On Oct 10, 1:51 pm, ta nc.rr.com> wrote:

It seems that it is not only the fault of the people but the expensive
research on how to manipulate human emotions, desires and instincts.
If that is the case we need to just get preventive medicine comercials
and ads fter every burger commercial and ad. Our bad health cost a
lot, that is the ability to persuade us to chose bad health for a
price.

Effectiveness of Media Appeals

The broad question is this: How credible and effective are obvious
attempts to package and sell products (toothpaste, aspirin,
presidential candidates) through the mass media? The prima facie
evidence suggests that they are extremely effective. Why else would
corporations and political parties spend hundreds of millions of
dollars a year trumpeting their products? Moreover, as parents, most
of us have seen our children being seduced by toy commercials that
artfully depict the most drab toys in an irresistible way. Similarly,
a child watching cartoons on any Saturday morning is deluged by fast-
paced ads for cereal, carry-out food, and candy. The aim is to get
kids to demand that their parents buy them the products they have seen
in the commercials, and it seems to work. Over 90 percent of preschool
children asked for toys or food they saw advertised on television,
according to a survey of their mothers. In fact, almost two-thirds of
the mothers reported hearing their children sing commercial jingles
they learned from television, most by the age of three.

Most children do catch on after a time; I've seen my own children,
after several disappointments, develop a healthy skepticism (alas,
even a certain degree of cynicism) about the truthfulness of these
commercials. Indeed, one survey found that only 12 percent of 6th
graders believed television commercials told the truth all or most of
the time; by the 10th grade, only 4 percent felt they were truthful
even most of the time. This kind of skepticism is common among adults
as well. A public opinion poll showed that the overwhelming majority
of the adult respondents believed television commercials contain
untruthful arguments. Moreover, the results indicate that the more
educated the person, the greater the skepticism, and further, people
who are skeptical believe their skepticism makes them immune to
persuasion. This might lead us to conclude that the mere fact of
knowing that a communicator is biased serves to protect us from being
influenced by the message. This is not true. Simply because we think
we are immune to persuasion does not necessarily mean we are immune.
In the case of many consumer products, the public tends to buy a
specific brand for no other reason than the fact that it is heavily
advertised.

Let's look at the headache remedy business. Daryl Bern, a social
psychologist, provides us with an interesting analysis of our
susceptibility to television commercials even when we know they are
biased. According to Bern, a well-known brand of aspirin (which we
will call "Brand A") advertises itself as 100 percent pure aspirin;
the commercial goes on to say that government tests have shown that no
other pain remedy is stronger or more effective than Brand A. What the
maker didn't bother to mention is that the government test actually
showed that no brand was any weaker or less effective than any of the
others. In other words, all tested brands were equal—except in price,
that is. For the privilege of popping Brand A, consumers must pay
approximately three times the price of an equally effective but
unadvertised brand.

Another product proclaims it uses the ingredient "that doctors
recommend." By reading the label, we discover the "magic" ingredient
to be good old inexpensive aspirin. Several pharmaceutical companies
also market "extra strength" varieties of "arthritic pain"
formulations. You will pay a premium price for these products, but are
they worth it? Actually, their extra strength comes from extra aspirin
(or acetaminophen, an aspirin substitute), along with a dose of
caffeine. Taking additional aspirin would be less expensive, but it
sounds great in the ads: "Not one, but a combination of medically
proven ingredients in an extra-strength formula."

Such blatant attempts at mass persuasion seem pitifully obvious. Yet
the cash registers ring, and tremendous numbers of consumers
apparently set aside their skepticism even though they know the
message is an obvious attempt to sell a product. Of course, there may
be a basic difference between susceptibility to aspirin commercials
and susceptibility to commercials for presidential candidates. When we
are dealing with identical or very similar products, mere familiarity
may make a huge difference. Robert Zajonc has shown that, all other
things being equal, the more familiar an item is, the more attractive
it is. Suppose I walk into a grocery store looking for a laundry
detergent. I go to the detergent section, and I am staggered by the
wide array of brand names. Because it doesn't matter too much to me
which one I buy, I may simply reach for the most familiar one—and,
chances are, it is familiar because I've heard and seen the name on
television commercials over and over again. If this is the case, then
sudden increases in television exposure should produce dramatic
changes in familiarity and, perhaps, in sales. And that seems to be
the case. For example, several years ago, the Northwest Mutual Life
Insurance Company conducted a nationwide poll to find out how well the
public recognized its name. It came out 34th among insurance
companies. Two weeks later the company repeated the poll. This time it
came out third in name familiarity. What caused this amazing leap from
obscurity to fame? Two weeks and $1 million worth of advertising on
television. Familiarity does not necessarily mean sales, but the two
are frequently linked—as evidenced by the fact that A & W Root Beer
boosted its share of the market from 15 percent to 50 percent after 6
months of television advertising.

But is voting for a presidential candidate the same kind of decision
as choosing toothpaste or root beer? The answer is a qualified "yes."
Several years ago, Joseph Crush and his colleagues found that, by and
large, the congressional candidates who spent the most money typically
received the most votes. More recently, Michael Pfau and his
colleagues have shown that spot television commercials are by far the
most effective determinants of how people vote...

The Social Animal - Elliot Aronson - 8th Edition 1999
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0716733129/

Consumer Psychology Primer
http://www.wsu.edu/~taflinge/advant.html