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More on Neuroscience and Marketing
SLiK812 writes "The NYTimes is running a
story
about how marketing companies are using neuroscience to determine how to reach a consumer's buy button more efficiently. A quote from the article, 'At issue is whether marketers can exploit advances in brain science to make more effective commercials. Is there a "buy button" in the brain? Some corporations have teamed up with neuroscientists to find out. Recent experiments in so-called neuromarketing have explored reactions to movie trailers, choices about automobiles, the appeal of a pretty face and gut reactions to political campaign advertising, as well as the power of brand loyalty.' Some groups have branded this as Orwellian. I pretty sure I saw the child of this tactic in Futurama somewhere." There's a related story in the The Independent. We've had previous stories on using MRI scans to market products.
Now along with Radio guy(who advertises serious stuff) Radio Female( who pushes the sensitivity button) TV baby( who pushes the happy button) we have research into the buy button that allegedly will induce me to buy something before I even see it, sort of like the LotR Trilogy box platinum extended boxed set with gondor I ordered today.
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
Leela: Didn't you have ads in the 21st century?" Fry: Well sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio, and in magazines, and movies, and at ball games... and on buses and milk cartons and t-shirts, and bananas and written on the sky. But not in dreams, no siree.
Folks, it's not Orwellian unless it is backed by a totalitarian state. Most of your fears would be better directed at a Huxleyan future.
taken! (by Davidleeroth) Thanks Bingo Foo!
I don't think a brain analysis is an effective way to determine consumer behaviour.
Our behaviour is most likely shaped by the environment and condition we're experiencing.
Truth to be told, any sports car will trigger my buy-button, but can I afford to buy it?
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
To make guys buy: Gorgeous women implying the purchase of a product makes said guy more attractive.
To make women buy: "Sale"
I hope this research will do away with the plethora of commercials aimed at the idiots among us who will buy anything based on what they are told about the product.
Wasnt subliminal messaging tested in the 1950s by the CIA, for something like this? I seem to remember an experiment where they used subliminal messaging and increased the purchase of popcorn in a cinema by around 50%.
Linux Wireless Hardware in the UK
It seems that in many cases these studies are confirming long-held beliefs rather than breaking new ground. E.g.,:
The study showed that some people did not choose a drink based on taste alone, Dr. Montague said. They chose a drink plus what it conjured up to their medial prefrontal cortex, namely the strong brand identity of Coca-Cola, he said.
I was pretty confident in that conclusion without the fMRI.
Create a pill to make you buy more. Or even better: something to spray inside shopping centers.
True.
For a given value of true.
"People buy from emotion and justify with logic" has been around since the turn of the last century among a certain segment of the marketing people.
The new bit I suppose is to try to pinpoint the triggers more exactly, to reduce those unpleasant random variables like human free will and choice and stuff. It's so much easier if "They" can just model you on a mainframe, debit your account, and ship you whatever it is you're supposed to buy from them next, I suppose. Not that this is what they think they're aiming for, but I doubt the net effect will be any different.
"Imagine a stealthy hand reaching into your pocket. For the rest of eternity."
She endorsed Pepsi, not Coke. And apparently it worked, because I remember that. Unfortunately for them, I don't really like either cola so their mindfuck was just a waste.
This kind of thing has been around for a long time. The basis is a Behaviorist view of the world that says that given a certain stimulus, most of us (enough of us) will respond in a certain way. Marketing from that viewpoint becomes about pushing the right buttons, and finding better and better ways of pushing those buttons.
Your opinion on how good or evil this kind of thing is may come from how much you agree with that viewpoint. Can marketers refine their science to such a point where you have almost no choice but to buy what they tell you?
Depending on which side of the coin you fall on, this is all either smoke & mirrors, or cutting-edge research that will eventually rule the world.
That being said: You are getting sleeeeeepppy. Loooook at the preeety ligghts on my siiiitteeee. You waaaannntt to buyyyy myyy wireless frooog.You waaaanntt to buyyy the froooogg!!
Memorize THIS. Think of nothing else! WOOOEEEEEEOOOOOOOO.
In the end, you either have control over your urges, wants, and needs, or you don't. You either are in control of yourself or you're not. If you're not, then you've probably accrued all sorts of gadgets, toys, and things you don't really need. And doubtless you have/had sex with anyone that got you remotely excited. Actually, that doesn't sound so bad...
Really, though, we are either in control of our faculties or we are not. If we're not, then we're just animals with no will. If we are, then this is no more concerning then someone plucking your heart strings to sell insurance. I highly doubt there is some subversive way they can force us to buy against our will using some sort of deep-seated neurological button. A shopping spree isn't exactly a survival mechanism.
