Are We What They Want Us To Be

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

Have you ever gone to the market looking for some basic supplies and come back home with three times more things than those that you needed at the beginning? Even more, when you realize that you bought a lot more, you tend to think that actually all those products were the ones that you really needed. Have you ever wondered why these things keep happening to you over and over again? The answer is easy, from the very first moment that you entered to that market, every single thing in there had a purpose: colors, lights, distribution, smells and everything is designed and placed for you to buy. It is normal thing that if you see big letters and bright colors in front of your eyes, it will immediately catch your attention and you will focus on that specific product highlighted in there and nothing else. What you don’t know is that, even if that product seems to be the better/cheaper (perfect mix), probably the real better/cheaper product it is right next to it but you don’t even see it because by now, they want you to focus all your attention in that specific highlighted product and buy it. That is what advertising does, they make you see, feel, think, need, like or do things decided by someone else with a special purpose. Most of the advertisements that we see, hear or read day after day have as its aim to get inside your mind in order to make you buy some specific product or to make you act in some specific way, to make you believe that you need it and must have it or do it. Advertisements associate its product with life quality standards and popularity; they play games with your mind and you finally do what they want unconsciously. Physiological manipulation has been, for some years now, an essential pillar of the advertising in all its edges worldwide. Our life, what we see, feel, think, need, like and do is most of the time determined by what a few people decide for us and choose to put in their advertisements in order to get through our minds, control it and make us victims of their manipulation. What is the worst? We do not even notice.

Advertising is a kind of communication in which a brand, product, person or ideology tries to persuade a consumer through a message (written or spoken) or image. This type of communications involves not only the aim of making the audience (reader, viewer or listener) perform some specific action, but it also includes a large and deep social study of the target to which this message must be send in order to make this advertise successful. Advertising companies analyze our society and who we act for long time periods, they ought to know what our needs and worries are, so finally they can satisfies our need. But, the problem appears when our needs are fully covered and the market is planning on launching a new product; this is when advertising turns to be something that goes beyond just a work in which people elaborates the best way to give us advice, but work in which people, motivated for monetary or ideological interest, find out the way to play with people’s mind and force them unconsciously to purchase or do something.

In terms of how advertising have control our mind, using physiological manipulation techniques, is a clear example how political parties or ideologies have used this kind of social influence during their political campaigns or governments. Advertising is known as propaganda in terms of political manipulation. Through propaganda, political leaders, have found a way to get to the uneducated population and transmit their message taking advantage of their condition in which they are not available to discern if it is wrong, good, fair or harmful and using strategies that will concern their feeling and needs, making them believe that they are proposing a solution to their problems or offering them a better life without letting them know the cost that it may have. This method is a successful one that has been used for many political parties, all over the world and for many years now. One of most well-known usage of propaganda and physiological manipulation through it is the one that the Nazi Germany used. Adolf Hitler (1935) believed the following:

All propaganda must be so popular and on such an intellectual level,

that even the most stupid of those toward whom it is directed will

understand it... Through clever and constant application of propaganda,

people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way

around, to consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise. (p.197)

Hitler, then known as Chancellor of Germany (Reichskanzler) and Head of State (Führer), not only believed the message given in his book, but also applied it during his government. He showed German People that they were living in some kind of paradise in which the Jewish was the enemy and they did not deserve living; he used the most deep feeling of the German people, the pride of being German, of being special and unique. His government’s propaganda and the message that it included provoked one of the most terrible massacre ever known in human history. And the reason of this sad success was the way that his psychological manipulation of the propaganda implanted and idea of supremacy in the German People, and finally that idea let him reach his anti-Semitic dreams of not only Germany, but the all the world.

People are like a helpless target in front of the power that an advertisement may have. The people in charge of this work is so well prepared and know so much about us that they know the to get into our mind do whatever they want with it.

But not only the psychological manipulation in propaganda can be a dangerous way of advertising; the everyday day advertising, the one that you see just around the corner or after your favorite movie, can be also some other game that advertisers are playing with your mind. Commonly, we associate beauty with youth, popularity with parties, and so. But the question is, why? Who or what gave us those ideas for those concepts? Advertisers did. They made people have these kinds of ideas in order to associate their products with things that we normally want. We all want to be young and beautiful or popular and interesting; advertisers know that, they take our idea, put it a spot with a sexy woman saying that only if you use whatever she is promoting, your deep desire of being attractive will become true, and finally you will look like she looks. John Fisher (1978) proposed that "our society’s values are being corrupted by advertising’s insistence on the equation: youth equals popularity, popularity equals success, success equals happiness". This equation presented by Fisher, shows what seems to be a reality in nowadays world, advertising is manipulating our minds through constant repetition of same idea, in different product, brands, names, etc all of this in order to have complete control of no only our mind but also our life and society. This technique that uses the insistence of the same idea is normally used in little children who are more sensitive to this kind of psychological manipulation; if you pay attention to most of the TV spots of toys have a song that distinguishes them. This is song is unconsciously in the little kid’s mind, in order to stay in there and let him remember anytime what the song says, which actually is what they want kid to ask for. And that, with no doubts, is manipulation, manipulation of a infant’s mind, and so, manipulation of the parent’s mind who will think that buying that special toy for their kid will make him happy, which is exactly what the purpose of the advertising was, to create the idea of a relation between their product and happiness/beauty/youth/popularity, etc.

Stephen Butler Leacock (as cited in Michael Jackman’s book, 1982) said:" Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it". This Butler’s thought is a very fair way to explain how advertising world is acting nowadays. Advertising do not look at us as clients, but as a victim. And that is what we are, we are victims of what they have wanted us to be, everything that we want is because they wanted us to. We are not longer persons, but some kind of robots designed for a small group of people that influence everything we see, hear or read.

The globalization and all the technology that it implies have made us everyday more victims of their manipulation. There is no way that you can look that is free of being a potential advertising platform. There is no doubt that we are almost incapable to notice how or when they manipulate us since we are so used to being manipulated that is hard to see how. Anyway, last studies have shown that most of the people are now changing channels when there are advertisements on TV, or just turning that off or not paying attention, which in some way give us hope to stop with this manipulations, with fact of being robots, and turning back to humans.

Alicia Silva F.