11 ms·

Is there any non-anecdotal evidence that marketing has anywhere near the power this article ascribes to it? I hear this a lot lately. Some people believe that

Is there any non-anecdotal evidence that marketing has anywhere near the power this article ascribes to it? I hear this a lot lately. Some people believe that media have an almost magical power of shaping culture and behaviours. Beauty? Cosmo propaganda. Boys liking different toys than girls? Marketing. Yet when you dig a little deeper, studies on priming usually get wee p-values and barely significant, temporary changes in behaviour, if any. And when they do show something more, they're impossible to replicate, or straight-up fraud. I don't buy it.

tomp 13y ago
I remember all the fear mongering about violence in computer games (especially first-person shooters). Now, there is a whole generation of 20-somethings that grew up staring at the screen and shooting people and monsters, and crime rates have not gone up (in fact, they are falling IIRC). Accordingly, I don't think marketing can change our desires and behaviour. Sure, it can change what we buy through brand-perception, but the desire to buy must already be there (e.g. we want shiny rare objects -> we buy diamonds (due to marketing)).
- samastur 13y ago
  Your example may be a proof that violence in games does not cause violence in person, but it isn't a proof that it has no effect. In essence I may be fearful of the wrong scenario, but that isn't the same as me not having a good reason to fear. Personally I think opulence of violence in media makes us number when confronted with images or stories of real violence then we would be otherwise.
- ajitk 13y ago
  Don't ads create false memories[1] and consequently our behavior? [1] http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/05/ads-implant-false-memories/ http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/05/ads-implant-false-...
  - pit 13y ago
    > We steal our stories from everywhere. Marketers, it turns out, are just really good at giving us stories we want to steal. What's interesting about this is that marketers are now stealing stories from consumers and selling them right back, either by monitoring our behavior (both on- and off-line) or direct solicitation. "Tweet your favorite Dunkin' Donuts memory with #DunkinMemories!" There are even promotions that encourage consumers to write and produce their own commercials for a product -- there was one a while back where the winning ad was shown during the Super Bowl.
- TheLegace 13y ago
  Makes me think of this, obviously causation != correlation but it's a funny graph1[1] nontheless. [1]http://blog.sid3windr.be/wp-content/uploads/2007/04/crimegames.jpg http://blog.sid3windr.be/wp-content/uploads/2007/04/crimegam...
- Kurtz79 13y ago
  I think that there are many other factors (law enforcement policies, gun control policies, economic climate...) that would affect raw crime rates much more than violent video games (in any way or the other). If there is an effect of sorts, it's probably lost among the various other factors.
- forgottenpass 13y ago
  Now, there is a whole generation of 20-somethings that grew up staring at the screen and shooting people and monsters, and crime rates have not gone up Accordingly, I don't think marketing can change our desires and behaviour. But first person shooters and the marketing thereof were never intended to make people more violent. They are designed to make people like and play more first person shooters. Even the crazies who claim games do make people violent, mostly don't claim that making people violent are their intended purpose.
- VLM 13y ago
  1) fearmongers gotta fearmonger. There's a couple animal fables about how a scorpion has gotta be a scorpion because thats its nature etc. So if they were not fearmongering about violent video games, they would be fearmongering about internet social media, or pr0n, or immigrants, or liberals, or whatever. Their whipping boy of the day doesn't really matter. Also their market share of the overall population is extremely small. 2) Speaking of pr0n, I note the monkey see monkey do epic failure WRT violence stats, and notice that despite better pr0n availability that ever in the history of the species, monkey see monkey do birthrates are not going up. 3) However, taking into account your point and #2, people do not copy activities very well, but they do copy appearances. Mere observation tells anyone interested that "scary looking black guns" are a ridiculously popular fad right now compared to a nice hardwood finished stock. Its exactly the same firearm but just wanna be scary looking, sort of. Also it is supposedly a well known fact that womens, uh, bodily hair shaving habits WRT hair below the neck, or however you want to phrase it, have in recent decades been nearly universally oriented to match hairless pr0n images. Pr0n images have to be hairless otherwise guys are staring at a wool rug or whatever, and now women in general want to try to match that. I don't think either example has important social ramifications other than being somewhat profitable for certain mfgrs and retailers which is in direct opposition to your claim that marketing is ineffective. Go ahead, try and find me jpeg of a woolly mammoth of a woman carrying a classic traditional wooden stocked hunting shotgun to prove me wrong. Bet you can come up with 100x the number of counterexample pixs.
