frontline: the persuaders | PBS This looks really interesting—especially since I am one of “the persuaders” by trade.
Like a lot of people in advertising, we that form the brands—that spew out the fluffy-stuff that makes a product or a name more than just words, but a tangible deisre in the marketplace, those of us that are the reason wanting a “pony” in the generic has been supplanted by wanting a very specific yellow rubber-band bracelet—seem on the whole pretty cynical about the entire marketing ordeal. Look at jelly helm if you want a dichotomy and a good example. Read “hey whipple, squeeze this!” Then read “fast food nation” and look at what we have wrought in all our creative zeal.
On the whole, I look at what I do and every once and a while get a real feeling for how utterly silly it is. But it really doesn’t make me want to do it less.
Sadly, most of the time I don’t give much thought to it at all. It’s just so easy to get caught up in the whole brain-tease psychology of the thing. That, aside from the fact that writing is the one saleable thing I seem to do pretty well, is why I stay in this field. To ponder what makes people “want” something. To figure out what gives people the kind of gentle gut-twisting feeling of having a PlayStation-shaped hole in their heart. What drives them to walk into a Pottery Barn and feel like they’ve just come home.
I’m getting excited just thinking about it actually - the manipulation of emotion. The prospect for changing things up to keep an ever-jaded consumer public interested, buying, wanting, needing.
I’m a branding geek, I guess. Unashamedly. Without apology.
I am the person Target makes slightly off-colored, satin-finish tissue boxes for. And I would buy them even if they weren’t the cheapest. I buy them, and then I take them home and wonder what they could do better to make MORE people want them. It’s a sickness. And a job.
anyway
More after I watch the program.