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Immune might be a strong word, but does anyone else feel this sometimes? (thelemmy.club)
submitted 2 days ago by to c/neurodiverse@hexbear.net
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I feel the same about SEO stuff. Stuff that's designed to attract peoples attention doesn't just not work on me, it often repels me. Some of it actively irritates me. Some of it I can't even stand to look at.

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[–] 45 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (7 children)

Marketing is about incepting or forcing a product into your brain whether you like it or not, so that if you are in a purchasing decision you are oriented towards choosing the one that got there first or is there in front of you first, to whichever degree you are aware of it or not. Whether by allure, or repetition, or product description and explanation, or placement and convenience (including mental availability, familiarity, heuristics, novelty vs comfort seeking, etc.), there will be a method or confluence of methods that works on you. It's not just ads. It will wear you down and you will be influenced in some way or form. You are not immune to propaganda, you are not immune to marketing.

(The example I like to cite is those irritating 5s KFC YouTube ads. They are designed to be irritating to deliberately displace the competition (Hungry Jacks, Red Rooster) both within the advertising space and within your active recall. Then, when you see a KFC ad in other locations you think of that irritating ad and it reinforces those neural pathways, further cementing it in your brain and locking out competitors whether you buy from KFC or not)

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  • [–] 21 points 1 day ago (1 child)

    Many times it's just about just creating a need that isn't there in the first place, and then selling a product to solve that need.

    People who think they're immune to marketing are just immune to bad marketing. There's also so much more money being spent in B2B marketing than B2C, and the former ultimately decides what's on shelves before you get any choice in the matter.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 day ago (3 children)

    I haven't been to a KFC or even considered it as an option in decades. I go to the places I like when I feel like it and try new things every so often to see if I'll like them too. I'm with the owl on this one, that shit doesn't work on me.

    Now advertising as a form of customer awareness is a different matter. "Restaurant X is now nearby" or "product Y exists" works to alert me to try something out that I would have already been interested in if I had known about it beforehand.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 day ago* (2 children)

    Yep, I think recognising that seemingly 'informative' marketing is still marketing is key in looking at the ecosystem of a brand trying to announce its existence and attract you to it. Smaller stores may not have the same dominant ad spend, but they still market.

    I think there is also a maximalist trap that I kind of fell into in my TLC that is 'everything a brand does is marketing'. To a certain degree that's true with hyper optimised products like Coca Cola, they'll have whole teams dedicated to the bottle design, for example, and marketing budgets to promote the bottle design as a cultural symbol. But to be like 'Mom and pop store down the road not having the budget to run YouTube ads is actually a marketing choice' is fatuous.

    The net result of the mom and pop store not advertising and therefore not provoking a negative 'this brand advertised to me so fuck them' response just coincidentally works in their favour for people who don't like ads, but if that mom and pop store could afford an advertising budget you bet your bottom dollar they'd run jingled on every platform they could.

    Mostly calling myself out here because yeah the god of the gaps-esque argument 'it's the ads you don't notice that work best' is mystique that marketing fuckheads like to use to present themselves as omnipotent.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 day ago (1 child)

    Sometimes if you have a monopoly, you don't need to advertise. I lived in a town that had only 1 dry cleaners. So my dry clean only clothes went to them. They run no ads, have no social media presence, and just relies on the fact that all the locals know the one dry cleaners that has been there since 1970 and all the newcomers that Googled "dry cleaner near me", it's them and one 3 hours drive away, and no-one is making a 6 hour round trip for a 2 piece suit for a job interview. Now, they definitely had the money to afford advertising, because the previous owner did run local ads. But the Chinese couple that bought the business stopped running them immediately. I asked them about it and they said "We stopped paying and business is still the same".

    Now, if they retire and their shitty {富二代|Fù èr dài} kid takes over, I'm sure it'll be different.

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