “Whether we like it or not, we’re in a deep relationship with the consumer world. But this realization can actually be empowering,” they write .

Their biggest, yet simplest, suggestion for how to do this involves shopping in a more conscious way. In particular, they exhort, don’t shop while you’re emotional, distracted, or hungry. “Thinking is difficult,” says Johnson . “It requires mental energy.” Here’s the basic idea: Our brains only have a certain amount of processing power. When a portion of our mental resources is being occupied by distractions, we simply have less brain power left to make good buying decisions. Likewise, whether we’re shopping for food or any other product, when we haven’t had a meal in a while, our brains don’t have the energy to make the best decisions possible. That means we’re more susceptible to making impulse purchases.

As simple as these suggestions sound, they work. And in this time of financial hardship for so many due to the COVID pandemic, anything that helps us make better consumer decisions and save money is worth its weight in gold.

David B. Feldman, Ph.D. , is a professor in the department of counseling psychology at Santa Clara University.

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Advertising: Information or Manipulation? Essay

• 13 Works Cited

Advertising: Information or Manipulation? In today’s difficult economy who can afford to spend their hard-earned money carelessly? Americans want good quality and low prices, and businesses that advertise their product make saving money possible. Advertising was created for one reason, so businesses could make known their product (Black, Hashimzade, and Myles). Some consumers may argue that advertising is not informative, but that it is manipulative because some advertisements make false claims. Fortunately, there are regulations and consumer rights that promote truth in advertising. Consumers must embrace their rights to keep advertising the way it is meant to be. Advertising is meant to be informative and not manipulative, and …show more content…

Consumers save time and money by not having to look for the best and cheapest deals themselves (Black, Hashimzade, and Myles). Advertising helps Americans make more informed purchases by delivering the information directly to them. However, Americans must use this privilege responsibly. If an advertisement seems misleading, consumers should refuse to give the company their business. It is unreasonable for consumers to feel that advertising is manipulative when their actions greatly affect its production. Businesses also benefit from advertising. Obviously, advertising enables business owners to provide information. Since this attracts more consumers to shop with them, they are able to provide better quality products at reasonable prices. If a business was unable to inform the public about their products they would receive a lot less business and consequently receive less profit. Less profit means higher prices and less selection for consumers, and the inability to pay employees. When a business does not have funds to pay employees this begins the vicious unemployment cycle (Madura 473). The long-term effect of business without advertising is the elimination of employees, fueling the high unemployment rates. When businesses are able to advertise they are also providing great benefits for the economy (Milton 9). Americans are looking for the best deal and convenience, which they usually find through advertising. Consider the

Case 2.01 Citing Textual Evidence

Advertising is used in the public to get the word out that a new product is here. Advertising informs people that this product may be something that they like and is useful to them. Without advertising, many companies would not be able to preserve their business. Companies have to make sure they efficiently inform the public what their product does because if the public has no understanding of the product, they most likely will not buy it. Advertisements are first used locally and can eventually become nationally if the business is doing well and properly informing the consumers about the product and its purpose. This can be done using social media, newspapers, magazines, or bill boards if they are wealthy enough.

Summary Of Nestle's The Supermarket : Prime Real Estate

Advertisements are an extremely prominent part of American society. Very few places exist that an individual can go without being exposed to some form of ad. From product placement to billboards, advertisements exist in nearly every facet of life. Marion Nestle discusses what she considers to be one of the more heinous forms of advertisement in her essay, “The Supermarket: Prime Real Estate.” Nestle uses several persuasive techniques to convince her audience of the evils of supermarkets. Her use of emotionally charged phrases paired with her more logical assertions help to drive her point home while her clear bias and lack of supportive source detract from her overall argument

Jib Fowles Advertising's Fifteen Basic Appeals

In today’s society, no matter where you are, there is always a good chance that you have seen an advertisement. These little creatures are everywhere. You may see them when you are reading a magazine, watching TV, or surfing the internet. We have become so used to them. Advertisements are good at making us stop what we are doing and giving them our full attention. What is an advertisement? An advertisement is an announcement made to the public. In Jib Fowles’ article, “Advertising’s Fifteen Basic Appeals,” he is informing us that companies are spending millions of dollars on advertisements to grab our attention in order to manipulate us into spending or thinking of spending our hard-earned money on their product. Even though a lot of people do not want to believe that a paper that is eight times eleven with an image and no more than five words is manipulative because we want to think that we are not that easy to trick. Nike created an advertisement for one of

Examples Of Propaganda In United States History

The average United States Citizen views about 5000 advertisements a day (Johnson). Advertising is everywhere. Billboards on the way to work, ads on the internet, and paper products such as magazines or newspapers display a sale or a promotion of a good or service. Usually, the ad will give a brand or company name, and uses the product’s merits to draw the consumer closer. This has grown exponentially as advertisements in media in 1970 were estimated to be 500 a day, a ten percent increase in the last 48 years. (Johnson). This is due to the rise of technology, as the computer has become a household gadget within the new millenium. These advertisements are meant to give a synopsis of the product or service’s purpose, quality, and efficiency. If a consumer views 5000 advertisements in a single day and assuming the commercials do not repeat, 5000 goods or services are introduced. With more options to choose from in such little time, the consumer has a harder time differentiating the quality and perhaps necessity of the product. The marketers rely on the quick, impulsive decision making of consumers. With the misleading nature of many infomercials or radio broadcasts, the people of American society are bombarded with constant propaganda, thus making seemingly harmless promotions more potent to filling industries’ pockets and lessening the common population’s

The Cult You Re In Analysis

The “American Dream” has changed form dramatically since the term was first coined in 1931 by James Truslow Adams. By definition, it refers to the goal of the American people to pursue their own individual dreams with independence. However, considering the increased amounts of advertising in recent years due to the advancement of technology, are Americans actually making their own, uninfluenced decisions about the products they are purchasing? Kalle Lasn, the founder of the anticorporate AdBusters Media Foundation, would likely disagree. As the founder of this organization, the Estonian author’s goal is to inform average consumers about the hidden grime in advertising that they may not be aware of, such as discrimination and logical fallacies.

Magna Soles Analysis

Modern day society revolves around consumerism. As American citizens, we see thousands of different advertisements each day. The majority of our lives simply consist of buying and selling products and services. In a mock press release, The Onion’s criticizes American consumerism and the false promises advertisers make in their commercials.

Analysis Of How Advertising Inform To Our Benefits By John E. Calfee

In the article “ How Advertising Informs to Our Benefits”, writer John E Calfee, argues about the benefits that advertisement provides to our society. He says advertisement is a great tool for communicating information and shaping markets today. However, he also argues on the point that advertisement can sometimes be misleading, and that it leaves out the important information.

The New Technological Advancements Of The 1900s

With the new technological advancements of the 1900s, the concept of advertising prospered into a new industry based on the desires of the people. Historically, magazines, newspaper, radio and television have all greatly improved advertising, making it one of the largest forces that works to help or hinder society. “Before 1910, advertisers mostly sought to inform customers about products; after 1910, the main goal was to create a desire to purchase products” (Blackford 3). Thus, business strategy was created that convinced people that they needed a product. This opened up a new world for people to be manipulated into spending their money on what they thought would improve their lives. Advertising improved the

The Impact Of Advertisements On Society

Every day, companies present the people with advertisements everywhere they go. Advertisements have become very prevalent in today’s society nowadays focusing in on a negative connotation. Advertisement has become an effective way for producers to display their new products. In present day, they come in forms of billboards, flyers, e-mails, and even text messages. It is widely known that companies create advertisements to persuade people to buy specific products or goods; however, it is not widely known that advertisements can make a negative impact on today’s society. The companies manipulate people’s mind and emotions, swaying people by new promotions and therefore generating a strong desire to fit into the society, that causes them to make inessential expenditures. Advertisements pose a critical impact on the American culture.

Charles O Neill's The Language Of Advertising

Individuals decide whether or not he or she want to believe the advertisements they see and hear. Just as O’Neill evinced “You must listen. You must read. And finally you must think – all by yourself” (352). If individuals learned how advertisements work, he or she can avoid being persuaded by the salesman. The individual will no longer feel forced to buy products he or she did not want. Society should serve a positive influence for change in advertising.