Really, before trying to make their commercials more effective, perhaps they should find out if their commercials are effective.
I'm not saying marketing doesn't work.. Obviously people need to know about you and your product if you're going to sell anything.
But, from what I understand.. there's a lot of theories at the bottom of today's marketing that don't make sense to me.
For instance, marketing generally tries to target young people. Not because they are consumers, but on the theory that consumption patterns like brand loyalty are set at a young age, and kept through life.
Now.. how can they possibly know that? If they're studying middle-aged people now, then they're learning that the advertising of the 70's was effective. Then. And quite a lot has changed in both advertising and how people relate to it since then.
So really.. it seems to me to be a good question whether neuroscience will help much, because the critical attitude of science seems to go straight out the window once something becomes a 'marketing theory'.
I concur. Kerry is infinitely worse than Bush.
It surprises me that, what I would consider to be a more pertinent study, has not been done: how do people filter out advertisements? Everyone is focused on what sticks; however, it may be equally as valuable, if not more so, to determine what does not stick - what we don't even notice. Perhaps this has to do with the get quick attitude of our society. Finding what sticks goes towards the goal of making another "1984" commercial that catches everyone's imagination. However, finding what does not stick allows you to build a much more lasting brand. To do this kind of brand building you don't need to make an immediate impression, you just need to slowly infiltrate people's conciousness. I wonder why large corporations and these researchers don't look at this more often
that was the title for the story I submitted to /.
call me a grouser but check out some of the other links too http://science.slashdot.org/~museumpeace/journal/
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
The more those bastards try to make me want to buy stuff, the less stuff I want to buy. When I do buy, I buy the stuff that doesn't flood my life with annoying ads.
I am taking a graduate class in cognitive science and half of the students are business or marketing majors. One of our guest lecturers, who studies child development also teaches a class in the business school.
-ashot
- Is the product interesting to me personally?
- If I buy this, will I still be able to eat and pay rent next month?
If the answer to both questions is yes, my "buy" button has officially been pressed, and unless someone (such as my wife, who incidentally is much better at saving money than I am) talks me out of it, I'll be buying it within the next few days.File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Careful, soon you'll begin to believe in the Matrix!
On a serious note you can easily see when you make points like this where stories like The Matrix get their ideas from. Every government in every country be they dictator of elected officials would find it so much easier to manage their country if they could do away with freedom of choice and run everything to a prescribed formula. Hence the occurences of so many dictators, and 'tin foil hat' paranoia's. We are controlled by one force or another on a daily basis we just don't notice most of the time because we are too busy getting on with what we belive is our life. How much of it is influenced do we really ever know? Maybe just maybe dictators aren't clever or powerful they're just lazy. Its far easier to control a nation if you take away their choices.
It could be that the purpose of your life is only to serve as a warning to others.
I'm a beta, so I'm happy leaving these smart thoughts to you.
John
But it's still better than Blipverts.
R: That voice. Where have I heard that voice before? B: In about 365 other episodes. But I don't know who it is either.
Is anyone doing research into resisting this kind of stuff? Anti-brainwashing techniques? Peril-sensitive glasses?
I find poverty works quite well.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Put a metric shitload of money in my bank account they would find my buy button pretty quickly.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Its not like companies haven't done reaserch on this before. There are many many subtle tactics used in commercials nowadays. The most obvious one is how everything is priced at 19.95 instead of 20$, because we subconsiously think that we are getting a bargain out of it. There is a whole department in most corperations devoted to this kind of stuff (Public Relations). This just makes it easier for companies to pick up more of those little subtleties, so instead of having to have a focus group you just have a CAT scan.
I am a viral sig. Please copy me and help me spread. Thank you.
The term the grandparent poster used was "cokes" not "Coke". It seems that in some places, the term "coke" as applied to soft-drinks has become a synonym for "brand-name cola"... I can't tell you how often I've seen the term used that way in restaurants that didn't even serve cocacola at all.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I wonder if I am the only one who feels he has been watching less ads in the last few years than ever before in my life. I now own a HD-based videorecorder that allows me to skip ads. What's more I feel my TV-consumption is at an alltime low due to crappy programming and the PC as a competitor. Although I find myself in need of a Robo-Cola from time to time. ;-)
Online I use Firefox with Adblock so I hardly read any ads on the web, ever.
