When asked, most people say they are not directly influenced by advertising and make their choices based on product quality, price, performance etc, etc. What they fail to realize is how advertising really works.
The best advertising often doesn’t directly make you jump up and purchase the product but rather integrates the product or service into the cultures value system. The most effective advertising creates a belief that you will have greater social status if you purchase the product or service, or have greater sex appeal (yes sex still sells!) Even better is when these values are translated into cultural norms.
One American cultural norm is that everyone spending everything they earn, and therefore your spending is a good indication of your earnings and wealth. Although this really doesn’t make sense on many levels it is deeply ingrained in our values system.
Here is a recent example I experienced:
A recent speaker at my CEO think tank group asked if anybody had recently purchased a car. I raised my hand since I had just purchased a car a couple of weeks earlier. He asked the make and model. When I told him he said that car runs about $30,000, right. When I told him it was less, he said Work with me here I’m trying to make you look better.
Here are the unspoken values the speaker was expressing:
- The more you spend on a car the “better” (wealthier) you are
- Purchasing a less expensive car made me a lesser (less wealthy?) person.
- I must have purchased the most expensive car I could afford (I want to look as “good” as possible, right?)
Here are a couple of others:
- My dad’s newly found respect for a cousin of mine who recently had purchased a Jaguar.
- My client who works at a large law firm who was looked at strangely for bringing his lunch to work to save money.
We are either rewarded or sanctioned based on our adherence to these cultural norms usually by those whose opinions we value the most: Family, Friends, and Co-Workers.
This is an advertisers dream. Having the most influential people in your life punish and reward you for not purchasing their products and reward you for purchasing them.
Unfortunately, an advertiser’s dream is probably not yours. In order for you to assert your own values you will need to do five things:
1.Recognize the powerful forces that are aligned to impose their value systems on you and how they work.
2. Make some tough decisions on what is really important to you (see the last blog on that topic)
3. Enroll those you care about to support you in living your own values. This means having a conversation about what you want is important to you in life and what changes you have decided to make.
4. Increase the time you spend with those who provide positive support for your life goals and decrease the time you spend with those who are not supportive.
5. Develop a long-term plan to achieve what is most important to you and revisit it periodically to make sure you are or track or make course corrections.