Marketing is not a benign science. It’s not a committee of well-meaning clerics discussing the virtues of a moral life.
Its sole purpose is to get you to buy a thing or an idea.
The Internet and social media are to politics and truth, what an uncontrolled fire is to urban housing.
It lays waste to a time-honored belief system that most people are honest and will tell you the truth and for the most part are not trying to trick you.
It doesn’t alter the fact that most people are honest and trustworthy, it just muddies up the waters to such an extent that you’re in serious doubt most of the time.
A. Did that candidate vote yes on new taxes 50 times in the last six years as the Ads say?
B. Is Biden senile?
C. Is Trump a criminal deserving of jail time and not the presidency?
Marketing is like brain surgery in that it is capable of extracting a minute amount of data from a source, highlighting it as a fact, and then using it to promote a 50% improvement claim in advertising only because the number of people who did not develop hiccups while testing a new drug went down from 2 to 1.
Marketing, especially the brand used during political campaigns lives right next door to its darker and more insidious cousin – propaganda.
1. Marketing will show you how using a new soap will make you more attractive to the opposite sex.
2. Propaganda will show you that using any soap is a lie and that one political party will try to get you to compromise your natural odors – so stand firm and vote Green.
SOCIAL MEDIA
The Internet, social media, and political propaganda all rely on repetition. They also rely on the quality of the source. This is why sitting senators in your state are used to endorse candidates running for the House.
One tends to assume that the greater the number of times one hears something the more likely it is to be true – or at the very least, remembered.
Marketing also tends to assume that if your favorite ballplayer, celebrity, or trusted newscaster says it, then you’re more likely to listen.
But we’re all designed to not fall for this sort of thing. Look at the number of times our parents or teachers told us to listen or do something a certain way and we didn’t.
We resisted. Maybe for all the wrong reasons or just to be ourselves, but that mechanism can still work in our favor.
Nowadays it’s fairly safe to assume that a percentage of the content we see, read, or listen to is incomplete, false, or misleading. It’s unfortunate but true.
Go back to the reports of the 2016 election to find out how Russian programmers ended up on social media promoting candidates in ways that would have made Joseph Goebbels (Nazi Minister of Propaganda) giddy with delight.
The key factors are:
· Social media takes advantage of our propensity to accept information without verifying its source.
· Social media is also designed for bite-sized bits of data that travel at great speeds around the world.
· Social media is predominantly interesting & entertaining so is not taken seriously like The News, which is why false and misleading info flows undetected through it.
jail time
Voting for who we like and who we want to lead us is our right. But keeping it real means, we can be influenced.
If a trusted neighbor, a mechanic of 40 years, and a member of your bowling team says electric cars aren’t ready for prime time yet, there’s a good chance you’ll stop looking online and will “suddenly” become more aware of the negative reviews about those cars.
It’s how advertising uses psychology to fill our supermarket aisles with cereal containing lots of sugar.
We know we should avoid them, but what’s in your cupboard?
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