- diydsp 13y ago
  Crime as a whole in the United States has gone down, yet school shootings, which First-Person Shooters emulate, have gone up since about 1993, the year Doom was released. Yes, I have a source. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the... Note that the list of the US shootings, where Doom was released, has its own page, and far outstrips the number of school shootings in the rest of the world. You can also see a graph of this at http://i56.tinypic.com/29uo8wg.jpg http://i56.tinypic.com/29uo8wg.jpg Roses are red, Violets are blue. They don't think it be like it is, But it do.
rmk2 13y ago
The analysis of the influence of media onto the individual was, in fact, the subject that was at the very heart of the establishment of modern empirical sociology. A good start for further reading is the Princeton Radio Research Project[1], with a follow-up reading on its director, Paul Lazarsfeld[2]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Project [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Lazarsfeld https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Lazarsfeld
junto 13y ago
Having a daughter about the same age so it gives me a bit of insight. She doesn't get to watch TV. Her playgroup has no major bias towards pink for girls (actually even deliberate in their avoidance of such stereotyping). My wife secretly detests pink and girly stuff and is/was a tomboy at heart. We do not discourage or encourage any particular colour or style. There are no obvious factors in my daughter's life that should bias her towards pink girly toys, yet she is absolutely obsessed with girly pink clothes and toys. I honestly can't fathom it. Pink attraction seems to be built in. Like a moth to a flame. Recently she asked for a pirate ship for her birthday, so it isn't all bad.
- maxerickson 13y ago
  If she is friends with even just one girl that likes pink, she has someone to copy from (share with, whatever). I would also guess that there are individuals that she prefers as friends in the play group (so a survey might not be very revealing).
  - alandarev 13y ago
    The same logic could be applied other way around: "If one of her friends does not wear pink, she now has someone to copy from." Not saying it is likelyhood. And I agree, that majority can influence minority, especially in youngster social circles.
    - maxerickson 13y ago
      Well, in your example it would not be a potential explanation for her preference for pink. But peer influence is probably a likely explanation. For the second, part of what I was getting at was that there doesn't need to be a majority if she only really identifies with a few members. The members that she thinks of as her friends are likely to have much more influence over her than the overall group.
      - alandarev 13y ago
        Yah, totally agreed with you. I might have expressed it wrong. Using term 'majority', I meant the majority of friends around her.
AlexandrB 13y ago
Diamonds. > Americans exchange diamond rings as part of the engagement process, because in 1938 De Beers decided that they would like us to. Prior to a stunningly successful marketing campaign 1938, Americans occasionally exchanged engagement rings, but wasn’t a pervasive occurrence. http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/45768546804/diamonds-are-bullshit http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/45768546804/diamonds-are-b... I think it's naive to think that marketing doesn't in some way shape and reinforce what one thinks is "normal".
- k__ 13y ago
  The point OP made is the opposite. Everyone already thinks marketing shapes our idea of what is "normal". The question is "Does it really do this?"
  - shawabawa3 13y ago
    And he posted some evidence that yes, it really does. The diamonds marketing campaign shows that marketing really can completely change cultural norms
    - trothoun 13y ago
      Would examples of large, unsuccessful marketing campaigns, be equally strong evidence that marketing does not affect our perceptions of cultural norms?
      - thedz 13y ago
        No, because you only need one example to prove that it is possible (and that, therefore, marketing can change our perceptions of cultural norms).