I switched to Linux three years ago and my daily dose of desktop advertising (ICQ, Splashscreens, branded bootscreens) went down to zero.
While I am on the outside (beware) I am mostly reading books or listening to commercial-break-free MP3 music (during subway rides or on the bus) and when I am out at night I try to avoid "the hip joint (TM)" where all those guerilla-marketing groups show up. I prefer small, subculture clubs with decent pricing and good music (including hot AND smart girls).
So, I guess I am much less under the commercial thumb then I was back in 1995...
Marketers might not want to embrace this too much; it might actually reveal that some of their favorite (read: profitable) techniques don't actually work. Remember how it turned out that no one clicked on banner ads? Like that.
Your Jedi mind tricks will not work on me, boy.
Like they need a MRI scanner to tell them that Ill buy anything endorsed with gratutious breast images. *sheesh*
Nice to see that some of the mods don't bother reading the linked ads in the original message before downrating posts. My post was A) not off-topic and B) not trolling. Apparently irony is lost at times around here, but I'm not surprised.
To elaborate, there is nothing all that surprising about this for those of us who study politics, since modern politics is really about brand-marketing. Candidates are packaged and presented in ways designed to appeal to us on a gut level rather than with regard to their actual policy positions.
This is magnified by the role of political parties, since a candidates political party is in fact a brand. Over 60% of the electorate still consider themselves members of one of the two major parties. Most party members will vote for candidates of their party, regardless of what that candidate says or does. This holds even though most of those claiming party membership don't even know what the party stands for.
In political campaigns, the cognitive effects of this are readily apparent by listening to how people react to the different candidates. Those with stronger partisan identification will filter the 'news' in such a way that it more neatly fits their biases - ergo 'Coke tastes sweeter'.
can be hacked. The human mind is probably more full of holes than Windoze.
And what are "we," anyway? What's doing the experiencing? Is it the soul? Or could it be.. wait, wait, don't tell me! could it be....... the brain?
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
At a basic level, marketing is about conveying information to the consumer, and consumers make decisions in their self-interest. The economic history of the world pretty much confirms the truth of this.
A well-designed marketing campaign may increase Coke's market share over Pepsi, and may even expand the overall market for soft drinks, but fundamentally, consumers drink soft drinks because they enjoy them, and any market expansion is likely the result of increased awareness that such enjoyable consumables exist. To the extent that Coke actually differs from Pepsi (I'm not saying it does), competitive marketing is useful in highlighting the difference, to the benefit of the consumer.
Speaking as a consumer, I resent the implication that I'm some sort of automaton influenced by "neuro-advertising", and that I need government protection from the big, bad, marketers. I can handle my own consumption decisions, thankyouverymuch.
Imposing Libertarian views on everyone online since 1992.
What I want is a database with what can be given in terms of objective information, third party reviews , etc. Then it is much easier for me to buy the product that is most suitable to me. When I can do that capitalism would work well.
If they have to try subliminal messages on me to lure me into buying, it has to be because the product doesn't have any merits on its own, and I'm really not interested. Besides, the economy is finite, I can't see any good reasons for this...
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
when the link in the /. article puts a "please register" page in my face? /. and put more links in it becuase I found some relevant background that amplifies the story. For instance, have you heard of using neural net programming to uncover buying patterns from analysis of "shopping cart" contents? you can bet Amazon has.
I offered this story to
but what has vulcan eugenics got to do with ANYTHING?
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
I think my wife has a Buy Button. If something has "sale" on it or comes with a coupon, her button gets pressed.
Antisource - antivirus, antispam, antispyware
Not that I think that the research is not valuable, but c'mon. Spend the cash looking for the fountain of youth. :-P
IMHO, there is no given set of stimuli that will cause a person's logic and reason to fail and become a spending machine... that takes years of brainwashing, consumer competition, and a free-market economy.
Of course, you see right through this. You're far too intelligent to be fooled by these techniques. But, if you choose to, you can use them to manipulate your own mind. And, your customers, of course, will be completely taken in! Our new high-tech mental marketing tools have shiny new MRI technology. Not at all the same as that other new agey junk--nosiree! To sell your product, you MUST buy ours!
Wanna buy a lure?
Wanna laugh at the fishermen?
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
Obviously only metaphorically. This really isn't the right place to discuss this so I'll say it simply: While neither candidate's views are close to what I would, I can think of no case where Kerry's views are closer to mine that Bush's. In tandem, pointing out any flaw that Bush has is meaningless as he is still the better of the only two viable options. I'll not argue he is without flaws.
...is choice. /neo
Tweet, tweet.