Examples Of Effective Persuasion In Advertisements

There are thousands of companies around the world today, but only a few are successful in the competition of business. Top companies, every year, invest billions of dollars on advertising because it is an effective way to present their product or service. Advertisements are impactful because they are everywhere from the Internet, movies, books, magazines, and outdoors. Although most advertisements may look simple, its use has been effective for companies to deliver propaganda, persuasion, and subliminal messages to convince consumers to buy something they don’t need. The use of propaganda, and persuasion is evident in companies such as Camel, Pepsi, and Tesla Motor to convince viewers to engage in their

Synthesis Essay On Advertising

Source C explains that advertising is essentially teaching because it explains to the consumer how to use products and about beneficial and necessary items. However, commercials are not long enough to provide any kind of real training and if consumers need to know how to use a product they can learn about it through another much more thorough method. Additionally, Source F points out that anything that is truly essential does not need to be advertised because customers will purchase it anyway. Another argument is the advertising generates money, thus promoting the economy by encouraging people to spend money and paying for online articles and television programs (Source D). While advertising may boost sales, the fact of the matter is that people will make purchases without viewing commercials, therefore contributing to the economy, and will likely make better decisions that are based on logic rather than flashy entertainment. Moreover, Source F explains that in an effort to promote sales companies often ignore their moral responsibilities, as in the case of the powdered milk sales and cigarette advertisements. A 30 second television commercial promoting sugary sports drinks or frivolous purchases may help the company’s profits, but at what cost to the well-being of

The Ethics Of Persuasive Advertising

Each day we are bombarded with advertisements from a plethora of corporations in every waking moment of our lives. Advertising agencies have become so advanced at what they do, that often times we may not even realize we are being advertised a product. This raises an interesting ethical dilemma over a certain type of advertising: persuasive advertising. Philosophers, economists, and business professionals have debated over whether or not persuasive advertising is an immoral violation of the autonomy of consumers. While not all forms of advertising are in and of themselves certainly immoral, persuasive advertising is particularly reprehensible due to the fact that not only does it manipulate our unconscious desires of which we are completely unaware in order to sell a product, but it also routinely leads us to act against our own best interest, thus overriding our autonomy.

Advertising: the good and bad Essay

• 2 Works Cited

Without advertising, the media (including newspaper, television, and radio) would be much less vigorous. Advertising provides revenue for commercial mediums, which would otherwise need to be funded by the actual consumer of these mediums. For instance, a newspaper would cost up to three times as much money because advertising provides two-thirds of the revenue of the print media, and all television, bar government funded networks, would be pay-TV (since nearly ALL revenue for television is provided by advertising, while the consumer provides no financial support except for providing the service of watching the advertised messages). So we can see a major economic infrastructure based around advertising.

Advertising Has A Impact On Society Essay

Advertising has had a major impact on society. Some may be considered positive and some negative. Take a look around, advertisements are placed everywhere, television commercials, billboards, newspapers, and even on the sides of buses. Advertising is the basic form of marketing and trading throughout the world. Today’s society knows it as marketers trying to influence or persuade consumers into buying something. It also serves as a medium for services and businesses. There are many advertising strategies, but television commercials will always remain the number one strategy. Think about it, how much television is watched a day, probably a lot. What better way to advertise a product or service? Advertising has a positive effect on our economy. It does not only influence and persuade consumers, but it also benefits them in many ways. It also benefits manufacturers and their company, and the world as a whole.

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Essay on Effects of Advertisement

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Special Issue: Propaganda

This essay was published as part of the Special Issue “Propaganda Analysis Revisited”, guest-edited by Dr. A. J. Bauer (Assistant Professor, Department of Journalism and Creative Media, University of Alabama) and Dr. Anthony Nadler (Associate Professor, Department of Communication and Media Studies, Ursinus College).

Propaganda, misinformation, and histories of media techniques

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This essay argues that the recent scholarship on misinformation and fake news suffers from a lack of historical contextualization. The fact that misinformation scholarship has, by and large, failed to engage with the history of propaganda and with how propaganda has been studied by media and communication researchers is an empirical detriment to it, and serves to make the solutions and remedies to misinformation harder to articulate because the actual problem they are trying to solve is unclear.

School of Media and Communication, University of Leeds, UK

Introduction

Propaganda has a history and so does research on it. In other words, the mechanisms and methods through which media scholars have sought to understand propaganda—or misinformation, or disinformation, or fake news, or whatever you would like to call it—are themselves historically embedded and carry with them underlying notions of power and causality. To summarize the already quite truncated argument below, the larger conceptual frameworks for understanding information that is understood as “pernicious” in some way can be grouped into four large categories: studies of propaganda, the analysis of ideology and its relationship to culture, notions of conspiracy theory, and finally, concepts of misinformation and its impact. The fact that misinformation scholarship generally proceeds without acknowledging these theoretical frameworks is an empirical detriment to it and serves to make the solutions and remedies to misinformation harder to articulate because the actual problem to be solved is unclear. 

The following pages discuss each of these frameworks—propaganda, ideology, conspiracy, and misinformation—before returning to the stakes and implications of these arguments for future research on pernicious media content.

Propaganda and applied research

The most salient aspect of propaganda research is the fact that it is powerful in terms of resources while at the same time it is often intellectually derided, or at least regularly dismissed. Although there has been a left-wing tradition of propaganda research housed uneasily within the academy (Herman & Chomsky, 1988; Seldes & Seldes, 1943), this is not the primary way in which journalism or media messaging has been understood in many journalism schools or mainstream communications departments. This relates, of course, to the institutionalization of journalism and communication studies within the academic enterprise. Within this paradox, we see the greater paradox of communication research as both an applied and a disciplinary field. Propaganda is taken quite seriously by governments, the military, and the foreign service apparatus (Simpson, 1994); at the same time, it has occupied a tenuous conceptual place in most media studies and communications departments, with the dominant intellectual traditions embracing either a “limited effects” notion of what communication “does” or else more concerned with the more slippery concept of ideology (and on that, see more below). There is little doubt that the practical study of the power of messages and the field of communication research grew up together. Summarizing an initially revisionist line of research that has now become accepted within the historiography of the field, Nietzel notes that “from the very beginning, communication research was at least in part designed as an applied science, intended to deliver systematic knowledge that could be used for the business of government to the political authorities.” He adds, however, that

“this context also had its limits, for by the end of the decade, communication research had become established at American universities and lost much of its dependence on state funds. Furthermore, it had become increasingly clear that communication scientists could not necessarily deliver knowledge to the political authorities that could serve as a pattern for political acting (Simpson, 1994 pp. 88–89). From then on, politics and communication science parted ways. Many of the approaches and techniques which seemed innovative and even revolutionary in the 1940s and early 1950s, promising a magic key to managing propaganda activities and controlling public opinion, became routine fields of work, and institutions like the USIA carried out much of this kind of research themselves.” (Nietzel, 2016, p. 66)

It is important to note that this parting of ways did  not  mean that no one in the United States and the Soviet Union was studying propaganda. American government records document that, in inflation-adjusted terms, total funding for the United States Information Agency (USIA) rose from $1.2 billion in 1955 to $1.7 billion in 1999, shortly before its functions were absorbed into the United States Department of State. And this was dwarfed by Soviet spending, which spent more money jamming Western Radio transmissions alone than the United States did in its entire propaganda budget. Media effects research in the form of propaganda studies was a big and well-funded business. It was simply not treated as such within the traditional academy (Zollman, 2019). It is also important to note that this does not mean that no one in academia studies propaganda or the effect of government messages on willing or unwilling recipients, particularly in fields like health communication (also quite well-funded). These more academic studies, however, were tempered by the generally accepted fact that there existed no decontextualized, universal laws of communication that could render media messages easily useable by interested actors.