  - AlexandrB 13y ago
    If marketing doesn't, then what does? Culture? But marketing is part of culture. In fact it has become inseparable from it. When I was growing up the "I am Canadian"[1] rant was a super-popular thing in my school. But this is from a beer ad of all things! And yet in some way it helped shape what being Canadian meant for a significant number of people at the time. If you make the argument that your peer group influences what is normal that's still no escape from marketing as friends of mine were literally quoting this ad word-for-word. I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a straight line between marketing and a specific effect. Ideas and culture don't work like that. But they do work, otherwise nothing cultural would ever change - fashion, as an industry, wouldn't exist. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMxGVfk09lU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMxGVfk09lU
runarberg 13y ago
Just think of two opposing theories. One account scribes that humans are not rational thinkers, our actions constitutes of the stimuli around us. We can be pursued against our best interest. The other accounts for humans having 'free will'. Our free will explains our rational thinking, we will always maximize our utility. Advertizement has no effect if it doesn't meet our utility. Now if you thing about those two theories and compare them. Look at evidences for either ones and evaluate their validity, surely you must come to the conclusion that either we humans are special in nature of being able not to respond to stimuli due to some 'free will apparatus' or, more likely, marketing agents have the ability to control us. Or at least, by Okham's razor, the media explanation is the more plausible one.
rmc 13y ago
Gay people. There are considerably more open gay people today than 50 or 100 years ago. Either there are more gay people naturally today, or the societal pressures 50 to 100 years ago to marginalise gay people were successful and were able to convince lots of people to stay in the closet. If society can do that to gay people, can the same happen to gender roles?
- spindritf 13y ago
  > There are considerably more open gay people today than 50 or 100 years ago. There are considerably more people having pre-marital sex, too. My pet theory is that with the increase of wealth and progress in technology, medicine, we can afford more risk including tolerance of risky behaviour. With things like the antibiotics, condoms, hormonal contraception, abortion (that is not likely to kill you) and just generally low risk of destitution, people don't need to be as careful as they used to. Many religious taboos are guidelines for surviving in a harsh world, and the world just isn't that harsh any more. But those are real, material changes. It's not a matter of perception.
  - aestra 13y ago
    >There are considerably more people having pre-marital sex, too. No there isn't. http://www.nbcnews.com/id/16287113/ http://www.nbcnews.com/id/16287113/ More than nine out of 10 Americans, men and women alike, have had premarital sex, according to a new study. The high rates extend even to women born in the 1940s, challenging perceptions that people were more chaste in the past. “This is reality-check research,” said the study’s author, Lawrence Finer. “Premarital sex is normal behavior for the vast majority of Americans, and has been for decades.” The study, examining how sexual behavior before marriage has changed over time, was based on interviews conducted with more than 38,000 people — about 33,000 of them women — in 1982, 1988, 1995 and 2002 for the federal National Survey of Family Growth. According to Finer’s analysis, 99 percent of the respondents had had sex by age 44, and 95 percent had done so before marriage.
    - philwelch 13y ago
      Women born in 1940 were 20 in 1960 and 30 in 1970, which is roughly when the sexual revolution happened.
leokun 13y ago
> I don't buy it. There's an entire branch of social science that spends a lot of time on marketing, sociology. I recommend reading up on it from an academic perspective. Marketing is very influential but it isn't mind control. I'd say it shapes expectations more than create demand for particular products. And from an anthropological perspective I'd say marketing actually reveals more about a culture than it creates.
- omonra 13y ago
  You know, saying 'I recommend reading up on X from an academic perspective' is a fairly useless cliche. If you want to be helpful and feel that there is a specific book or study that someone should read - go ahead and mention that. Just saying 'go read a book or paper or something' adds nothing.
  - leokun 13y ago
    All I was saying is that is possible to actually have an informed opinion about this other than to rely on whatever you think you might have picked up from your own personal life experiences.
joosters 13y ago
Look at the gigantic sums that companies spend on advertising. They can't all be throwing their money away. You can either assume that all these companies are complete fools, or the marketing works. In fact it's getting easier to prove nowadays, with so much more data from the likes of adwords, loyalty cards and so on. Marketing has more 'real numbers' behind it to give confidence in spending the money. Everyone likes to think that advertising doesn't affect them. But, it does. You are not immune to it.
