Some of the most deceiving and manipulative people are in marketing.
Companies spend billions every year to create messages that appeal to your desires, fears, insecurities, and aspirations.
They use clever slogans, catchy jingles, and emotional triggers to capture your attention and make you associate their products with positive feelings.
Tapping into emotions and creating a need where there wasn't one before. Just so they can influence the market so their product's perceived value is 100x more than its cost.
And when they do that, people won’t be able to spend their money fast enough on whatever they’re selling.
Here’s how some brands with the biggest marketing budgets brainwash you to think you desperately need their product.
Thriving on negativity
Since 2010, the media massively increased headlines that use fear, anger, disgust, and sadness.
In a randomized study of 105,000 headlines and 370 million impressions from a data set of articles from Upworthy, researchers concluded that each negative word increased the click-through rate by more than 2 percent.
Which celebrity headline do you think your friends would more likely text you about asap:
Celebrity donate $1 million dollars to charity
Celebrity scandal ruins their relationship and family
Create the fear. Sell the solution
Fear is one of the most powerful emotions that can be used to manipulate people.
Before even introducing their product, brands will have a media rollout to alert people of bad times coming up to create conversations, have people speculating, and assuming the worst is yet to come.
For example, an insurance company shows the increased likelihood of a disaster in an area, how bad the impact will be, the dangers of not having the right insurance, etc.
All just to make you feel anxious of not being covered in an emergency.
Or take the example of Gillette when they created a new need for women that shook up the entire hair removal industry.
They created the insecurity among women to make them feel that having body hair is not normal and something to be ashamed of.
Before this, women weren’t as self conscious with their body hair, but a new insecurity was unlocked when Gillette decided they wanted to sell to women.
False urgency
Tactics like countdown timers, limited-time offers, and flash sales to create a sense of urgency and encourage people to make impulse purchases before the logical part of their brain even has a chance to think.
It’s all in the scientific principal of loss aversion, a cognitive bias that describes why the pain of losing is psychologically twice as much as the pleasure of winning.
It’s why FOMO makes people do irrational things, like buy gamestop stock at $400.
False urgencies leverage Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Instead of using positive statements to make customers feel like they’re fulfilling a need, fear motivates them more by making them feel like they’re missing out and will never have this chance again.
And that exclusivity drives up the value.
The feeling of FOMO affects the brain similar to other anxiety conditions by activating a “fight or flight” response, where missing out is a “threat” to their survival and they need it to be well off.
Key takeaways for your brand
Make your product feel necessary for survival. That not having it is putting you at a disadvantage in life.
If you’re creating content, don’t have the headline “10 ways to improve your productivity.”
We need it to be more negative! So make the headline “10 ways you’re ruining your productivity”
Remember, you grab more attention through alerting negativity than trying to be helpful.
Now let’s add some urgency to it. Have the opening line of the content “This is your last chance to change your productivity habits. If you don’t, you’ll be stuck living the same life you’re trying to escape from forever.”
So don’t be boring, break down people’s self-esteem, and then sell it back to them with your product.