One aspect of marketing/advertising/design is ergonomics and human factors, which helps advertisers structure their materials in the most logical fashion for the way people process information. Just look at any cover of Cosmopolitan and you'll see the end result of years of studies of the scanning people do when they see a document. Important elements seem to jump out at you without you even realizing it, and if you have time you can read the smaller text under each element to find out more. Cosmo, ironically, probably has one of the best-designed magazine covers. Color, layout, subject matter ("SEX" or related words are the lead/top priority item on every cover) and other design elements are used to great effect. The end result is that you look at the magazine, your eye traverses multiple times across the impossibly beautiful woman whose style (if you're a woman) you want to emulate and you then want to buy it, or you don't want to buy it because you don't really read Cosmo. This is why they sell them in checkout lines-- they're an impulse item for non-subscribers. Same thing with Maxim, Playboy, and other glossy magazines.
Compare a well-designed magazine cover like Cosmo with an ugly or poorly designed cover like TV Guide or Hot Rod magazine and you'll see who has the best understanding of human factors. Cosmo is pleasant to look at, "Guns" magazine really isn't, even if you are an enthusiast.
I for one welcome our new human factor-embracing overlords-- as long as they don't beam ads into my head.
That article in the Indy, which focusses on the soda market, overlooked the effects of addiction. I used to have a major problem with cravings for sugar, particularly sodas. Four months ago I read a friend's online diary where she said that she had gone cold turkey and stopped drinking soda four years ago. I was inspired to go cold turkey as well. In the first few weeks, the sight of a coke sign or a carboard cut-out of a sparkling glass of Pepsi at KFC was enough to give me cravings (which I thankfully resisted) but nowadays I find this kind of advertising having less of an effect on me. I still get the occasional little craving, but since soda has been well and truly purged from my system, it's no longer the overpowering urge that once propelled me out of the office and to the nearest vending machine.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Companies have a buy button already which make men buy faster and without much thought:
Women.
Banu
Gee...sounds just like my Columbia House Music subscription. Although it is better now, than when they used to mail me LPs every month that had to be mailed back to them...
"Unheard of means only it's undreamed of yet,
Impossible means not yet done." ~~ Julia Ecklar
If something like that would work it would cause economic breakdown. Capitalism only works if the buyer searches for products they actually want/need at the best quality and lowest price. Break any of those and its something else.
Yeah I know what you mean. (No, I really do understand what you're trying to say).
:-D most states have early voting so that should help the /.'ing of the polls. Wooo!!
Besides, I was tricked into replying to your post by a very sly, clever, dangerous little man. (yes, u know who u are, you monkey....yeah you with the chickens...)
hahaha
Nah, regardless of the matter, I am glad you're not an "undecided" or "ooo i can't choose" blah blah. Just make sure you go vote
Anyway, have fun and happy slashing-of-dots!
It will really get bad when corporate lobbyists target our politicians with these kinds of techniques.
Homo Sapiens Americanus--A documentary in p
Yeah, but they still have to hook you on it first
6 &cid=10565621
This is research into hooking you more effectively on the first contact - for whatever they have in mind next. Continuity programs are an old device - Benjamin Franklin started the first "Book of the Month" club back before the Revolution.
But they still need to hook you first, right? It's not like they can determine that you fit the profile for their current "widget" and just ship it to you without consulting you and getting you to say "sure!" first.
Yet, anyway.
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=12591
Yes, except that prior to say, 1960 or so, these salesmen were more properly known as con artists and flimflam men.
The only reason to allow people to be aggressive when selling something, is that their product might otherwise be desired except that people have a hard time discovering it. When they no longer desire it at all, and salesmen exist only to manipulate you into buying something totally worthless, then salesmanship itself is useless to society.
Society (and individuals like yourself, should you ever pull your head out of your ass) have the right to discuss whether that point has been reached, and also the right to limit it if it has.
They will not reach my "buy button"
t h.html
I despise commercials. They are nothing less than constant brainwashing. The more they hammer me with BS commercials, the more I am turned off to that product. Most commercials are so offensive and annoying that I only have to see it ONCE to be forever turned off to the product.
I know what I need. I go to the store and buy only the things I MUST have. I do not buy extra things, I don't "browse" or "shop", I buy.
I can't hit the SHUT UP button on the remote fast enough when a commercial comes on.
I wish the U$$A had commercial free TV like the UK does, or at least did have at one time.
I would pay for commercial free TV.
