Marketers aren't 'hacking your brain' they are just good communicators

All the evil marketers hacking into your brain have done is get you to buy the thing you were going to buy now and from us rather than later and from someone else

Zoe Strimpel in the Spectator reminds me, once again, that I am a member of the world’s most powerful and influential profession. Forget politicians, lawyers, doctors or accountants, the professionals that really direct your life are marketers. You are all mere puppets of the ad men as they make you buy mattress toppers and kitchen bins that you didn’t think you needed.

“While perusing bins on the John Lewis website, having heard great things about the Brabantia 60-litre, I noticed my stress levels rise – and it wasn’t just because the lid-up height meant the bin wouldn’t fit in my new cabinet. It was because for my whole shopping session there had been a dribble of information about how many other customers had put the items I was looking at in their basket in the last 24 hours, how many had bought them and how fast the stock supply was dwindling. Over on the M&S website, a mattress topper flashed a banner: ‘In demand! Sold 43 times in the last 48 hours’. My heart rate climbed and I felt my wellbeing plummet as a generalised, half-conscious sense of missing out for being too slow – a lifelong fear – crept over me.”

The idea that advertisers make us buy things that we don’t need is firmly embedded in the minds of every journalist and, as a result, with the general public. It isn’t a new idea but every new generation rediscovers the dark truth about marketing, the truth so cruelly exposed by Vance Packard, one of those journalists, in his 1957 book, “The Hidden Persuaders”. Packard told us how marketers and advertisers used ‘motivational research’ and ‘psychological methods’ to get us to buy the products they sell. Famously, Packard fell for cinema ad salesman James Vicary’s hoax about subliminal advertising reminding us that people won’t check claims or research that confirms their biases.

At one level, of course, marketers do get you to buy things that they sell. Otherwise there’s no point to the profession. The techniques that Zoe Strimpell describes aren’t inventions of the doomscrolling era but ones with origins lost in the mists of advertising’s origins. Retailers have always sought to push sales by saying things like "there's only a few left, if you come tomorrow I might have sold them” and advertisers have likewise used the safety of crowds by reminding us that the product is a ‘best seller’. When we were designing catalogue pages (there you were thinking we just plonked things randomly on the page) all of these techniques plus a load of others we applied to maximise the sales per page.

We use powerful words to get your attention - best seller, new, exclusive, as seen on TV, limited stock. And we put these words in bold type even as a flash of yellow or red drawing your eye to the product. We underlined them, repeated them and made them bigger. And it works, we know this because every square inch of the catalogue was tested to death. Because pages are printed on big sheets we could run eight, sixteen, even 32 different pages each with different flags, emphases and even copy. I know that if I stick a big red flash saying ‘last few’ or ‘selling fast’ on the mattress topper it will increase how many of those mattress toppers we sell.

Marketing and advertising does not, it seems, increase aggregate demand in the whole economy. It might tip you into buying that kitchen bin online from John Lewis but the chances are you’d have bought a kitchen bin at some point. All the evil marketers hacking into your brain have done is get you to buy the bin you were going to buy now and from us rather than later and from someone else. And we did not force you to do this, you made that choice because you have agency. Zoe Strimpel, instead of buying the bin from John Lewis, could have popped to Home Bargains or ASDA, she might even have struck lucky with a kitchen bin from the central aisle at Aldi! At no point did John Lewis’s marketers reach out of the phone, point a gun at the cat and say “buy the bin or the mog gets it”.

The idea that ‘modern marketing’ removes agency from consumers is now a fairly ancient idea. Indeed, if we start the age of mass marketing with the widespread availability of first radio, then TV, then Vance Packard’s still popular book came during the childhood of that mass marketing. After all, the first UK TV ad was aired in 1955 and Packard’s book was published in 1957 - the idea that business is manipulating you into buying lots of stuff you don’t need (usually called ‘the consumer society’) has been a popular theme among social commenters almost since the first ad man created the first advertisement. Each iteration (readers may be familiar with Naomi Klein’s ‘No Logo’) revisits the same tropes to the applause of an educated audience who, while obviously immune to the blandishments of marketing, are deeply concerned at how ‘hidden persuaders’ or ‘brand bullies’ are exploiting other, less aware people so as to make profits and control our lives.

Back in 1980 Ashley, Granger and Schmalensee tested for causation in the relationship between advertising and aggregate demand. The study found that the null hypothesis (advertising doesn’t cause consumption) couldn’t be rejected and hinted that cause and effect were in the opposite order - consumption causes advertising not the reverse. Others (Jacobson & Nicosia for example) made similar findings from different data sets. Initially the idea that ‘consumption causes advertising’ seems upside down but a moment's thought reveals why. Here are Jacobson & Nicosia:

“The finding indicates that a large percentage of advertisers determine their budget by applying this decision rule, thereby using past sales as the base in the ratio. In support of this interpretation, note that, in many firms, corporate management may not know the response of sales to advertising and thus chooses the advertising budget in terms of past information”

