Over at Wired, Jonah Lehrer looks at how marketers invade our heads:
A new study, published in The Journal of Consumer Research, helps explain both the success of this marketing strategy and my flawed nostalgia for Coke. It turns out that vivid commercials are incredibly good at tricking the hippocampus (a center of long-term memory in the brain) into believing that the scene we just watched on television actually happened. And it happened to us.
The experiment went like this: 100 undergraduates were introduced to a new popcorn product called “Orville Redenbacher’s Gourmet Fresh Microwave Popcorn.” (No such product exists, but that’s the point.) Then, the students were randomly assigned to various advertisement conditions. Some subjects viewed low-imagery text ads, which described the delicious taste of this new snack food. Others watched a high-imagery commercial, in which they watched all sorts of happy people enjoying this popcorn in their living room. After viewing the ads, the students were then assigned to one of two rooms. In one room, they were given an unrelated survey. In the other room, however, they were given a sample of this fictional new popcorn to taste. (A different Orville Redenbacher popcorn was actually used.)
One week later, all the subjects were quizzed about their memory of the product. Here’s where things get disturbing: While students who saw the low-imagery ad were extremely unlikely to report having tried the popcorn, those who watched the slick commercial were just as likely to have said they tried the popcorn as those who actually did. Furthermore, their ratings of the product were as favorable as those who sampled the salty, buttery treat. Most troubling, perhaps, is that these subjects were extremely confident in these made-up memories. The delusion felt true. They didn’t like the popcorn because they’d seen a good ad. They liked the popcorn because it was delicious.
Super creepy, especially when you consider how we’re constantly bombarded by advertisements aiming to create an artificial reality.
Go watch the BBC’s Adam Curtis documentary “Century of the Self” for more on what ought to be a bigger story about manipulative marketing (and hey, Beeb—why don’t you release it on DVD?):
— Harold Meyerson has been talking to some awfully beaten-down labor leaders. They’re telling him unions, at least in the private sector, are all but dead.
Many union activists viewed the 2009-10 battle for the most recent iteration of labor law reform — the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) — as labor’s last stand. EFCA could never attain the magic 60-vote threshhold required to cut off a filibuster, despite the presence, at one point, of 60 Democratic senators. Given the rate at which private-sector unionization continues to fall (which in turn imperils support for public-sector unions), many of labor’s most thoughtful leaders now consider the Democrats’ inability to enact EFCA a death sentence for the American labor movement.
“It’s over,” one of labor’s leading strategists told me this month. Indeed, since last November’s elections, half a dozen high-ranking labor leaders from a range of unions have told me they believe that private-sector unions may all but disappear within the next 10 years.
Unions like SEIU are going beyond their membership to try to represent the interests of workers as a whole. It’s desperate and it’s not going to work. Meyerson:
But, like Working America, it signals a strategic shift by American labor, whose ranks have been so reduced that it now must recruit people to a non-union, essentially non-dues-paying organization to amass the political clout that its own diminished ranks can no longer deliver. Since labor law now effectively precludes workplace representation, unions are turning to representing workers anywhere and in any capacity they can. It’s time, they’ve concluded, for the Hail Mary pass.
— Fortune has an interesting feature on the trillion dollars of mineral wealth in Afghanistan and how a JPMorgan Chase banker is trying to tap into it. James Bandler profiles Ian Hannam, who is trying to help the Afghans (and Western investors, of course) exploit these virtually untapped resources.
The Fortune piece on Afghanistan was linked on Naked Capitalism a while ago. I remember sending it to a friend so we could scoff at it together, and it has not improved with time. It reads like the first chapter of a cheap novel, describing the ubermensch hero: ruggedly handsome, former special forces, spewing snappy dark humor ("Unless it's fools gold"), and of course by necessity the chosen one, who alone holds the power to tame the wild Mohammedans ("If anyone can wrest a fortune from Afghanistan's rubble, it is this man, Ian Hannam."). At one point it literally describes Hannam as charming the Afghans with "a twinkle in his eye".
Even if the tone were not ridiculous, the voice seems off for a news piece. One paragraph begins: "As he flies to the mine for the ribbon-cutting ceremony, Hannam thinks back over the past 12 months". This isn't followed by any kind of quote or other context, the reader is left to assume that the writer is simply privy to Hannam's thoughts. Again, the phrasing makes the article sound like the type of literature sold at grocery store checkouts, not a serious piece of journalism.
And if you consider all the facts presented outside of the context of unequivocal praise, Hannam doesn't really sound like that nice a man. He plots with Persian Gulf princelings to break up a corporation behind its president's back, he contracts for the UK government in their backing of other Gulf monarchs putting down a popular revolution, and he flies away from his employer in a huff to sulk after not being promoted. Somehow these are all couched in terms that glorify Hannam further: counterinsurgency innovator, ambitious businessman who perhaps flew too close to the sun, loyal company man passed over for outsider. There's no kind of critical analysis applied to what are pretty clearly faults in the man's character, presumably because it would detract from the image being built of a capitalist hero, come to liberate the unwashed savages.
The article was factually accurate and informative, but for me the writing was, frankly, lousy, and I'm surprised that CJR isn't taking a harder line with it.
#1 Posted by Xiafang, CJR on Wed 25 May 2011 at 09:19 PM