-
http://www.csun.edu/~vceed002/health/docs/tv&heal
Number of 30-second TV commercials seen in a year by an average child: 20,000
Number of TV commercials seen by the average person by age 65: 2 million
Percentage of survey participants (1993) who said that TV commercials
aimed at children make them too materialistic: 92
Rank of food products/fast-food restaurants among TV advertisements to kids: 1
Total spending by 100 leading TV advertisers in 1993: $15 billion
The So-What is that when marketers and others get better and better at using the workings of human psychology to exert influence, eventually the definition of "free choice" loses meaning. At some point advertisers have such a psychological advantage that their techniques stop being persuasion and start being weapons.
I think we have already passed that point. People alive today are no less intelligent than their great great grandparents on the farm, but a much higher percentage of us seem to have lost all common sense when it comes to spending money. The average American family today carries, I believe, $8000 in credit card debt. That's normal behavior for normal people nowadays. But normal people don't spontaneously decide to go massively into debt, or to accumulate so much stuff that they need to rent storage places to keep it in. They have to be induced into that kind of irrational behavior, in ways that work on their insecurities, desire to be loved and so forth, things that are as basic to human nature as breathing in and out. Expecting people to be abnormally resistant to modern marketing techniques is as unreasonable as expecting them to become martial arts experts so that mugging can be legal.
Theoretically, if you want to avoid advertising you are free to turn off your television and radio, stop surfing the web, and generally withdraw from contact with the world. So in that sense it's your free choice to expose yourself to constant sales bombardment. But on the other hand, becoming a hermit isn't a reasonable expectation of anyone. Normal behavior is to associate with people around you and take part in the same cultural activities they do. I don't think wanting to walk around in public without developing irrational consumption habits is any less reasonable than wanting to breathe the air without getting lung cancer or swim in the river without getting dioxin poisoning.
There is no fixed target. It is a cat-and-mouse game. If they did find a particular pattern that triggered buying, eventually people would grow overly accustomed to it and tune out, requiring something new.
Generally a successful ad will create more of the same or more like it, making people grow weary of that technique or pattern.
The first Macintosh ad was unique for its time, but the concept has been copied too often. Big Brother is sales-people, big corporations, lawyers, etc. in various variations on the theme.
Their research might work on a cave-man who wondered into town, but not those overwelmed by ads.
Table-ized A.I.
is to make it a bargain...
I only eat off the 99cent/dollar menu when I eat fast food. I don't drink soda/pop anymore when I eat out, I stick to water. Its rare for me to spend over $3 on a meal when I eat out.
When I shop for groceries, I only tend to buy stuff that is on sale that actually is a bargain. I never pay more than $2 for a box of cereal. Never more than $2.50 for a gallon of milk. Never more than a dollar for bread. Around a dollar for a dozen eggs. I rarely spend over $1.50 for a meal when I eat at home.
I have the same kind of standards for buying/using gasoline. I will walk instead of driving at every chance I get. Prices are too high right now to justify driving around for everything ($2.30 for a gallon of regular where I live).
When it comes to buying cds. I usually don't bother anymore. Why should I pay a fixed price of about $15 for 1 or 2 good songs? If I want to hear those songs, I'll just listen to the radio since they tend to play the same songs over and over again. Plus listening to the radio is free.
When it comes to software. I used to buy alot of it. Nowadays, I just look for freeware for the task as I don't believe in pirating.
Anyways, enough of that rant. What I want to say is companies need to look into making better products at better prices to get people to buy, not look into some sort of mind control.
Live long and be frugal...
DEAD DEAD DEAD DELETE ME
No, that's incorrect. Marketers and sales people have been doing this since at least the 19th century. Case in point, P.T. Barnum, who never said that line attributed to him about suckers.
Next up was Albert Lasker, Meyer Lansky and Bruce Barton.
But the guy who had them all beat cold was Claude Hopkins, the author of "Scientific Advertising". That period marks the end of the transition period from guesswork of the early ad men into marketing as practiced today. Depending on how you want to stretch the data, you're off by a century or at a minimum 40 years.
Yes. How self programing is the human mind? It might be possible for it to patch itself if it knew enough about the techniques likely to be used on it. So knowing how people are going to try to manipulate you is usualy a good thing. Then again someone may come up with an attack on the human mind that only works if the target knows about the attack, or a similar attack.
The reason many people buy so much crap is because they don't stop to think about whether they already have something that will work. I've seen people buy countertop pizza cookers, why? They also have a microwave and an oven with their stove; why not use one of those to cook the pizza? There are people who have every type of household cleaner on the market, when they are all made from about 4 or 5 basic ingredients. There was once a time when people made their own cleaning products and their houses were no less clean than they are now.