Advertising doesn’t create new demand (you were going to spend the money) but if aggregate demand rises in a given period, the amount of advertising in the following period will rise. Of course, advertisers are not really interested in increasing aggregate demand and do not invest their money to make the economy bigger. Some of John Lewis’s advertising and marketing effort is directed to getting Zoe Strimpel to buy the bin from John Lewis now while she's scrolling on her phone. The rest of the advertising effort goes into getting Zoe and lots of others to go to the John Lewis site to look for stuff rather than the many hundreds of other possible sources for a kitchen bin or mattress topper. Indeed Zoe notices this too:

“...brands built around appealing to the decorous middle classes through good customer service and reliable quality…”

John Lewis has, over decades, invested in persuading (through words and deeds) people that they are the sort of place that will have what I want, that it will be good and that they’ll look after us. This is, I suppose, also ‘hacking’ into Zoe Strimpel’s mind but seems less intrusive than the way in which the online site seeks to operationalise the techniques that Zoe doesn’t notice from the lovely, friendly sales assistant in store.

Light-hearted though Zoe Strimpel’s article might be, the idea that marketing is somehow sinister, manipulative and exploitative remains popular. And this idea is not only mistaken but dangerously mistaken - advertising is an essential component of our economy and its suppression (or over-regulation) has a negative effect on our lives. At the whole economy level advertising is essential:

“Lower advertising costs are associated with lower R&D investment and slower economic growth. We provide empirical evidence supporting substitution between R&D and advertising using exogenous changes in the tax treatment of R&D expenditures across U.S. states. Finally, we find that R&D subsidies are more effective under an economy that includes advertising relative to one with no advertising.” (Cavanaile & Roldan 2019)

I’m not, however, especially concerned about macroeconomic models for marketing effects (these are, like models of all sorts, limited and subject to error). Too many people believe that this essential environment - one with advertising - somehow removes agency from the consumer. The most common application of this myth comes with public health - children are ‘trapped’ into vaping by colours and flavours, mums over eat and get fat because of the ‘obesogenic’ environment created by food marketing, and lads spend too much money betting on the number of corners or headed goals via an online app designed to keep them engaged using nefarious techniques like suggesting another bet. We are told that in store sales promotions, displays and even music make us buy more than we would have done had these offers not been made.

This mischaracterising of marketing suits public health’s mission creep. Public health came from the idea that we should reduce environmental risks in order to improve population health. This simple idea lies behind better sanitation, vaccination, and clean air or water regulation. These are all things that individual people can’t control, they are definitionally environmental. Public health administrators want to persuade us that marketing and advertising are similarly outside people’s control, that they create an environment that removes choice and agency from the individual consumer. If this is accepted then measures to control advertising are justified to improve population health.

The problem is that when we see advertising controls, what we don’t also see is a commensurate change in consumer behaviour, even children:

“If advertising is the causal mechanism for the relationship, watching programming on television should have a greater effect than watching similar programming on video or DVDs. We find no significant difference in the effects of viewing commercial versus noncommercial television. Moreover, we generally find no significant differences between watching programming for the same intended audience on television or on video. These results suggest that restrictions on advertising may play a limited role in the battle against childhood obesity.”

Advertising and marketing are, fundamentally, just a form of speech, of communication. In our daily lives we receive thousands of messages from hundreds of different sources. From our friends and family, from people we meet and talk to, from newspapers and television, from films, radio and songs. Advertising messages are a small part of this overall communications environment and should be seen in that context not as uniquely powerful or influential. We know that people use trusted sources for consumer information and also that one of the main purposes of brand advertising is to establish ‘brand equity’ - trust - in the consumers’ minds. But we also know that your mum or BFF, the woman from Which? or Martin Lewis on the telly, even Steve down the pub are more trusted than the advertiser. None of these sources are necessarily objective (or right) but neither is our decision-making driven solely by advertising and marketing.

Over many years marketers have developed techniques designed to elicit a positive response from consumers. Indeed the fields of marketing science and consumer behaviour probably contain more insight into our lives than related less business-oriented aspects of psychology and sociology. This is doubly true when researchers beg the question by assuming that either advertising controls are effective or else that the effect of marketing is to remove consumer agency. This results in the sort of pseudo-science we’ve witnessed defending ad bans on the London underground or attacking the use of sweet flavours in e-cigarettes.

Vance Packard and Naomi Klein have more influence on our (mis)understanding of marketing than actual experts like David Ogilvy, Claude Hopkins or Philip Kotler. People will read articles in news magazines like the one cited here from Zoe Strimpel, nod and smile then move on having had their prejudices reinforced. The bien pensant will continue to see marketers and ad men as either sinister manipulators of hapless consumers or cynical but charming exploiters of human gullibility. The sad reality is that, while us marketers want you to believe that we have an unique insight into consumers, most of what we do is ‘suck it and see’ especially where brand marketing is concerned. And if you want to understand direct marketing (those cunning techniques making Zoe Strimpel buy that kitchen bin from her phone) there are loads of great books - Ogilvy on Advertising is a great start - but for the story read Walter Weintz’s tale of Reader’s Digest, “The Solid Gold Mailbox”.