Your Thoughts Are Not Your Own Volume Two: Marketing, Movies and Music

by Neil Sanders

De Beers was established by Sir Cecil Rhodes,

By being part of the brand, you psychologically attach yourself to something larger and become part of an accepted mass that agree with you and bolster your ego.

Their job now is to create and maintain a whole meaning system for people, through which they get identity and understanding of the world.

In order to capitalise on this for future advertising campaigns, he decided the best course of action was to study the techniques used by cults in recruiting new members, with the intent of applying this to the marketing of brands.

“People, whether they are joining a cult, or joining a brand, they do so for exactly the same reasons. They need to belong and to make meaning, we need to figure out what the world is all about and we need the company of others, it is simply that.”

“And that is the object of emotional branding, to fill the empty places where non-commercial institutions like schools and churches might have once done the job. Brands become more than just a mark of quality, they become an invitation to a longed for lifestyle, a ready made identity.”

Psychologist Christopher Lasch explained, “It is advertising and the logic of consumerism that governs the depiction of reality in the mass media…“It is the logic of consumerism that undermines the values of loyalty and permanence and promotes a different set of values that is destructive of family life.”

Jean Kilbourne wrote in Can't Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel, “Not only are children influencing a lot of spending in the present …they are developing brand loyalty and the beginnings of addiction to consumption that will serve corporations well in the future. According to Mike Searles, president of Kids-R-Us, [a major American children’s clothing store] “If you own this child at an early age, you can own this child for years to come. Companies are saying, “Hey, I want to own the kid younger and younger.” No wonder Levi Strauss and Co finds it worthwhile to send direct mailing to seven year old girls to learn about them when they are starting to form brand opinions.”

“Advertising targeted at elementary school children, on programs just for them, works very effectively in the sense of implanting brand names in their minds and creating desires for the products”.

Stephen Butler Leacock insightfully stated, "Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it".

the Listerine Company actually invented the ‘medical condition’ halitosis as a selling point. Halitosis is actually a made up disease, invented by the manufacturers of Listerine and publicised as being the primary source of bad breath. Listerine was marketed as the only available cure for this new found disease.

something better is happening somewhere else and those involved in it are far happier than you.

the more you are included in the virtual world of social interaction, the less time you have for real human interaction. The screen of the computer allows for a distancing and a removal from the scary, awkward realness of life.

A recent study concluded that the false world presented by the social media phenomenon actually made users feel bad about their own lives. The more time spent on social media web pages corresponded directly to the feeling that the user was in some way being handed the short straw in life and missing out on the fabulous lives being experienced by their peers.

“New research indicates that the more people use the hugely popular social networking website, the more they will believe that others are much happier.

researchers have established a direct link between the number of friends you have on Facebook and the degree to which you are a ‘socially disruptive’, narcissist personality.

Manipulation is present at every level of consumerism.

The technique is called disassociation - which is the ideal state for mental manipulation.”

The word ‘robot’ comes from the Czech word ‘robota’, for forced labour or drone/slave worker.

Is not the greatest form of mind control our acceptance of this robot-like life offered up to us as a normal existence?

I would contend that because the ‘product’ is not vital to existence, it must be sold; you must convince people that they need this product in their life.

This manipulation, so that you see a lack of morals as a desirable attribute in this milieu, is mind control on the same level as a cult, imbuing you with the world view and concept of right and wrong as depicted by the corporate entity that pays you.

modern competitive corporate entities held the same ‘personality traits’ as a clinically diagnosed psychopath.

influencers

"Researchers at the Centre for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory at University of California, Irvine, have determined that 10 minutes of listening to a Mozart piano sonata raised the measurable IQ of college students by up to nine points".

In Battle for the Mind, William Sargant wrote about the use of rhythmic sounds or beats to influence brain patterns and create a religious conversion: “It is easier to disorganise the normal function of the brain by attacking it simultaneously with several strong rhythms played in different tempos”. The rhythm of certain beats (closest to that of the natural heart beat) can also reduce brain activity to alpha state, ripe for post-hypnotic suggestion.

Traffic moves faster if drivetime radio DJ’s play certain songs of a higher tempo.

Fast food outlets use bright colours to move the customers quickly whereas restaurants will have earthy colours to relax and keep the customer there.

•Forest green and burgundy appeals to the wealthiest 3 percent of Americans and often raises the perceived price of an item.

Fromm summarised the multi-billion dollar advertising industry as such: "We live in a historical period characterized by a sharp discrepancy between the intellectual development of man... and his mental-emotional development, which has left him still in a state of marked narcissism with all its pathological symptoms." “A vast sector of modern advertising . . . does not appeal to reason but to emotion; like any other kind of hypnoid suggestion, it tries to impress its objects emotionally and then make them submit intellectually."

The psychologist Christopher Lasch summed up the advertising process perfectly in his acclaimed work, The Culture of Narcissism; "In a simpler time, advertising merely called attention to the product and extolled its advantages. Now it manufactures a product of its own: the consumer, perpetually unsatisfied, restless, anxious, and bored. Its 'educates' the masses into an unappeasable appetite not only for goods but for new experiences and personal fulfilment. It upholds consumption as the answer to the age-old discontents of loneliness, sickness, weariness, lack of sexual satisfaction; at the same time it creates new forms of discontent peculiar to the modern age. It plays seductively to the malaise of industrial civilization. Is your job boring and meaningless? Is your life empty? Consumption promises to fill the aching void..."