Ideology, economics, and false consciousness

If academics have been less interested than governments and health scientists in analyzing the role played by propaganda in the formation of public opinion, what has the academy worried about instead when it comes to the study of pernicious messages and their role in public life? Open dominant, deeply contested line of study has revolved around the concept of  ideology.  As defined by Raymond Williams in his wonderful  Keywords , ideology refers to an interlocking set of ideas, beliefs, concepts, or philosophical principles that are naturalized, taken for granted, or regarded as self-evident by various segments of society. Three controversial and interrelated principles then follow. First, ideology—particularly in its Marxist version—carries with it the implication that these ideas are somehow deceptive or disassociated from what actually exists. “Ideology is then abstract and false thought, in a sense directly related to the original conservative use but with the alternative—knowledge of real material conditions and relationships—differently stated” (Williams, 1976). Second, in all versions of Marxism, ideology is related to economic conditions in some fashion, with material reality, the economics of a situation, usually dominant and helping give birth to ideological precepts. In common Marxist terminology, this is usually described as the relationship between the base (economics and material conditions) and the superstructure (the realm of concepts, culture, and ideas). Third and finally, it is possible that different segments of society will have  different  ideologies, differences that are based in part on their position within the class structure of that society. 

Western Marxism in general (Anderson, 1976) and Antonio Gramsci in particular helped take these concepts and put them on the agenda of media and communications scholars by attaching more importance to “the superstructure” (and within it, media messages and cultural industries) than was the case in earlier Marxist thought. Journalism and “the media” thus play a major role in creating and maintaining ideology and thus perpetuating the deception that underlies ideological operations. In the study of the relationship between the media and ideology, “pernicious messages” obviously mean something different than they do in research on propaganda—a more structural, subtle, reinforcing, invisible, and materially dependent set of messages than is usually the case in propaganda analysis.  Perhaps most importantly, little research on media and communication understands ideology in terms of “discrete falsehoods and erroneous belief,” preferring to focus on processes of deep structural  misrecognition  that serves dominant economic interests (Corner, 2001, p. 526). This obviously marks a difference in emphasis as compared to most propaganda research. 

Much like in the study of propaganda, real-world developments have also had an impact on the academic analysis of media ideology. The collapse of communism in the 1980s and 1990s and the rise of neoliberal governance obviously has played a major role in these changes. Although only one amongst a great many debates about the status of ideology in a post-Marxist communications context, the exchange between Corner (2001, 2016) and Downey (2008; Downey et al., 2014) is useful for understanding how scholars have dealt with the relationship between large macro-economic and geopolitical changes in the world and fashions of research within the academy. Regardless of whether concepts of ideology are likely to return to fashion, any analysis of misinformation that is consonant with this tradition must keep in mind the relationship between class and culture, the outstanding and open question of “false consciousness,” and the key scholarly insight that ideological analysis is less concerned with false messages than it is with questions of structural misrecognition and the implications this might have for the maintenance of hegemony.

Postmodern conspiracy

Theorizing pernicious media content as a “conspiracy” theory is less common than either of the two perspectives discussed above. Certainly, conspiratorial media as an explanatory factor for political pathology has something of a post-Marxist (and indeed, postmodern) aura. Nevertheless, there was a period in the 1990s and early 2000s when some of the most interesting notions of conspiracy theories were analyzed in academic work, and it seems hard to deny that much of this literature would be relevant to the current emergence of the “QAnon” cult, the misinformation that is said to drive it, and other even more exotic notions of elites conspiring against the public. 

Frederic Jameson has penned remarks on conspiracy theory that represent the starting point for much current writing on the conspiratorial mindset, although an earlier and interrelated vein of scholarship can be found in the work of American writers such as Hofstadter (1964) and Rogin (1986). “Conspiracy is the poor person’s cognitive mapping in the postmodern age,” Jameson writes, “it is a degraded figure of the total logic of late capital, a desperate attempt to represent the latter’s system” (Jameson, 1991). If “postmodernism,” in Jameson’s terms, is marked by a skepticism toward metanarratives, then conspiracy theory is the only narrative system available to explain the various deformations of the capitalist system. As Horn and Rabinach put it:

“The broad interest taken by cultural studies in popular conspiracy theories mostly adopted Jameson’s view and regards them as the wrong answers to the right questions. Showing the symptoms of disorientation and loss of social transparency, conspiracy theorists are seen as the disenfranchised “poor in spirit,” who, for lack of a real understanding of the world they live in, come up with paranoid systems of world explanation.” (Horn & Rabinach, 2008)

Other thinkers, many of them operating from a perch within media studies and communications departments, have tried to take conspiracy theories more seriously (Bratich, 2008; Fenster, 2008; Pratt, 2003; Melley, 2008). The key question for all of these thinkers lies within the debate discussed in the previous section, the degree to which “real material interests” lie behind systems of ideological mystification and whether audiences themselves bear any responsibility for their own predicament. In general, writers sympathetic to Jameson have tended to maintain a Marxist perspective in which conspiracy represents a pastiche of hegemonic overthrow, thus rendering it just another form of ideological false consciousness. Theorists less taken with Marxist categories see conspiracy as an entirely rational (though incorrect) response to conditions of late modernity or even as potentially liberatory. Writers emphasizing that pernicious media content tends to fuel a conspiratorial mindset often emphasize the mediated aspects of information rather than the economics that lie behind these mediations. Both ideological analysis and academic writings on conspiracy theory argue that there is a gap between “what seems to be going on” and “what is actually going on,” and that this gap is maintained and widened by pernicious media messages. Research on ideology tends to see the purpose of pernicious media content as having an ultimately material source that is rooted in “real interests,” while research on conspiracies plays down these class aspects and questions whether any real interests exist that go beyond the exercise of political power.

The needs of informationally ill communities

The current thinking in misinformation studies owes something to all these approaches. But it owes an even more profound debt to two perspectives on information and journalism that emerged in the early 2000s, both of which are indebted to an “ecosystemic” perspective on information flows. One perspective sees information organizations and their audiences as approximating a natural ecosystem, in which different media providers contribute equally to the health of an information environment, which then leads to healthy citizens. The second perspective analyzes the flows of messages as they travel across an information environment, with messages becoming reshaped and distorted as they travel across an information network. 

Both of these perspectives owe a debt to the notion of the “informational citizen” that was popular around the turn of the century and that is best represented by the 2009 Knight Foundation report  The Information Needs of Communities  (Knight Foundation, 2009). This report pioneered the idea that communities were informational communities whose political health depended in large part on the quality of information these communities ingested. Additional reports by The Knight Foundation, the Pew Foundation, and this author (Anderson, 2010) looked at how messages circulated across these communities, and how their transformation impacted community health. 

It is a short step from these ecosystemic notions to a view of misinformation that sees it as a pollutant or even a virus (Anderson, 2020), one whose presence in a community turns it toward sickness or even political derangement. My argument here is that the current misinformation perspective owes less to its predecessors (with one key exception that I will discuss below) and more to concepts of information that were common at the turn of the century. The major difference between the concept of misinformation and earlier notions of informationally healthy citizens lies in the fact that the normative standard by which health is understood within information studies is crypto-normative. Where writings about journalism and ecosystemic health were openly liberal in nature and embraced notions of a rational, autonomous citizenry who just needed the right inputs in order to produce the right outputs, misinformation studies has a tendency to embrace liberal behavioralism without embracing a liberal political theory. What the political theory of misinformation studies is, in the end, deeply unclear.

I wrote earlier that misinformation studies owed more to notions of journalism from the turn of the century than it did to earlier traditions of theorizing. There is one exception to this, however. Misinformation studies, like propaganda analysis, is a radically de-structured notion of what information does. Buried within analysis of pernicious information there is

“A powerful cultural contradiction—the need to understand and explain social influence versus a rigid intolerance of the sociological and Marxist perspectives that could provide the theoretical basis for such an understanding. Brainwashing, after all, is ultimately a theory of ideology in the crude Marxian sense of “false consciousness.” Yet the concept of brainwashing was the brainchild of thinkers profoundly hostile to Marxism not only to its economic assumptions but also to its emphasis on structural, rather than individual, causality.” (Melley, 2008, p. 149)

For misinformation studies to grow in such a way that allows it to take its place among important academic theories of media and communication, several things must be done. The field needs to be more conscious of its own history, particularly its historical conceptual predecessors. It needs to more deeply interrogate its  informational-agentic  concept of what pernicious media content does, and perhaps find room in its arsenal for Marxist notions of hegemony or poststructuralist concepts of conspiracy. Finally, it needs to more openly advance its normative agenda, and indeed, take a normative position on what a good information environment would look like from the point of view of political theory. If this environment is a liberal one, so be it. But this position needs to be stated clearly.

