Marketing Manipulation

The following sections are included:

• About the Author
• Contents

Imagine that you are taking your weekly trip to the supermarket to buy groceries with your significant other, and as you pass by the cereal aisle, you reach for a box of Kelloggs’ Frosted Flakes and quickly place it into your shopping basket. Your significant other, whose main role in life seems to be to serve as the critic of what you eat and how you lead your life in general, tells you: “Get that stuff out of the shopping cart, first of all, it’s not good for you and secondly it’s for kids!” You counter her arguments by telling her that everyone who knows Tony The Tiger, the spokes-tiger for Frosted Flakes knows that they are GREATTTTTTTTT for you, taste good, and moreover as Kelloggs’ own advertising just recently suggested, are not ONLY just for kids, but for adults too, so there!

Every day as we go about our purchase activities and simply carry on with our lives, we are exposed to hundreds of advertisements and promotions. Hence, we absorb and store a huge amount of data and images in a way that is beyond our conscious awareness or control. While this information is not highly processed, it is argued that with repeated exposure, certain connections and associations will be made. Consistent with System I processing, consumers who are exposed to advertising under low involvement conditions (i.e., one in which the consumer has little or no motivation to process or learn the material) are typically persuaded to purchase through a “peripheral” route to attitude change, which occurs NOT because the individual has carefully considered the pros and cons of an issue or a product purchase, but rather because the object is associated with positive or negative cues (e.g., they liked the music contained in the advertisement, possibly they liked the celebrity associated with the brand, or even the images shown in the advertisement).

The following sections are included:

• System II Processing
• The “Anchoring Effect”
• Availability Cascade
• The Bandwagon Effect (Herd Behavior Bias)
• Base Rate Fallacy
• Choice Supportive of Confirmation Bias
• The Denomination Effect
• The Endowment Effect
• The Framing Effect (“Money Illusion for Currency”)
• Escalation of Commitment
• Sunk Cost Fallacy
• Baader-Meinhof Effect
• “Mere Measurement Effect”
• Negativity Bias
• Reactance
• Rhyme-as-Reason Effect (Keats Heuristic)
• Selective Perception

The following sections are included:

• False Consensus Effect
• Lake Wobegon Effect (Illusionary Superiority)
• Out-Group Homogeneity Bias
• Self-Serving Bias

The following sections are included:

• Schema Incongruence Effect
• Context Effect
• Egocentric Bias
• Fading Affect Bias
• Primary and Recency Effect
• Spotlight Effect
• Von Restorff Effect
• Zeigarnik Effect

The following sections are included:

• Introduction
• Consumer Confusion
• International Branding and Branding Issues
• Secondary Meaning and Trade-Dress
• Dilution

Two University of Chicago researchers, Robert Schindler and Lori Warren (1988), hypothesized that when given a choice between odd ending versus even ending prices for specific items on a menu, consumers would choose the items with the odd ending price much more frequently than when the price was evenly ended. Indeed the difference between the price of the item when it was odd or evenly priced was trivial, often accounting to less than 5 cents on a $20.00 menu item.

Way back in time, some 30 years ago when Bruce Jenner was famous for having become the 1984 Olympic Decathlon Champion, he appeared in a series of television commercials for Tropicana Premium Pack orange juice. In one of the commercials, he was shown squeezing juice from an orange and pouring it into a Tropicana carton, saying, “It’s pure pasteurized juice as it comes from the orange.” Clearly, the commercial was playing upon Mr. Jenner’s (at the time) chiseled body and hand strength, since few people could take an orange in the palm of their hand and squeeze it, extracting all of its juice.1 The message to be conveyed was that Tropicana, unlike other leading brands, was not made from concentrate. Coca-Cola, which still produces rival Minute Maid, sued.

The court found this visual sequence to be false because Tropicana juice was not squeezed from the orange directly into cartons, as the commercial depicted; it was pasteurized and sometimes frozen first. The court also said that Jenner’s qualifying voice-over was insufficient because “pasteurized juice does not come from oranges.” The judge granted an injunction, and the advertising which conveyed this message was removed from the air.

