Our society has a social dynamic that affects us all and is strongly marked by consumption. To encourage the purchase and sale of products, we are constantly bombarded by ads and advertisements. They are among TV shows, billboards and posters on the street, on the subway and on the Internet. However, we are often unaware of the influences of advertising on us.
One of the most impressive facts of maximum marketing is that people tend to shop without thinking too much about what they’re doing. That is why we know from literature that many of the products we buy are, in fact, a purchase resulting from an impulsive act. In other words, we rarely make a conscious choice about how we spend our money.
- For this reason.
- Most companies focus their ads on the goal of awakening our instinctive participation.
- So that the influences of advertising fall on our unconscious desire.
- So in today’s article we will talk about the most common marketing strategies to promote advertising influences in our unconscious.
One of the most important discoveries of social psychology is the probabilistic model of development in the field of persuasion, according to this theory, for which there is already an enormous amount of scientific evidence, people can be convinced in two ways, while one depends on the rationality of the message, the other has an almost exclusive relationship with our emotions.
And what drives us to use one path and not another?Apparently, the choice has to do with the amount of mental resources we want to devote to thinking about it. If a person has the ability and willingness to think of something, it will be necessary to convince them rationally. However, if you can’t or don’t want to think, it’s your emotions that will dictate the final choice.
By studying this model, advertisers around the world have discovered that we generally don’t want to waste much time thinking about what we’re buying. If we need a washing machine, for example, we usually don’t make a list of professionals and cons to choose the best model. On the contrary, we tend to choose the first one that catches our attention and seems to work relatively well.
For this reason, decades ago companies decided to focus on the influences of advertising in the unconscious, if they manage to awaken in us certain certain emotions, they know that their sales will surely increase. they happen regardless of the quality of the product.
Although consumers are not aware most of the time, almost all companies are aware that our emotions have a lot to do with what we buy. As a result, most ads have a number of common features designed to exploit this reality. We’ll see some of the most common.
Have you ever wondered why ads are essentially happy people?As many studies show, the answer is quite simple: happiness sells more than objective data.
If you think about the marketing around you, you will find that we usually have very little information about what is advertised, when we see an ad in a car, we rarely talk about its power, its technical characteristics or the quality of its components. On the contrary, the focus is on the experience of driving this car, or the social status we will have with it, or the joy we will have when buying and driving it.
The next time you come up with an ad, ask yourself: What positive emotion do advertisers want to associate with the product?If you find out, you’re about to control the influences of advertising on your unconscious.
One of the most important principles of persuasion is scarcity, this principle says that when we believe that something is very limited or difficult to find, we want something much more intensely, both with objects and with people, works and experiences.
Advertisers are well aware of this, of the power of scarcity in our brains. That’s why one of the most common marketing strategies is to sell a product as if it were something totally exclusive or with specific benefits if you buy it exactly that day. In this way, buyers feel that when they make a purchase, they are taking advantage of an opportunity.
Perhaps the most obvious example of using this principle is Apple’s “Think Different” campaign. This brand has been able to position its products as exclusive or alternative, although obviously it is not. Today, millions of people own an iPhone and a MacBook.
However, Apple isn’t the only company that takes advantage of this mental shortcut, from car-making companies to clothing brands, a multitude of products increase their sales in an incredible way by simply publishing as exclusive.
Of course, the two principles mentioned are not the only effects of marketing on our minds, but they are certainly among the most common. To avoid this and other advertising influences on the unconscious, the only solution is to try to be more aware when you get to acquire something. If you focus on rational data and not your emotions, you can escape much of that influence.
Editorial note: in this article we talk about the unconscious not as the psychoanalytic concept of a part of the mind that we do not have access to, we talk about content that our consciousness can capture if it changes its lens, and in these cases, it eventually lets go to try to spend as little energy as possible during decision making.