- spindritf 13y ago
  They can probably make Coors sell better than Miller, or vice versa, OK. But that's a minor adjustment, even if worth a lot of money, not a massive change in behaviour like stopping half the population from discovering readily available video games.
  - joosters 13y ago
    It's not minor. What you should be considering is how many of the coors+miller drinkers would have drunk other things without the blanket advertising. A better example: Coke vs Pepsi. Two big brands. Lots of people will claim they choose whichever they drink without advertising making their mind up for them. Yet there are plenty of other colas out there, with very similar tastes, that hardly anyone drinks. This is low technology stuff, sugar water, it's not that hard to make a cola drink taste good. The reason why people only buy the big brands? Marketing.
    - VLM 13y ago
      "Yet there are plenty of other colas out there, with very similar tastes, that hardly anyone drinks." This also applies outside colas; lemonade, limeade, fruit juices, bottled water, sports drinks (non carbonated non cola sodas). Cokes enemy isn't pepsi so much as tapwater.
    - philwelch 13y ago
      It's worth pointing out that "marketing" includes such things as distribution and availability. If I really liked RC Cola, I would be disappointed often. But every corner store, fast food joint, and taco truck has at least Coke or Pepsi and often both.
samsonasu 13y ago
I think we as a group tend to underrate the power of marketing because it doesn't make s lot of analytical sense, but marketing is hugely important as anyone who had founded a business learns very, very quickly. This is just more anecdotal evidence, but the effect the hunger games movie/books have had on female enrollment in archery clubs is staggering: http://www.npr.org/2013/11/27/247379498/more-girls-target-archery-inspired-by-the-hunger-games http://www.npr.org/2013/11/27/247379498/more-girls-target-ar... Here's another article that purports the rise (and now domination) of women in forensic biology to be predicated on the media's portrayal of the career and the large number of female role models in the field. There is nothing special or innately "male" about video games, and I think the real thesis of the article is that player demographics are much more evenly split than we think; we just assume video games are for boys because the video games that girls play (candy crush, the Sims, etc) aren't marketed as being "video games" at all
- girvo 13y ago
  You have to admit the two types of games are very very different, though.
michalu 13y ago
I am not sure there is evidence our brains are wired differently http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/02/men-women-brains-wired-differently?CMP=twt_gu http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/02/men-women-bra... and different behaviour can be observed among girls and boys in a very young age (<5) J. Medina describes it in his book "Brain Rules" women have some areas of more developed and vice versa, therefore they perceive some things differently, such as they they tend to process information in more complexly. So I am not sure it's "all marketing" although I think it plays part.
chongli 13y ago
Yet when you dig a little deeper, studies on priming usually get wee p-values and barely significant, temporary changes in behaviour, if any. And when they do show something more, they're impossible to replicate, or straight-up fraud. You're right in that these studies do not support the article. The question I have is this: how do you study this alleged phenomenon in a controlled way? Culture, by its very nature, is a vast and complicated mess of interactions between individuals in society. If you take a group of people out of society and study them in isolation, you aren't going to see the same effects. It's like trying to analyze a drug in vitro and then draw conclusions about it in vivo; it just doesn't give you the whole picture.
VLM 13y ago
Although its a bit off topic, the "standard american hearty breakfast" simply didn't exist more than a century ago. Highly processed breakfast cereals are also relatively recent. Corn syrup soda apparently becoming primary/sole source of hydration rather than a special treat. All humans must consume vast quantities of dairy products is fairly recent. Could just say "diet in general". How about "Natural is good for you". Or greenwashing sells.
- twoodfin 13y ago
  Going out to restaurants more than once a month or so wasn't a common household experience either. Essentially all of these things are possible due to a rise in living standards and income. That money was going to go somewhere, and no matter where it went, you would inevitably be able go back and tell a just-so story about how it went one way instead of another because of marketing.