Of course, misinformation studies need not worry about its academic bona fides at all. As the opening pages of this Commentary have shown, propaganda research was only briefly taken seriously as an important academic field. This did not stop it from being funded by the U.S. government to the tune of 1.5 billion dollars a year. While it is unlikely that media research will ever see that kind of investment again, at least by an American government, let’s not forget that geopolitical Great Power conflict has not disappeared in the four years that Donald Trump was the American president. Powerful state forces in Western society will have their own needs, and their own demands, for misinformation research. It is up to the scholarly community to decide how they will react to these temptations. 

• Mainstream Media
• / Propaganda

Cite this Essay

Anderson, C. W. (2021). Propaganda, misinformation, and histories of media techniques. Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) Misinformation Review . https://doi.org/10.37016/mr-2020-64

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Autonomy and Manipulation: Refining the Argument against Persuasive Advertising

2020, Journal of Business Ethics

Critics of persuasive advertising argue that it undermines the autonomy of consumers by manipulating their desires in morally problematic ways. My aim is this paper is to refine that argument by employing a conception of autonomy that is not at odds with certain forms of manipulation. I argue that the charge of manipulation is not sufficient for condemning persuasive advertising. On my view, manipulation of an agent's desires through advertising is justifiable in cases where the agent accepts (or would accept) the process through which the desires were developed. I show how the standard manipulation objection proves too much as it would also condemn cases of that kind. I argue that this distinction is especially important when we consider the implications of "new media." In addition to increasing vulnerability to manipulation, new media have considerable impacts on well-being. By siding with the traditional autonomy argument, we would be compelled to take an implausible stand against all forms of manipulation through advertising, but I suggest that only a proper subset of those cases are morally problematic. This conclusion opens up a space for persuasive advertising that is permissible while nevertheless condemning cases that violate consumers' autonomy.

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Autonomy and Manipulation: Refining the Argument Against Persuasive Advertising

• Original Paper
• Published: 28 July 2020
• Volume 175 , pages 689–699, ( 2022 )

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• Timothy Aylsworth   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-8164-3451 1  

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Critics of persuasive advertising argue that it undermines the autonomy of consumers by manipulating their desires in morally problematic ways. My aim is this paper is to refine that argument by employing a conception of autonomy that is not at odds with certain forms of manipulation. I argue that the charge of manipulation is not sufficient for condemning persuasive advertising. On my view, manipulation of an agent’s desires through advertising is justifiable in cases where the agent accepts (or would accept) the process through which the desires were developed. I show how the standard manipulation objection proves too much as it would also condemn cases of that kind. I argue that this distinction is especially important when we consider the implications of “new media.” In addition to increasing vulnerability to manipulation, new media have considerable impacts on well-being. By siding with the traditional autonomy argument, we would be compelled to take an implausible stand against all forms of manipulation through advertising, but I suggest that only a proper subset of those cases are morally problematic. This conclusion opens up a space for persuasive advertising that is permissible while nevertheless condemning cases that violate consumers’ autonomy.

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Irrational Advertising and Moral Autonomy

Consumer Autonomy and Social Technology: The Case of Social Media Algorithms and the Metaverse

Autonomy and the social dilemma of online manipulative behavior.

As I explain below, there are two additional conditions: the self-reflection on the process of development must be minimally rational and uninhibited.

This suggestion—that one’s autonomy could be enhanced through external manipulation—is not new. Sneddon ( 2013 ) provides an example in which a benevolent neuroscientist helps an agent act in accordance with her commitment to a project of drinking more tea (37). This is precisely the sort of benevolent manipulation that I will defend here.

Although they approach the possibility differently, the possibility of autonomy-enhancing advertising is raised by Anker et al. ( 2010 ). They adhere to the Dworkin/Frankfurt model of autonomy, but they claim that “divergent marketing” is at odds with autonomy while “convergent marketing” is not.

Throughout the paper I use the term “persuasive advertising” in keeping with Crisp’s usage. Crisp uses this label to distinguish persuasive advertising from informative advertising. Phillips ( 1994 ), following Beauchamp ( 1984 ), prefers the term “manipulative advertising” because this leaves room for the possibility of advertising that makes use of rational persuasion, which no one takes to be problematic. Although I use the term “persuasive advertising,” I am typically talking about manipulative advertising, not ads that work by means of rational persuasion.

He writes, “In fact, it is odd to suggest that persuasive advertising does give consumers a choice. A choice is usually taken to require the weighing-up of reasons. What persuasive advertising does is to remove the very conditions of choice” ( Ibid. 416).

One would expect a Kantian objection to pertain to autonomy as well. Villarán is indeed concerned with autonomy but only in the strict Kantian sense of being a moral agent who acts out of respect for the moral law. Villarán argues that advertising threatens to make us heteronomous by directing us to obey self-interested desires that are at odds with Kant’s notion of duty. This is certainly about autonomy, but it is distinct enough from the standard manipulation objection that I do not discuss it at length here. Villarán and Kant are principally concerned with moral autonomy, but the views I am discussing deal with personal autonomy. For more on this distinction and an attempt to generate a Kantian view of personal autonomy, see Taylor ( 2005 ).

Nevertheless, if Villarán is right about advertising, that would cast doubt on my conclusion about the moral permissibility of manipulative advertising. Although I cannot give a full response here, I believe that my conclusion could be defended from the Kantian critique. First, Villarán presents examples of advertising that encourage obeying desires even when this means violating one’s moral duty (10). I would agree that such advertising is morally problematic, but I do not think that all advertising is guilty of this charge. Advertising might lead me to act on a desire in a way that is consistent with my moral duty. If I act on an inclination that was induced by advertising, then the heteronomous action could be “in conformity with duty” even if it was not done “from the motive of duty.” For instance, an ad might show me pictures of starving children and evoke my compassion and sympathy, prompting me to donate money to famine relief. Such an action conforms with the duty of beneficence even if the advertising-induced inclination was the determining ground of the will. Second, Villarán suggests that a Kantian account of manipulative advertising must begin by “denouncing that it implies treating humanity merely as means” (11), but this is not necessarily true of the kind of advertising that I defend here. In the cases like Ricardo’s, the persuasive ads respect the agents’ capacity to set ends for themselves, so it could be argued that they are not treated as a mere means.

It is possible that Kantians will my find this response to Villarán’s criticism unsatisfying. They might persist in their belief that manipulative advertising (even construed along the lines I have suggested) is at odds with the Kant’s ideas about autonomy and respecting rational agency. If that is the case, then I would defer to Crisp’s point that Kant’s “standards are too high” (414). Kant’s view of moral autonomy ultimately requires us to conceive of an agent that is “entirely external to the causal nexus found in the ordinary empirical world” (Crisp 1987 , p. 414) and this is not the common sense notion of personal autonomy at stake in most discussions of advertising. Acting from the motive of duty is a noble moral principle, but requiring advertising to be consistent with this kind of moral autonomy sets an unreasonably high standard. Because of the arguments I defend throughout the paper, I think we ought to lower the bar given that circumventing rational faculties appears to be morally permissible in some cases. As Hyman ( 2009 ) points out, if we believe in the idea of responsible ads at all, we must accept that “non-cognitive appeals can be used responsibly” (201). Cf Maciejewski ( 2004 ).

The account of autonomy defended by Dworkin 1988 requires procedural independence. The account I favor in this paper—that of Christman ( 1991 )—also requires procedural independence. Some have argued that this does not go far enough and that there must be substantive independence in addition to procedural (see, for example, Stoljar 2000 ; Benson 2005 ).

Cunningham’s objection to Sneddon might be something of a straw man argument. First, she is treating autonomy like an all-or-nothing affair, but an agent’s autonomy comes in degrees. Sneddon’s argument is pointing out how the capacity for strong evaluation can make an agent more autonomous, and he argues that the bombardment of consumerist advertising diminishes agents’ capacity for such evaluation. Second, Sneddon does not claim that autonomy requires that agents engage in strong evaluation; autonomy might simply require the capacity for strong evaluation. Cunningham makes it sound as if Sneddon limits autonomy to the very few individuals who actively question all of their most basic commitments, but that is not the case on Sneddon’s view. Third, the comparison with Catholicism overstates Sneddon’s point. Adherence to an ideology does not undermine autonomy; the question is whether or not one’s adherence to the ideology is autonomous in the first place. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for raising these concerns.

