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What's the difference between brand advertising (2) and hacking your brain (3)? To me, brand advertising is when marketing people try to associate a brand with

What's the difference between brand advertising (2) and hacking your brain (3)? To me, brand advertising is when marketing people try to associate a brand with "values" that may or may not actually reflect the values that a company has when manufacturing a product or providing a service. For example, they might subtly suggest that they care about quality design, but in fact only care about cost cutting. Or in the car industry, where they try to create brands to give the impression that similar cars were designed and engineered with different values in mind, or even by different people/companies. What would be the purpose of splitting Chevrolet and Cadillac if it's not a brain hack?

Broken_Hippo 7y ago
2) Branding, logos, cutesy characters, etc. 3) Trying to hack my brain with dirty tricks, lying-with-technical-truth, pseudo-enthusiastic actors, psychology grads thinking they are clever. Worse if they actually are being clever. Branding and logos help you recognise something. If you are going down the road and like the look of a car, the logo lets you know what it is. You know something is disney if you see Mickey's ears or the castle. Same with slews of other things. Not everything that has a logo is something that is advertised to you specifically. Alternatively, they help you figure out if the product is real or fake. Government seals, for instance, help with this. Overall, they let you know something about a product/company (in general) without spending as much thought to do so. But tricking the brain is more... On the low end, your example of giving "morals" to car companies or specific cars. But consider, for an instant, that toilet paper used to advertise, "Contains no splinters!". This was technically true, but the competitors did not produce splintered paper either. A current example is a vitamin commercial telling folks, "might help reduce medical condition!" when there is no science behind it.
JulianMorrison 7y ago
I think that is where parsing them out on an axial graph helps. A brand can be a pure brand - a classical example is the many cartoon/cutesy characters that are used in Japan to represent everything from supermarkets to local government. A brand can also be polluted with axis-3 psychological manipulation[1], implied claims that aren't true, false differentiation, and so forth. You can separate at least in abstract as a thought experiment, how much it is of each. [1] I'm excepting cuteness from manipulation because although it does make people happy, it's not tricksy, you can see what's making you happy, it's the cute logo right there in front of you.

Broken_Hippo 7y ago

2) Branding, logos, cutesy characters, etc. 3) Trying to hack my brain with dirty tricks, lying-with-technical-truth, pseudo-enthusiastic actors, psychology grads thinking they are clever. Worse if they actually are being clever. Branding and logos help you recognise something. If you are going down the road and like the look of a car, the logo lets you know what it is. You know something is disney if you see Mickey's ears or the castle. Same with slews of other things. Not everything that has a logo is something that is advertised to you specifically. Alternatively, they help you figure out if the product is real or fake. Government seals, for instance, help with this. Overall, they let you know something about a product/company (in general) without spending as much thought to do so. But tricking the brain is more... On the low end, your example of giving "morals" to car companies or specific cars. But consider, for an instant, that toilet paper used to advertise, "Contains no splinters!". This was technically true, but the competitors did not produce splintered paper either. A current example is a vitamin commercial telling folks, "might help reduce medical condition!" when there is no science behind it.

JulianMorrison 7y ago

I think that is where parsing them out on an axial graph helps. A brand can be a pure brand - a classical example is the many cartoon/cutesy characters that are used in Japan to represent everything from supermarkets to local government. A brand can also be polluted with axis-3 psychological manipulation[1], implied claims that aren't true, false differentiation, and so forth. You can separate at least in abstract as a thought experiment, how much it is of each. [1] I'm excepting cuteness from manipulation because although it does make people happy, it's not tricksy, you can see what's making you happy, it's the cute logo right there in front of you.