Montague’s experimentation seems to clearly demonstrate that advertising can actually alter our sensory perception of reality.

Edward Bernays, the father of public relations, also strongly believed that the masses should be manipulated at a subconscious level in order to promote the survival of democracy, or more accurately, the established hierarchical order.

Bernays described the necessity for this in his 1928 work, Propaganda: “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society.”

Bernays himself acknowledged the labyrinthine nature of the organized manipulation; “Our invisible governors are, in many cases, unaware of the identity of their fellow members in the inner cabinet”.

“Propaganda is the executive arm of the invisible government”.

The event, although completely manufactured, was reported in the news as an important, organic story. Using this example of the effectiveness of the technique, Bernays managed to convince industries that the news, rather than advertising, was to become the most useful medium with which to carry their message to an unsuspecting public.

“If you can influence the leaders, either with or without their conscious cooperation, you automatically influence the group which they sway."

Bernays was responsible for the promotion of the use of fluoride in water supplies and later toothpaste, helping the Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa) to convince the American public that water fluoridation was not only safe, but also beneficial to human health, specifically their teeth.

In his publication The Engineering of Consent, published in 1947, Bernays stated; “The engineering of consent is the very essence of the democratic process, the freedom to persuade and suggest”.

when people come together in crowds, they start to identify with the group at large, instead of as an individual.

The opinions of the crowd become the opinions of each person, like a mass hypnosis.

"A phenomenon of which it is easy to establish the presence but which it is not easy to explain. It must be classed among those phenomena of a hypnotic order. In a group every sentiment and act is contagious, and contagious to such a degree that an individual readily sacrifices his personal interest to the collective interest. This is an aptitude very contrary to his nature, and of which man is scarcely capable except when he makes part of a group."

In his most famous work Public Opinion (1922), Lippmann compared the masses to a “great beast” and a “bewildered herd” that needed, for its own good, to be guided by a responsible governing class, namely, the established order of the elite.

In Lippmann’s considered view, the “bewildered herd” has its function: to be “the interested spectators of action”, meaning that the majority of people should not participate in anything of any real importance.

Participation in the running of the world, in Lippmann’s opinion, was the duty of “the responsible man”, namely the elites rather than the average man in the street.

One important concept presented by Lippmann was the “manufacture of consent”, which is, in short, the manipulation of public opinion to accept the specific agenda of the ruling class. In Lippmann’s opinion the general public was not qualified to reason and to decide on the most important issues. It is therefore important for the elite to decide ‘for their own good’ and then sell those decisions to the masses. “That the manufacture of consent is capable of great refinements no one, I think, denies. The process by which public opinions arise is certainly no less intricate than it has appeared in these pages, and the opportunities for manipulation open to anyone who understands the process are plain enough…as a result of psychological research, coupled with the modern means of communication, the practice of democracy has turned a corner. A revolution is taking place, infinitely more significant than any shifting of economic power. . . . Under the impact of propaganda, not necessarily in the sinister meaning of the word alone, the old constants of our thinking have become variables. It is no longer possible, for example, to believe in the original dogma of democracy; that the knowledge needed for the management of human affairs comes up spontaneously from the human heart. Where we act on that theory we expose ourselves to self-deception, and to forms of persuasion that we cannot verify. It has been demonstrated that we cannot rely upon intuition, conscience, or the accidents...

The opening chapter in Lippmann’s Public Opinion is titled The World Outside and the Pictures in Our Heads. In this he explained that the ‘pictures’ in people’s minds, the way they ‘see’ things and their assumptions of what is ‘real’ is their method to interpret roles and positions in the world. Peoples understanding of the world through these conceptualised pictures denotes how people conduct themselves in everyday situations. “… The object of study of the public opinion social analyst is reality as defined by internal perception or images of that reality. Public opinion deals with indirect, unseen and puzzling facts, and there is nothing obvious about them. The situations to which the public opinions refer are known as opinions…The pictures inside the heads of these human beings, the pictures of themselves, of others, of their needs, purposes and relationship, are their public opinions. Those pictures which are acted upon by groups of people, or by individuals acting in the name of groups, are Public Opinion with capital letters. The Picture inside so often misleads men in their dealings with the world outside.”

Lippmann then explained how this can be best employed in the manipulation of opinions: "This then, will be the clue to our inquiry. We shall assume that what each man does is based not on direct and certain knowledge, but on pictures made by himself or given to him. If his atlas tells him that the world is flat he will not sail near what he believes to be the edge of our planet for fear of falling off. If his maps include a fountain of eternal youth, a Ponce de Leon will go in quest of it. If someone digs up yellow dirt that looks like gold, he will for a time act exactly as if he had found gold. The way in which the world is imagined determines at any particular moment what men will do. It does not determine what they will achieve. It determines their effort, their feelings, their hopes, not their accomplishments and results. The very men who most loudly proclaim their "materialism" and their contempt for "ideologues," the Marxian communists, place their entire hope on what?”

Nudge theory is the concept that governments can maneuver situations to ensure that people act in a certain way, which is judged as being desirable and beneficial to society at large. The policy makers use the language of linguistic persuasion in order to coax people into making the ‘right’ decision.