Christman ( 1991 ) worries that Dworkin’s view might have an infinite regress problem. We use second-order desires to validate the autonomy of our first-order desires, but then it seems that we must find a third-order desire to sign off on the second-order desire. And so on. See also Thalberg ( 1978 ). Another concern is that the time-slice view might endorse problematic manipulation. It is not enough to require second-order approval of a first-order desire; we must consider the possibility that an external manipulator has created both the first-order desire and the second-order approval of it. See Sneddon ( 2013 , p. 34). These problems are interesting, but it is not my aim to address them in depth here. My interest in adopting Christman’s view of autonomy is not avoiding such problems; rather, my aim is to accommodate differing intuitions about cases like Ricardo’s.

Christman’s view also allows us to maintain the intuitions motivating Frankfurt and Dworkin’s view. For example, consider an agent who has a second-order desire to rid herself of first-order desires for junk food. She is inundated with advertisements that promote her first-order desires for junk food. Christman’s view tells us that her desire for junk food would be autonomous only if she does not resist (or would not resist) the development of her first-order desire. Presumably she would resist the process, given that she does not want to have such desires. In this way, Christman’s account can preserve much of what is plausible about Frankfurt and Dworkin’s view.

Even Crisp mentions this experiment, although he says that it was ice cream rather than soda and popcorn. This story continues to circulate even though all attempts to replicate the experiment have failed and the initial researcher, James Vicary, has been charged with falsifying the data: “Nobody has ever replicated Vicary’s findings and his study was a hoax” (Karremans et al. 2006 ). See also Rogers ( 2001 ).

It should be noted, however, that Christman’s view does not guarantee that Ricardo would endorse this particular manipulative tactic. Even if Ricardo wants to have his desire for diverse media consumption promoted, he might not approve the advertiser’s manipulation of his desire for sex appeal. When reflecting on the desire-formation process, he very well might repudiate such manipulation. The desire would therefore be alien, not autonomous. This is consistent with my view, however. What I hope to show with the example is only that there is a possibility that Ricardo’s desire is autonomous in spite of being the product of external, non-rational manipulation. This possibility is ruled out by the accounts from Crisp, Noggle, Sher, and Santilli. My objection to their views does not depend on the claim that Ricardo is autonomous with respect to his desire; it depends only on the possibility that his desire could be autonomous. It would be enough to show that autonomy is potentially consistent with manipulation through advertising.

I do not intend to license paternalistic manipulation of desires.

As I note in this section, my argument refines Crisp’s, but his position leaves room for such an adjustment. It is not as if he objects to all forms of manipulation. He says that “Often, we are manipulated by others without our knowledge, but for a good reason, and one that we can accept” (Crisp 1987 , p. 414). He gives an example of consenting to have our emotions manipulated by a skillful actor.

It is also possible that Ricardo would reject the manipulation. Perhaps he is the sort of agent who finds all external manipulation repugnant. Christman’s account allows for this kind of agent relativity. The key question is whether or not the agent accepts the process through which the desire was formed. Reasonable people may differ on this issue. My aim here is to show that some manipulation through advertising could be accepted by some agents. This qualification is important to avoid overstating the conclusion.

This is according to a 2017 Pew Research Center poll. See, Elisa Shearer and Jeffrey Gottfried, “News Use Across Social Media Platforms 2017”.

This term was coined by Eli Pariser in his book The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You . Cf., Bozdag ( 2013 ).

For a discussion of filter bubbles, new media, and many other components of the “attention economy,” see Castro and Pham ( 2020 ). Among other things, Castro and Pham discuss how filter bubbles undermine our agency.

Although I believe that this point addresses Waide’s concern about advertisers desensitizing themselves, there are several other facets of the virtue ethics critique that deserve consideration. Waide worries that advertising sells us the message that consumption of market goods will make us happy, but virtue ethics tells us that this is mistaken. On the Aristotelian view, the good life is one that is achieved through proper cultivation and exercise of virtues, but when associative advertising supplants this pursuit with materialistic desires, it yields “the result that we become worse and, quite likely, less happy persons” (Waide 1987 , p. 73). I would agree on all these counts, and I think the virtue ethics critique provides a powerful argument against advertising that simply promotes consumerism. But as Villarán ( 2017 ) points out, on Waide’s view “advertising that does not promote materialism is free of blame” (4). So Waide is not condemning all manipulative advertising per se. He is condemning it insofar as it promotes vapid consumerism, and this is consistent with my view. There could be a manipulative advertisement that does not promote consumerism (such as the Oxfam ad that I suggested in note 5), and this would be immune to the virtue ethics objection but would still be subject to the manipulation objection that I rebut in this paper.

Social media sites can manipulate more than users’ media consumption. In 2012, Facebook engaged in an experiment on roughly 700,000 users to see if they could alter their moods by filtering the content they saw. The results confirmed the hypothesis. Altering users’ news feeds had an appreciable effect on their emotional states. See Kramer et al. ( 2014 ).

The empirical psychological research on this subject is vast. See, for example, Eyal ( 2014 ) for a discussion of how people become “hooked” on these technologies. Software developers have been immensely successful at deploying such psychological research in order to get people to spend more time looking at screens. I am not, by any means, suggesting that this situation is good. I argue elsewhere that it is, in fact, quite harmful. I am, however, suggesting that these manipulative methods could theoretically be harnessed for good. Thanks to Clinton Castro for suggesting this example.

Eyal ( 2014 ) discusses dopamine in particular. Its manipulative function is not merely that it brings us pleasure; it actually suppresses our critical faculties: “Research shows that levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine surge when the brain is expecting reward […] which suppresses the areas of the brain associated with judgement and reason while activating the parts associated with wanting and desire ” (Eyal 2014 , p. 7; emphasis added). So when I return to the exercise app because it has successfully triggered my dopamine response, it is certainly manipulating me through non-rational means. But I can (on reflection) consent to this kind of manipulation given that (1) it is for an end that I want to pursue and (2) it is done in a way that I would endorse.

It would be difficult to provide an exhaustive list. For a review of the literature in psychology, see De-Sola Gutiérrez et al. ( 2016 ), Cf. Lee et al. ( 2014 ), Rotondi et al. ( 2017 ), Rosen et al. ( 2013 ) and Thomée et al. ( 2011 ).

This desire could be seen as alien on Dworkin’s view given that the first-order desire to smoke is inconsistent with Samantha’s second-order desires. But it would also be alien on Christman’s view if Samantha rejects the process that led to creating the desire to smoke. In the folly of her youth, Samantha did not think that she would become addicted, and regrets ever starting.

I am grateful to Amy Sepinwall for suggesting that I include this example in the paper.

The tobacco companies also argued that the labels violated their right to free speech.

Anker, T. B., Kappel, K., & Sandøe, P. (2010). The liberating power of commercial marketing. Journal of Business Ethics, 93 (4), 519–530.

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to everyone who participated in the Zicklin Center Normative Business Ethics Workshop at the Wharton school. I received a great deal of useful feedback there. In particular, I would like thank Amy Sepinwall, Brian Berkey, Robert Hughes, Arudra Burra, and Ittay Nissan. I would like to thank three anonymous reveiwers for this journal for their comments. I would also like to thank Clinton Castro for many helpful discussions of autonomy, advertising, and technology. Finally, I would like to thank Emma Prendergast for sparking my interest in this subject and for giving helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this paper.

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Aylsworth, T. Autonomy and Manipulation: Refining the Argument Against Persuasive Advertising. J Bus Ethics 175 , 689–699 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-020-04590-6

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How Advertising Manipulates Your Choices and Spending Habits (and What to Do About It)

Advertisements aren't inherently bad, but many use manipulative tactics that influence in ways we don't even realize. Despite how much you think you ignore them, and how little you may believe they affect you, that's not necessarily the case. Here's a look at how manipulative ads work, the problems they cause, and what you can do to avoid these negative consequences.