The answer isn't to withdraw from society to avoid seeing ads, but to just stop and think before spending money. Think of spending money as a bad thing, to only be done when necessary, and you'll find that it's perfectly possible to get by without $8000 in credit card debt.
This kind of research can also be used to counter what the marketers are doing. If there are recognizable techniques being used based on this research they can be jammed/subverted. Look at what the good folks at Adbusters are doing.
Advertising should not be deductable as a business expense. It should come directly out of the bottom line. That would reduce ad clutter.
You're right, people do have to be induced to this kind of behavior. Now if I wanted to do that, how would I go about it? I would start by transforming money into a non-objective substance I could create at whim. I would then spend 80 years convincing people that my arbitrary creation of fiat currency was the only thing stabilizing their economy. I'd further start shouting about waging a "war on poverty", and once I had convinced people they had a "duty" to help those "less fortunate" (i.e., less successful, less capable), I'd begin stealing from the successful to pay the unsuccessful. This would limit incentive to produce, i.e. profit motive, because people would learn two lessons:
1.) Even if you work to earn a living, your money will be stolen to give to those who cannot earn it, because they cannot earn it, and
2.) If you cannot or will not earn a living, the government will provide it for you, either by taking from those who do earn a living, or making up new money.
Most people don't understand, and don't bother to learn, the complex relation that exists between interest, inflation, central banking, fiat currency, government wealth redistribution, and all the other sure signs your economy has collapsed into unsustainable socialist democratic rule, which brings me to the other part of the scam.
I'd further convince people that, despite the present condition of their government being a direct affront to the constitution (for example, massive legislative and war-making powers vested in a near-supreme executive), the nation was intended to be, and therefore is, a direct democracy, and the will of the majority will circumvent the "inalienable" rights of all others (for example, property rights like the right to keep wealth you have created).
Once you have reached this point, you have created generations unfamiliar with the concepts of self-reliance (they get their income, in whole or in part, from the government) and personal responsibility (even if they don't agree with the welfare state, they perpetuate its existence with excuses like "Well, sure I'll take a welfare check. After all, my tax dollars paid for it, so I'm just getting mine back."), who believe they have a sanction to lay first claim to the property, rights, and lives of others by virtue of belonging to "The Majority". In this state, people naturally assume little if any responsibility for their financial condition, as they've rationalized away their oposition to socialism and have no desire for self-reliance, because they never saw any example of its benefits. So, without knowing their system is unsustainable, they willingly go into debt on the assumption their government will take care of them. How? SHHH!!! Don't ask questions like that, just assume it will work, or you might jinx the whole thing!
The truth is that if people are made to be dependant on a government, their personal responsibility collapses, and of course they will buy on a whim. The government will bail them out, they can keep borrowing, they can dig deeper in, and they really don't believe anyone will ever call in the debt. Well, we've been accumulating debt as a nation for well over a century, we're about to accumulate $15 trillion more from social insecurity when the boomers retire, and our international creditors are going to start getting nervous. Don't blame the marketers, they're just working with what we've been giving them, and what we're giving them is what most people have been screaming for as an ideal, and what we've been practicing on a national scale, whether they admit it or not.
Is there any specific "button" for any behavior in the brain? Or is this science as doomed as the "pseudoscience of cool" they debunk in Wired?
--
make install -not war
Neural nets are an actual indirect application of neuroscience to marketing. Uh, they _are_ inspired in the brain, you know.
For those on the outside, uh, neural nets are structured compositions of nonlinear activation functions that can represent with an arbitrary precision a wide class of mappings between two hypercubes of arbitrary dimension.
Uh, neural nets learn stuff by example. Like bayesian spam filters, only better & smarter.
So, given vital stats from a sample population and a human-produced classification of those people, the neural net can generalize that info.
It's a very interesting field, and very underemployed by open source hackers in their hacking.
The catch is that boobies are also associated with another button - the embarassment button. The trick is not to trigger the buy button, but to set up an untraceable system of micropayments so I can buy as many boobie pictures as I like without my embarassment button being pressed.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
'cause I'm batshit insane! Muuuuahahahaha! They'll never get to me!
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
Advertising makes me want to NOT buy the product of whoever's annoying me the most. Example: I was fairly impressed by Capital One's ads for "no hassle" credit cards. Since I despise being hassled, I considered applying for one. But then I started getting tons of popups for them when I used my web based email, so I decided they were too annoying and hipocritical, so I didn't get one.