According to a report by CBS News Healthwatch, based on scholarly publications, nearly a third of all adults initiated discussion with their doctors about drugs they saw advertised on television, with approximately half of those adults receiving a prescription. Back in 1999, DTC advertising on behalf of big pharma amounted to $791 million, while in 2016 it rose almost seven fold to over $5 billion dollars Indeed, advertising from the pharmaceutical industry is especially effective in motivating purchase from the perspective of the prescribing doctor, consider the fact that when surveyed by the FDA, 58% of physicians thought that DTC advertising made the drug advertised seem better than it is. Consider that those surveyed here were PHYSICIANS and not the potential consumer who arguably is less educated and might be even more susceptible to the effects of advertising! In addition, prescription drugs that are supported with DTC advertising have in the past been shown to grow in terms of the number of written prescriptions by seven times faster than drugs not supported by DTC advertising.

So what makes a sales approach deceptive? One factor relates to a “False Description of Goods.” So for example, a salesperson tells a perspective client that the furniture that they are planning on buying is solid mahogany and that it will last a lifetime, when in reality it is a mahogany veneer with a plywood base. In reality, the only lifetime this type of furniture can last through is that of a termite.

The Lanham Act is the primary Federal Statute of trademark law in the United States governing and prohibiting trademark dilution, trademark infringement and false advertising: As written, the act establishes the following as law, with part (b) below relevant to the issue of false advertising.

In today’s world, political campaigns, especially those of national stature (like that of a Presidential campaign) seem to require more than just political advertising, slogans, hand shaking, appearances and political rallies. It seems as if every candidate has to write a book to create exposure and build their credibility. More importantly, in a society enamored with reality television and hard-core news morphing quickly into the realm of entertainment, the notion that traditional political advertising can maintain the impact that it has had in past elections is up for debate. This is especially true of the 2016 election where now President Trump utilized his fame as a television reality show favorite to his advantage in his run for the Presidency. To this effect, I recall Anderson Cooper saying early on in the campaign that Trump has incredulously achieved significant exposure despite not spending a lot on advertising. He didn’t have to! If Mr. Cooper just stood back and thought about Mr. Trump’s rise in the polls, he would have realized that his channel (CNN) and those at Fox and MSNBC were responsible for giving Mr. Trump hours and hours of air time early on in the campaign that other candidates were not privileged to simply because of the entertainment value of Mr. Trump and the money linked to increasing audience size. The “news” stations created the situation, and for CNN and MSNBC, complaining about the result (as they seemingly do every day now) is a bit too late.

The following sections are included:

• Introduction
• Revealing the Alternative Consequences of the Issue
• Question Format Biases
• The “Mere Measurement Effect”
• Written Framing of the Choice Alternatives
• Visual Framing of Choice Behavior: A Focus on Colour
• Visual Framing of Choice Behavior: A Focus on Background Imagery and Experimental Design Usage

As we have seen in this book, humans as a group generally behave in certain predictable ways that are often influenced by cognitive, memory-based or social biases. If you are aware of such biases, and can avoid behaving as the majority behaves in specific purchase situations, you can often outmaneuver others, particularly when prices of goods are not set in stone. While you might be thinking that prices are ALWAYS set in stone, this is a false assumption. While the super market may not be willing to bargain with you regarding a can of peaches or a bunch of grapes, consider the opportunity you have to buy for less when bidding for a product on eBay or when offering a bid for a hotel or car on Priceline. Even ticket prices on StubHub change the closer you get to the event, and believe it or not, when buying a stock, it may not be wise to purchase after it has gone up significantly since it may be due for a quick drop.

From the very beginning of this book, we have seen that the consumer can, at various times, be subject to marketing manipulation, ranging from tactics taken by the marketer to environmental stimuli, to feelings and exposure to marketing stimuli one had as a child which now impact decision making in the present. At the root of this susceptibility to marketing manipulation is the consumer’s tendency to utilize System I (or automatic) processing in decision-making (as discussed in Chapter 1) as well as the fact that oftentimes, once a decision is made, the consumer tends to follow the same decision rules resulting in brand loyalty as a consequence of inertia.

The following section is included:

• Index