You see ads every day, whether it's on a web page, before a movie, or in the middle of a TV show, and it's easy to say "they're just ads" because, at worst, they feel like a nuisance or interruption. A lot of people have difficulty accepting the idea that ads are manipulative because we want to believe we're in complete control of our choices. While the concept of advertising isn't inherently problematic, we've moved on from the "Eat at Joe's" sign to far more complex and sometimes even moving, cinematic messages that are designed to create significant memories of a product. These memories are created because an ad succeeds at making us feel something—whether it's good or bad—and that emotional response can have a profound effect on how we think and the choices we make. Not all advertising is bad, but we're going to take a look at what's problematic, what isn't, and ways you can avoid the negative effects associated with so much of what you passively experience.

The Problem: Advertising Is for the Rich, Not You

Photo by Andrew Magill

Advertising exists because there's a product a company wants to sell and they want people to know about it so they can buy it. This much is obvious. Sometimes that product is a cleaning spray or a microwave oven, but often it's yet another article of clothing, a gadget, another meal out, or something else you don't necessarily need. These advertisements aren't for the average person with a small amount of spending cash, but rather they're for the rich.

Rich people don't make up a large portion of any population, but they're the ones with money to spend. They can see an ad, decide they want a product, go buy it, and it has very little effect on their wallet. The problem is that we all see the same advertising but can't necessarily afford the purchases. We all want the lifestyle of the rich, as we see it depicted in television, film, and commercials.

We Reference What We Desire

We're not so blind that we believe our studio apartments are servant-filled mansions, but we see people in similar situations on television who live in a way we couldn't afford. Take the show Friends , for example. Rachel and Monica shared a gigantic apartment in Manhattan despite Rachel working, for some time, as a waitress and Monica as a chef. Collectively they enjoyed a lifestyle they couldn't afford. This is one example of many in which you'll find TV characters living outside their means with no consequences. Entertainment shows us average people living a better lifestyle than they can afford without many monetary concerns. And then we're shown advertisements, compelling us to buy the lifestyle depicted in our favorite shows. According to David M. Carter, a financial analyst and graduate of the master of applied positive psychology program, this is called referencing:

Experts in the field call it "referencing". We reference, either intentionally or otherwise, to lifestyles represented to us (in the media or in real life) that we find attractive. We create a vision of ourselves living this idealized lifestyle, and then behave in ways that help us to realize the vision. The problem with this process is that the lifestyles most often portrayed, and ultimately referenced, are well beyond the means of all but a very small percentage of Americans. We aspire to something that the vast majority of us cannot possibly achieve. And, in this attempt to realize our aspirations, we borrow heavily, feel poorly about ourselves because we just can't seem to get there, and become addicted to a way of living that gradually and inexorably separates us from the things in life that bring us the most joy.

The Resulting Debt

We've borrowed a lot. According to American Consumer Credit Counseling , we carry over $680 billion dollars in revolving credit and over 1.7 trillion dollars in total debt. That comes out to about an $10,700 per household with only about half of individual credit card holders paying their balance in full each month . This is bad by itself, but factoring in high interest rates and the inability to afford more than the monthly payment—while the desire to spend doesn't decrease at all—this turns out to be a huge problem. It's particularly hard to get rid of debt when the desire to spend doesn't go away. It's always there because we are constantly receiving messages to want more and more things that we can't afford.

How Manipulative Advertising Works (and What to Do About It)

There are all kinds of ads, but in general they all aim to keep you from thinking and, instead, make your buying choices based on an emotional response. Here's a look at some of the tactics and what you can do to counteract them.

Don't Forget to Think

Photo by J. Skilling

Advertising exists to tell you about a product, which can be as simple as "Brand X soap cleans your dishes" or "Restaurant Y serves food." Of course, when there's competition in the market the ads you see need to be a little more descriptive in order to set products apart. For example, a restaurant may serve a reasonably tasty, unhealthy hamburger in under a minute, but why would you choose theirs over another? Because they said so.

According to Dr. Julie Sedivy as you can't really tell the difference between a strong and weak arguments:

A pivotal study by Ellen Langer and colleagues provides one of the earliest demonstrations [regarding the ease of persuasion]. In this experiment, students in a university library were approached by an under-cover experimenter who asked to jump ahead of them in the photocopying line and make a few copies. Sometimes, the experimenter would justify the request by saying "May I use the Xerox machine, because I'm in a rush?" But other times, no explanation was offered. Not surprisingly, students were more reluctant to grant the favor when the experimenter didn't bother to justify the request. But the justification didn't actually have to provide a good reason-it just needed to sound like one. So, students complied just as readily when the experimenter gave a "placebo" explanation that was utterly without content: "May I use the Xerox machine because I need to make some copies?" Apparently, just decorating the sentence with the word because was enough to sway the students.

Basically, if you're not prepared to think—and you often are not when you're watching television or reading a magazine—you'll pretty much accept any suggestion if it is offered to you. Since you're being so passive, you may not even realize it's happening.

What can you do? Think. When your parents used to tell you "because I said so" you probably weren't ready to accept that answer. Don't do it subconsciously when watching an ad. Think about what the ad is saying. Play devil's advocate and consider the negative aspect of the products that definitely aren't being shown to you. It only takes a few seconds to consider that the chalupa you're seeing may or may not contain actual meat . Keep your brain active when you're looking at ads and you'll be better off.

Be Wary of Your Emotional Responses

No ad is more effective than one that makes you feel something because emotion and memory are tightly linked (more on this here ). The video on the left belongs to Google and is considered to be one of the best commercials that aired during the 2010 Super Bowl. It uses search strings to tell how a young man goes to Paris, meets a women, falls in love with and marries her, and they start a family. What makes this ad so good is that it not only made many people feel good, but it also demonstrated 1) how Google works, and 2) that Google appears to be an effective way of finding any information you might need throughout your lifetime. Does it tell you whether or not Google is better than another search engine? No. Does it provide you with any potential downsides to using Google, such as whether or not the search results were actually useful? Of course not. It shows you that Google can find lots of different kinds of information and it makes you feel something to be sure you remember it. You may even remember that the scenario describe in an ad happened to you .

If you've ever purchased movie theater popcorn— which is among the unhealthiest foods you can eat (not to mention overpriced)—or chosen something pretty over something functional, you've made an emotional choice based on desire rather than thinking about it logically. This is not to say emotions are bad, but that without a balance of emotion and logic you might not always make the best choices. Emotional ads try to capitalize on that phenomenon. An effective ad gets you to buy the product, not buy the product and be happy with it. When you have an emotional response to an advertisement, you need to be wary of any decisions you want to make regarding the product it's selling.

The arousal of emotions passes with time, and so there are a couple of good things you can do to avoid any negative results. First, when thinking about buying something you want to identify whether your motivation is intrinsic or extrinsic. David Carter explains:

Intrinsic motivation is represented by self-acceptance, affiliation, and community feeling. Extrinsically-motivated people, on the other hand, focus on financial gain, their appearance, and social popularity. They generally seek acceptance by something or someone outside themselves.

If your motivation is extrinsic, chances are you want to avoid purchasing this thing you believe you want. Desire can be a powerful thing for people, and consumer addiction is a problem, so another tactic that can help is to enforce a mandatory holding pattern on your spending . Basically, the idea is that you require yourself to wait 48 hours before deciding whether or not to make a purchase. If you think you'll need help with this, find a friend who can hold on to your credit card. Make them the gatekeeper to your purchases. If you truly have an addiction to spending it's not going to go away immediately. Get someone you trust to help you out.

Watch Out For Products Indirectly Targeted at You

You want your dog to be healthy, but it's not like you're the one eating the dog food so you'd think you're more likely to make a logical choice when choosing their food. That's not necessarily the case, as ads can target you very well even if you're making a decision for somebody else.

The ad pictured here ( see more ) depicts two skinny dogs engaging in human-like intercourse while a fat dog watches. The tag line reads, "LIFE'S HARD when you're a FAT DOG." This ad is designed to be funny, but it's also designed for people to think about how humans judge fat people and play on their desires to lose weight. The ad isn't selling a better sex life for your dog—a dog that is likely spayed or neutered—but playing upon human concepts of sex and beauty. Sure, a fat dog is likely an unhealthy dog but where in this ad do you learn why the dog food is healthy? You don't, because, again, the ad isn't targeting logic—it's targeting your emotions. You don't ask whether or not the dog food is healthy because the ad is asking you if you care whether or not your dog is healthy. These types of ads make no real claims. They simply identify the problem and you connect the dots. You assume there's a connection when there may not be one at all.