  - VLM 13y ago
    "tell a just-so story" That is theoretically possible, but with some of the more off the wall ideas like highly processed breakfast cereals, it should be easy to run statistical correlation tests. I do agree with your point WRT established and ingrained ideas like "someone cooks your food for you and someone puts it on a table while you relax" which is not all that weird or new of an idea, just previously too expensive. In contrast, considering something that's a bizarre idea like packaged processed breakfast cereals, that demand simply had to be manufactured because its too weird to organically grow itself. I mean, you're going to do what to corn, and then put it in a plastic bag, then drown it in cow milk even though you're an adult human not a baby cow, then eat it? Really? That's just weird.
parasubvert 13y ago
One could argue the whole distinguishing feature of modern for-profit organizations is that they are marketing entities with a side of innovation. Markets aren't created by God, they're created by marketers (or entrepreneurs acting as marketers). Advertising (and broadcast media in general) seems to be an amplifier of existing beliefs or desires. I agree there's little statistical or scientific proof it can convince people of something the opposite to something they already believe -- though there's centuries of evidence that people CAN be sold to. Marketing itself is a much broader function that also includes the supply-side: understanding the customer, and shaping the customer's complete experience with the company. Thus why it also includes branding, segmentation, and even product design / quality.
twoodfin 13y ago
If marketing really were that powerful, why the hell would the console makers decide they're only interested in half the market?
alex_c 13y ago
Is there any non-anecdotal evidence that marketing has anywhere near the power this article ascribes to it? I think you're overstating how much power the article ascribes to marketing. The article makes two arguments: 1) Video games being mostly "male" is a feedback loop of marketing (targeting) and product design, amplified by most of the industry being male. It's not that marketing has overnight caused everyone to decide that video games are for boys: it's that video games designed for boys are marketed to boys, sell well, and lead to more games for boys being produced and marketed. 2) Video games are not as "male" as we think, but video games that do not fit the stereotypical mold - The Sims, Farmville, casual games - are dismissed as "not real video games". The reasons for this are complex and the article does not go into them (that would be an essay in itself). Marketing is certainly part of it, but far from the only factor. You're doing a big disservice to a great article by reducing it to something it does not claim. It's a bit unfortunate that this simplification is influencing so much of the discussion here (not attacking you, it's just a property of ranked threaded discussions).
- gcb0 13y ago
  No, the article just stirs a lot of empty fox news style outages. First makes you feel bad because there are a girls toy section. Then right away tries to make you feel bad because there isn't one game girls section. Anyone with half a brain would notice this paradoxical trolling and ignore this article. The fact it has so many votes is scaring. Nobody reads anymore.
  - mindcrime 13y ago
    The fact it has so many votes is scaring. Nobody reads anymore. Votes don't necessarily mean "I read this article and agree with every word in it" or even anything close to that. In fact, as ill-defined as the semantics for voting are, a vote could just as easily mean "I read this article and disagree with almost everything in it, but I think this is a topic that is worthy of discussion so I'm upvoting it", or even "The headline sounds interesting, and since 'upvote' and 'save' are the same thing on HN, I'm upvoting this so I can find it to read later".
  - alex_c 13y ago
splintercell 13y ago
> Boys liking different toys than girls? Marketing. But...but...but its so convenient. We won't have wars if there weren't armament industry, we wouldn't have alcoholics if we didn't have brewery, we wouldn't have crappy music if we didn't have Robin Thicke. Humanity is better than what we see around us!

tomp 13y ago

I remember all the fear mongering about violence in computer games (especially first-person shooters). Now, there is a whole generation of 20-somethings that grew up staring at the screen and shooting people and monsters, and crime rates have not gone up (in fact, they are falling IIRC). Accordingly, I don't think marketing can change our desires and behaviour. Sure, it can change what we buy through brand-perception, but the desire to buy must already be there (e.g. we want shiny rare objects -> we buy diamonds (due to marketing)).

samastur 13y ago
Your example may be a proof that violence in games does not cause violence in person, but it isn't a proof that it has no effect. In essence I may be fearful of the wrong scenario, but that isn't the same as me not having a good reason to fear. Personally I think opulence of violence in media makes us number when confronted with images or stories of real violence then we would be otherwise.
ajitk 13y ago
Don't ads create false memories[1] and consequently our behavior? [1] http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/05/ads-implant-false-memories/ http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/05/ads-implant-false-...