Few things piss me off as much as "The Twenty" in movie theaters. It's downright insulting. The ads are all short attention span even though you're basicly a captive audience. And then they have the balls to REVIEW THE CRAP YOU JUST SAW at the end of it, in case you forgot something that made you want to claw your eyes out. This is before the 15 mins of trailers and after the half hour of advertising slides you're subjected to when you try to get to a movie early enough to get a decent seat.
Whatever happened to it being free services (like broadcast TV) had advertising, and pay services (like movies and cable) were ad free? That was THE ENTIRE POINT OF PAYING FOR THEM!
I'd gladly pay someone to reduce the amount of advertising bullshit in my life, in fact I've considered starting a business that does just that, if I could find the capital.
P.S. Firefox doesn't block everything, unless you want to spend eternity editing adblock filters. It's also been the #1 most crash-prone app on my system in the last year.
Introducing the new Occam Fusion! Now with sqrt(-1) fewer blades!
Wow. Just... wow. Thanks, AC.
Well that's a very typical reaction -- it's their own damn fault. If they just had more self control they wouldn't have a problem.
That's very true. But my point is that resistance to modern psychological advertising techniques is not a normal ability, it's an exceptional ability. Otherwise more people WOULD stop and think before buying, and the ads wouldn't work as well as they do. Modern life tends to punish people for being average, which I don't think is right. After all, they're the majority.
Unfortunately I have nothing to suggest to fix the situation. Any attempt to regulate advertising runs into the good old Freedom of Speech defense. The problem is that there's no effective way to distinguish between Speech and Hypnotism.
That's an interesting scenario, but I seriously doubt that modern American overconsumption is the result of a long-term government plot, or that anybody in the advertising industry is a willing party to socialism, income tax or a welfare state. I really think the only thing going on is sellers trying as hard as they can to sell more stuff.
There are good comments in this thread. Too bad hardly anybody will read them because the main comment got modded down.
I guess the big boobs were just here by pure hasard.
I think you just hit on an even bigger problem. People are not satisfied with their lives and think they will gain satisfaction from obtaining more material posessions. Lucky for me, I learned at a young age that it does not work that way, but many people don't figure this out. It's a very natural reaction to unhappiness, which most people will encounter at some point in their lives. As far as fixing the problem, there is no easy way. Consumer education is the only hope, but there are many people and companies that would like to obstruct that since it would mean reduced profits.
Targetting this hits us at the mammalian level, even below the monkey.
No! Don't hit me below the monkey!
You can't take the sky from me...
Another tactic is passive cross selling. This is where a retailer puts dissimilar products side-by-side because stats show that people will buy the item as an impulse buy. An oft-cited example is where Wal-Mart has put beer/snacks beside baby diapers. Studies showed that fathers were running to Wal-Mart to pick up diapers and that they would snap up beer/snacks, if those were close by. (I live in Canada, where we don't have beer in stores. However, last night at Safeway, I noticed that the toilet paper & paper towels are in the same aisle as the chips and pop.) And those tactics don't rely on neuromarketing.
-- SYS 64738 --
I recognize that many people feel such marketing practices are scary or evil. However, the academic study (and real world testing) of these theories has applications for much more noble causes. For example, the technology adoption lifecycle, made famous by Crossing the Chasm, can actually be applied to social marketing -- helping people adopt safer or beneficial behaviours. In fact, the tech adoption lifecycle is actually based on the works of Jacques Ellul and Everett Rogers. These academics looked into ways to help farmers use hybrid corn seeds and techniques for encouraging women in Lesotho to use solar ovens (instead of dangerous fuel-based ovens that blew up). Because of funding of business applications for technology adoption, we now have more insights about helping people try all sorts of new things. For example, some challenges with AIDS education can be overcome by identifying where the individual is in the buying/trying cycle and then developing tools to help them move to the next stage. Tech marketers might call a key reference a "change agent", but, in an African village struck by AIDS, that "change agent" might be the local religious leader or a respected teacher. You could also use social marketing principles to encourage people with chronic diseases to take their medications or engage in beneficial behaviours -- or you could focus on public education programs that change the way people think about individuals who have diseases.
Since neuromarketing is a new concept, I'm not able to cite examples of noble applications. However, I suspect that you'll see the same sort of spill over that occurred with technology adoption and customer buying cycles. And some of the funding going toward helping neurologists study customers will help fund researchers whose real "sideline" interests are in less profitable areas.