So what do you do about it? You do your research. When you view an ad, it helps to ask why. Why am I reacting the way I'm reacting? Why does this product solve a particular problem? If the product interests you, the answer should too. Look for product reviews ( while being aware of fakes ) and other information that can help you determine if what you want to buy can actually do what you think it can do. Don't buy blindly—do your research first.

Avoid Ads Entirely

Muting or skipping ads on any medium may seem like an effective way to solve the problem, but ignorance doesn't mean the ad isn't still lodged somewhere inside your memory . While avoiding ads entirely is pretty much an impossible prospect, you can still make the effort to get as close as possible. Of course, this means making sacrifices.

If you want to cut out ads from television and never, ever see them, your options aren't necessarily great. You can buy DVDs when they come out several months after the television season has ended, you can purchase content at a premium (either online or on demand through your cable provider), or you can download content via the internet (which may require a set of flexible ethics). You can't remove or block ads in a magazine or newspaper, so you'll have to start reading online and use an ad blocker . Even with all of that, you still can't avoid billboard ads or ads you see outside of your personally cultivated ad-free zone. You're also not without the influence of reference lifestyles (as discussed earlier) unless you cut out entertainment media altogether. You simply cannot live without ads if you want to be a part of modern society, but a significant reduction is possible using the aforementioned methods.

Photo by Alfonso Contreras

While I, personally, do what I just described—and have for over a decade—there are plenty of reasons you shouldn't. First of all, if ad revenue is how companies are able to afford to provide entertainment, blocking or removing their ads can hurt their budget. If everyone did that, they'd have no money to produce the content you want. When you don't see ads, you'll sometimes find yourself lost in a conversation about ads and products you've never heard of. If you like watching televised sports, you don't get to watch them live ( which can ruin the experience ). In fact, you don't get to watch anything live and that generally means watching it the next day. Giving up ads requires patience and sacrifice. While I consider those two things to be very important skills, that's just my opinion. How you choose to approach this problem is entirely up to you. The most important thing is to remember to think, because regardless of how manipulative advertisements can be your choices are still yours and yours alone.

You can follow Adam Dachis, the author of this post, on Twitter , Google+ , and Facebook . Twitter's the best way to contact him, too.

• Corpus ID: 28160156

Manipulative marketing: persuasion and manipulation of the consumer through advertising

• Victor Danciu
• Published 1 February 2014
• Theoretical and Applied Economics

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53 Citations

A study on the constituents of advertisement that manipulate consumer buying decisions, social manipulations in advertising: impact on consumers’ perception of a product, a linguistic study of manipulative advertising strategies of the mobile network operators in egypt and the united states. comparative approach., manipulation tactics and consumer behaviour: creating a desire to purchase, how consumer behavior is affected by sight and hearing in terms of promotion, organisational aspects of research on manipulation in advertising in an international environment, the role of aristotelian appeals in influencing consumer behavior, the impact of unethical advertisements on women buying behavior in pakistan, how consumers’ skepticism is derived from deceptive advertisements, manipulation perçue des marques et résistance, une proposition de profils de consommation.

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Influences and effects of subliminal advertising consumption decision, understanding green marketing and advertising in consumer society: an analysis of method cleaning products, deception in environmental advertising: consumers’ reactions to greenwashing, 고객과 지식 marketing, sell buy semiolinguistic manipulation in print advertising, the art of manipulation, related papers.

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Advertisements Usage in Consumer Manipulations Essay

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Introduction

Limited time offer advertisements, loyalty cards, consumer panic capitalization, competition, negotiation balance against power of traders.

Globalization and technological advancements continue to revolutionize business structures and cultures across the globe. Competition for rapidly growing market base coupled with reducing purchasing power compel business firms to engage in several strategies to win hearts of the consumers. Internet and social networks sites rapidly takes centre stage in providing ample avenue for advertisement and marketing.

In many cases, multi-national companies have conquered great market base through international advertising firms and proper use of social media. As competition grows, more firms offering similar service join the market fight for the consumer bases. In many cases, competition as pushed firms into exaggerated advertisement programs to lure and maintain competitive edge in the market.

In the history of business, advertisements always play a vital role in employing various tricks and tools to boost sales. In the past, professional marketers and salespersons played a vital role in marketing the importance of a firm’s product. However, with technological advancement and improved internet connectivity, soft-copy advertisement and online marketing present a noble advertisement conduit. Advertisement on social media goes beyond all borders as more populations become more technologically well informed.

In this form of advertisement, businesses develop a persuasive skill in winning the hearts of customers to purchase a particular product since it is available only for a given period. Given the fixed and short time frame for its purchase, the task of the advertisers revolves around frightening prospective buyers on the repercussions of missing such wonderful offers. The main objective of the drivers of these advertisements remains convincing the customers that they will never get such a product at such a lower price (Cameron, 2000).

Counter-argument

Traders easily manipulate buyers with little track of their spending and expenses. However, in the current world where resources are minimal, many buyers continue to get hold of their spending habits with an emphasis on the checks and balances in purchases. Consumers, in many cases, develop personal and family budgets with strict financial goals. Fidelity to these systems ensures insufficient manipulation from the advertisements run by traders.

Similarly, the availability of information in social media ensures that consumers get the right market information about promotion in the market. From the internet media, consumers easily compare the prices of goods and services available in the market, especially those on promotion. This reduces the chances of bulk buying arising from misinformation on the availability of such goods later.

Supermarket chains and retailers greatly rely on loyalty cards to increase their sales. Apart from creating a bond between the traders and the customers, the loyalty cards creates a platform for the traders to analyze and understand the shopping trends within a given area.

For this reason, the loyalty cards enable traders to create the most attractive and catchy product offers depending on the purchasing trends among the consumers. To the consumers, the cards play the basic role of earning redeemable points as well as showing the kind appreciation from the traders (Wilson, 2007).

Similarly, the fact that the loyalty cards earn points for the consumers, they often overlook rival traders without loyalty cards but offering similar goods and services at lower prices. The bond between customers and traders with loyalty cards often increase in time of rewards and vouchers.

For this reason, customers often increase their purchases to earn extra points to win presents such as birthday vouchers. Loyalty cards create a “family-like bond” between customers and traders, leading to the feeling of a sense of belonging. In such a circumstance, most consumers prefer supermarkets and retailers with cards due to the availability of rewards in the form of loyalty points.

In as much as loyalty cards offer grounds for consumer brand loyalty to a given trader, it fails to offer adequate rewards that can generate sufficient loyalty. This implies that in cases where competing traders copy substantial rewards, chances of shoppers staying loyal to a single trader reduces. In the worst cases, consumers often acquire cards from different retailers and use them about their needs and want.

This cases scenario becomes worse when different traders offer equal rewards for the same amount of spending. Such linear and uniform rewards continue to compromise loyalty to traders hence reducing chances of manipulation.

Similarly, retailers face an uphill task in maintaining substantive reward programs due to the low profits margins. Given the fact that giving a relatively lower one percent loyalty reward to shoppers reduces profits margins by between thirty to fifty percent, traders often depend on “excess capacity and resource base with extraneous subsidies” to maintain their loyalty programs.

All these represent short-term solutions to the loyalty program menace, thus jeopardizing the ability of the traders to manipulate their customers through the loyalty card programs.

In cases of life scares and pandemic outbreaks, traders capitalize on the panic among the consumers to maximize the sale on relevant products. During the SARS and sine flu outbreak, antibacterial hand gels and sanitizer products registered large sales volumes as advertisement strategies diverted to hoodwinking consumers that the presented the best preventive remedy.

Lysol, an antibacterial product manufacturer, acknowledged in their website that engaging in proper hygiene and sanitation played a great role in the prevention of the swine flu. Even though the media for the spread of the flu remained elusive, the company registered high sales in the antibacterial products since their statement insinuated that the use of the products reduced the chances of contracting swine flu.

