By the implied reasoning, is marketing an attempt to artificially simulate social pressure? I have questions.
Watching the Black Friday media coverage gives me the familiar feeling of just not getting it. I can see it happening and don’t understand why people accept(?) it. Sure, all hype is manufactured, but when people follow it, it becomes real - to them, anyhow. It’s actually fascinating.
I want to believe that I’m immune from marketing and hype, but I don’t think that can be completely true. Marketing also contributes to brand awareness which would still have an impact on trust when it comes to selecting products that you need. I do however think it’s much more difficult to convince me to buy a thing I don’t need by impulse. Objective reasoning always seems to take over. I don’t seem to be able to buy stuff I don’t need regardless of price. Maybe I’m depriving myself of potential happiness? Maybe I value reasoning above stuff? I don’t know.
Does anyone have any thoughts about what’s happening here?
Marketing has a lot in common with grifts or cons. It’s said that there is no grift that will work on anyone, but there is a grift for everyone.
Marketing is usually about appealing to the widest audience. You are likely not in that audience.
Sometimes a marketer knows a product inherently won’t appeal to a wide audience. They then choose a more bespoke strategy. If someone smartly target you, I expect you would be as receptive as anyone. You probably wouldn’t even notice, just like others don’t seem to notice when they’re being “sold” something.
I expect it’s just that simple. I know it is for me, and we seem quite similar in this regard.
The real goal of marketing isn’t to make you buy you don’t need but want, the goal is to make you believe that you need that item, bypassing want completely.
For instance, you need a monitor for a computer and marketing works to make you to not just need a monitor but to need the big monitor that’s curved and is as wide as two normal monitors but costs 3x as much. Because you code and with special drivers only that monitor has it’ll act like two separate monitors so you won’t lose productivity of only having one.
I think we by default look beyond what’s in front of us and analyze the why and how behind things—both the little things and the big life decisions too. Others tend to take things at face value unless they are pushing themselves or putting in a lot of effort to think through them.
This is really valuable with things like marketing because, by default, we see the intentions behind marketing schemes and the white lies on packaging probably more so than the average person.
It also (for me) can be a downside with the things I just need to get done without analyzing. Even more so with relationships—sometimes I simply need to trust the person in front of me to connect with them, but I often analyze people and their behaviors and intentions to the extreme to create a full “profile” of their good, bad, emotions, and intentions in my head.
Definitely not immune, it’s just way less of a thing these days. It’s also very person/culture (as in family culture, think about who else you frequently interact with who also doesn’t do it) dependent; some are raised to not buy things they don’t need, and toss or donate things they don’t use. Others think they will use something eventually so they better get it on sale. It also could be less enticing due to the number of people and noise level.
Otherwise, if you were immune, you would never keep an eye for sales for anything.
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Yeah I think what’s happening here is that you think you’re special for some pretty normal shit
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A discussion about how you’re a special snowflake?