-- SYS 64738 --
We just need to get Edison Carter out of the way. Lets slip him a special neuro-stim braclet, so he'll be too busy buying crap to foil our plot.
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
If only I had some mod points to give you.
How I got to this thread:
/. knows shit about advertising"
Step 1. Read subject of article and thought "Hmmm, let's see who on
Step 2. Ctrl-F, "sex"
wait a second...of course! I've figured out Stage 2!
1. Think of something to sell
2. Make people think it will get them laid
3. Profit!!!!!!!
well that problems solved, now onto NP-complete...
So although a few people figured out some modern advertising techniques a long time earlier, their real impact on society started in the 50s when Madison Avenue recognized their importance and started using them widely.
Every person who has to stand in a public mall and feel stupid saluting a camera is going to want to know "Why?".
This means that the player on the phone is going to have to make some effort to explain it to them, which means that person is going to want to go home and log onto the Bees game and become the next potential customer when Halo-2 ships.
A crafty marketing tactic which makes me want to NEVER buy their video game, EVER. I don't like deliberately manipulative crap like that. If you want to sell something, make it good, and tell people it's available and allow them to choose whether or not they want to buy it. --You can certainly make an interactive game like the Bees thing, but don't be a crafty bastard about it.
While I recognize that people can be VERY effectively manipulated into doing what you want them to do without their realizing it, (like invading foreign countries for no good reason), I strongly feel that the practice is disrespectful and degrading. --If I wouldn't do it to my friends, then I wouldn't do it to somebody I don't know.
Again, I have to tip the hat to the Slashdot editors for grouping this story along with several other stories about marketing. That kind of editing can increase awareness in readers by providing different perspectives on the same subject matter. Good job!
-FL
But I also recognize that I am still a victim of marketing manipulation.
Much of my behavior is the direct result of marketing.
Such as preferring women with shaved legs. This is an almost universal trait in men and it drives women to buy razors, --and a thousand other beauty products, for that matter. --Which in turn makes having self-esteem a conditional thing which can only be satisfied by the purchasing of certain products. They advertise anti-depressants like Prozac in women's magazines, because "No guy would want to love a women who has 'mood swings'".
The greatest achievement of advertising is that people have been conned into believing that they are not affected by advertising.
I don't even own a television. Most of the damaging behavior modification which happens as a result of television is not even related to overt ads. --And being aware that modification techniques are being used, contrary to popular belief, offers almost zero protection.
The fact of the matter is that CRTs which strobes at television frequencies cause people to slip into a trance state which enables messages and modifications to much more easily bypass the conscious level and plug directly into the core of the mind. This is not theory. The effects of television are measurable in the physiological state of the viewer as well as psychological. Reduced metabolic rates, defined changes in frontal lobe activity. It's all there, and it's well understood.
Do you like women with shaved legs? Do you believe in terrorists? Would you get nervous and uncomfortable if somebody accused you of being a 'conspiracy theorist'? How deeply are those reactions seated?
How much of you is really You?
Saying "I'm not affected by advertising because I understand how it works," is rather like saying the same thing about alcohol. The only protection is awareness and avoidance.
-FL
Are you familiar with the philosophy of Objectivism? Your comment follows Objectivist thought very closely; if you're not familiar with Objectivism, you should read some about it.
"Feel a glory in so rolling / on the human heart a stone" --E. A. Poe, "The Bells"
Here is the ultimate television commercial they want to do. Here's the woman's face. Beautiful. Camera pulls back: naked breasts. Camera pulls back, she's totally naked, legs apart, two fingers between them. And it just says "Drink Coke". Now, I don't know the connection, here, but Coke is on my shopping list this week. No, I don't know the connection. Yes, I am buying a lot of these products. The teeth are rotting out of my head, and I'm glued to the television.
-- Nick "Hallo this is Beel Gates, und I pronounce weendows as
I will definitely be watching.
Or does anyone else feel a sudden overwhelming urge to buy a slashdot subscription...
Curiosity was framed. Ignorance killed the cat.
Everyone is missing the point here. Assume I'm the marketing VP of mega-corp. I can either try to hypnotize millions of people to buy our product, or I can hypnotize the CEO into giving me a big raise. (hmm, decisions, decisions) This technology isn't scary in the way that it will be used against average consumers, it's scary when it's used against world leaders and people in power.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
That would be the belly button!
emt 377 emt 4
A basic fundamental for a Contract to be Non-Voidable is to have a "Meeting of the Minds".
People that are Insane, or a Child, or "Under the Influence..." that have created contracts can later "Void" the contract?