Marketing is a basic component of the business. It is responsible for the identification and anticipation of the consumer needs and wants, thus helping traders develop products that meet such wants. Since marketing represents the expression of the entrepreneurship skills and abilities of a given trader, innovation and unique execution strategies are necessary.

This creates an avenue for exploration and market capitalization in time of crises and panic among the consumers. Since marketing creates need-satisfying products in the market, an advertisement plays a vital role in delivery. It is, therefore, necessary for the traders in free-market economies to maximize from rare opportunities such as panics and paranoia, to improve their sales albeit in a short period (Hillstrom & Hillstrom, 2002).

The information available within the social internet media jeopardizes the ability of traders to manipulate consumers in times of panic and paranoia.

“I’m not saying that inanimate surfaces don’t spread disease. What I’m saying is that in the close relationship of a household, a lot of diseases is spread person to person, and cleaning inanimate surfaces with an antibacterial cleaner is not going to help” (Boone, 2012).

Availability of such information in the media runs down the propaganda from the traders on the ability of antibacterial soaps to reduce certain diseases.

Boone goes further to explain that it is sad that most of the researches showing a correlation between the reduction in the spread of infectious diseases among people using a certain antibacterial soap often draw funding from the manufactures of the soap in questions. Such information enables the shoppers to understand the real issues on the various advertisements, thus reducing manipulation.

In the narrow context, the competition represents a contest between two or more rivals. In the market place with great dynamism and a variety of players ranging from form suppliers, producers, traders, and consumers, competition becomes a relatively complex phenomenon that requires proper strategies to overcome.

In many cases, competitions from trader often override the complicated process of production, marketing, and sales (Eltschinger, 2007). The complex nature of market competition from the production segment to the sales department presents many opportunities for advertisers to strive to manipulate the consumers to maximize sales.

In the struggle to present the most attractive, highly appealing, and extremely influential products, advertisement firms engage in the psychological understanding of the various facets of consumer purchasing trends.

This helps in developing the essential motivating factor that drives consumers in large quantity purchases. Adverts targeting young children gain ground in social media as traders grow craftier to enjoy a competitive advantage over rivals. This factor results from the increasing purchasing trends among the children as well as the children’s nagging tendencies that often push parents in purchases.

Increasing competition jeopardizes traders’ balance of advertisements products and the real products for sale. To control manipulation, several governments continue to develop policies that regulate advertisements and penalize unscrupulous traders who manipulate shoppers. In Armenia, for example, the law prohibits “discrediting consumers that don’t use the advertised goods.”

Since this often offers many traders the best bargaining power, by instilling some guilt on the non-users, such a law ensures that the adverts remain free of any manipulation.

In the US, the Federal Trade Commission wields power to compel advertisers to prove their claims. For example, id the advert indicates that “tests prove,” propagators of such an advert must show test results from certified doctors. The agency also stipulates that such information must remain in the public domain all the times. All these regulations help check manipulative adverts ( Deceptive Advertising: Crossing the Line , n.d)

Arguments arise that traders should use all the ethical means of persuasion to maintain the market base. Since completion compels them to innovation and craftier persuasion means, consumers harbor have the power to control their purchasing tendencies (Kerin, Hartley & Rudelius, 2009). The ability of an individual to control what purchases they make lies in the shopping cultures and fidelity to one’s self-conviction on the purchasing priorities.

Negotiations balance the needs and aspirations of consumers against the power of the traders. For this reason, in cases, the amount of power to influences the behavior of consumers reflects the ability of traders to manipulate them. Since most products perform similar services and provide the same satisfaction to the consumers, the ability of traders to create a great perception about their product in the market remains important in manipulating consumer-purchasing decisions.

For example, in advertisement with restrictions on the number of recipients receiving a special offer in a given time, consumers often make impulse shopping to catching the offer presented. Similarly, in infomercials, in which an advertisement claims only a given number of callers get the offer, more consumer often makes calls to increase their chances of getting the offer (Kerin et al., 2009).

Traders often enjoy negotiation power in many ways. Based on the consumer needs, rivals in the market, scarcity of the product, and trader’s credibility, negotiation power comes in many forms. However, this remains just another manipulative device traders use to increase their sales at the expense of the consumer knowledge and purchasing skills. For example, in a city with only one gas station, often the trade seeks to maximize on the available market.

Prices may be high due to inadequate competitors even though the prices of gasoline remain constant at the source. Similarly, the gasoline trader may offer unique promotions on the service. To secure the entire city, the gasoline trader may engage in mass media advertisement to reach out to the entire population within a short time (Das, 2010).

Counter argument

Trader persuasion and negotiation power work well in systems under which consumers lack develop budgetary plans. Similarly, in scenarios where shoppers use hard cash for shopping, manipulation can easily take place. However, in the current world where financial planning and budget exists, manipulation reduces. The introduction of electronic money also help save the situation; electronic money reduces impulse buying, especially from the roadside hawkers. Advertisement represents mass-media sales. It is a communication of product details through mass media aimed at reaching out on a high number of consumers simultaneously.

Advertisers spend billions of dollars annually across the globe, encouraging, persuading, and manipulating consumers into lifestyles that have dire consequences on the purchasing cultures of the consumers. Even though these tendencies create great sales and earning to the traders, they create a culture of wastefulness and extravagance among the consumers.

Advertisements exploit consumer insecurities, panic, and ignorance, thus creating false needs with pre-defined counterfeit solutions. These manipulative designs create an insatiable dissatisfaction that fosters unlimited consumption. Advertisements continuously remain a manipulating factor among the traders to improve their sales.

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IvyPanda. (2020, April 3). Advertisements Usage in Consumer Manipulations. https://ivypanda.com/essays/advertisements-usage-in-consumer-manipulations/

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IvyPanda . 2020. "Advertisements Usage in Consumer Manipulations." April 3, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/advertisements-usage-in-consumer-manipulations/.

1. IvyPanda . "Advertisements Usage in Consumer Manipulations." April 3, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/advertisements-usage-in-consumer-manipulations/.

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Use of Methods of Advertising Manipulation in PR-Activity

27th International Conference on Psychology & Language Research (ICPLR), 28-29 Dec 2017, Bangkok, Thailand

Posted: 19 Jan 2018

Mariia Rubtcova

North- West Institute of Management-branch of RANEPA

Oleg Pavenkov

Russian Academy of National Economy and Public Administration under the President of the Russian Federation (RANEPA) - Moscow Campus

Date Written: December 2017

The article is devoted to the analysis of main methods of advertising manipulation in PR-activity. The first method which was analyzed is the method of hypnosis. Hypnotic reinforced suggestibility takes place in the sphere of advertising manipulation, however, it cannot be considered as the most effective. Hypnotic influence depends on many factors which are difficult to control simultaneously. Also, it requires large monetary expenses, which can be invested in favor of regular advertising. The second method is the method of imitation. It is the most effective method in the advertising because the promotion of product or service by presenting the image of prestige and credibility attracts the attention of consumers. The third method is the method of suggestion. This method is often verbal, but in rare cases also acts through multiple optical images. Method of socio-psychological installation based on social contacts and interaction of people with each other. By this method, the attitude of consumers to specific advertising can be formed or changed. Method of creation of image works by involving all known and popular people (the subjects of advertising message) in advertising. Using this method in advertising campaign increases the reputation and significance of company. Method of persuasion is widely known method of advertising manipulation. With the help of logical arguments, experts in the field of advertising try to obtain from the person internal agreement with certain conclusions, and then on this basic form and fix new attitudes (or transform old ones), which corresponds with the goal. According to the logic of method of infection, the person doesn’t experience deliberate pressure from outside. Person unconsciously assimilates patterns of behaviour of other people by transferring the specific emotional condition. All considered methods of advertising manipulation provide enough competent, professional and low-cost advertising. We made the conclusion that the economic component of the company depends directly on the work of the advertising manipulation. Such methods as hypnosis, persuasion, image, imitation, socio-psychological attitudes, suggestion and infection help to realize the product or service and create a positive public opinion about a particular company.

Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation

Mariia Rubtcova (Contact Author)

North- west institute of management-branch of ranepa ( email ).

St.Petersburg Russia

Russian Academy of National Economy and Public Administration under the President of the Russian Federation (RANEPA) - Moscow Campus ( email )

Moscow, 119571 Russia

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