- pit 13y ago
  > We steal our stories from everywhere. Marketers, it turns out, are just really good at giving us stories we want to steal. What's interesting about this is that marketers are now stealing stories from consumers and selling them right back, either by monitoring our behavior (both on- and off-line) or direct solicitation. "Tweet your favorite Dunkin' Donuts memory with #DunkinMemories!" There are even promotions that encourage consumers to write and produce their own commercials for a product -- there was one a while back where the winning ad was shown during the Super Bowl.
TheLegace 13y ago
Makes me think of this, obviously causation != correlation but it's a funny graph1[1] nontheless. [1]http://blog.sid3windr.be/wp-content/uploads/2007/04/crimegames.jpg http://blog.sid3windr.be/wp-content/uploads/2007/04/crimegam...
Kurtz79 13y ago
I think that there are many other factors (law enforcement policies, gun control policies, economic climate...) that would affect raw crime rates much more than violent video games (in any way or the other). If there is an effect of sorts, it's probably lost among the various other factors.
forgottenpass 13y ago
Now, there is a whole generation of 20-somethings that grew up staring at the screen and shooting people and monsters, and crime rates have not gone up Accordingly, I don't think marketing can change our desires and behaviour. But first person shooters and the marketing thereof were never intended to make people more violent. They are designed to make people like and play more first person shooters. Even the crazies who claim games do make people violent, mostly don't claim that making people violent are their intended purpose.
VLM 13y ago
1) fearmongers gotta fearmonger. There's a couple animal fables about how a scorpion has gotta be a scorpion because thats its nature etc. So if they were not fearmongering about violent video games, they would be fearmongering about internet social media, or pr0n, or immigrants, or liberals, or whatever. Their whipping boy of the day doesn't really matter. Also their market share of the overall population is extremely small. 2) Speaking of pr0n, I note the monkey see monkey do epic failure WRT violence stats, and notice that despite better pr0n availability that ever in the history of the species, monkey see monkey do birthrates are not going up. 3) However, taking into account your point and #2, people do not copy activities very well, but they do copy appearances. Mere observation tells anyone interested that "scary looking black guns" are a ridiculously popular fad right now compared to a nice hardwood finished stock. Its exactly the same firearm but just wanna be scary looking, sort of. Also it is supposedly a well known fact that womens, uh, bodily hair shaving habits WRT hair below the neck, or however you want to phrase it, have in recent decades been nearly universally oriented to match hairless pr0n images. Pr0n images have to be hairless otherwise guys are staring at a wool rug or whatever, and now women in general want to try to match that. I don't think either example has important social ramifications other than being somewhat profitable for certain mfgrs and retailers which is in direct opposition to your claim that marketing is ineffective. Go ahead, try and find me jpeg of a woolly mammoth of a woman carrying a classic traditional wooden stocked hunting shotgun to prove me wrong. Bet you can come up with 100x the number of counterexample pixs.
diydsp 13y ago
Crime as a whole in the United States has gone down, yet school shootings, which First-Person Shooters emulate, have gone up since about 1993, the year Doom was released. Yes, I have a source. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the... Note that the list of the US shootings, where Doom was released, has its own page, and far outstrips the number of school shootings in the rest of the world. You can also see a graph of this at http://i56.tinypic.com/29uo8wg.jpg http://i56.tinypic.com/29uo8wg.jpg Roses are red, Violets are blue. They don't think it be like it is, But it do.

rmk2 13y ago

The analysis of the influence of media onto the individual was, in fact, the subject that was at the very heart of the establishment of modern empirical sociology. A good start for further reading is the Princeton Radio Research Project[1], with a follow-up reading on its director, Paul Lazarsfeld[2]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Project [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Lazarsfeld https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Lazarsfeld

junto 13y ago

Having a daughter about the same age so it gives me a bit of insight. She doesn't get to watch TV. Her playgroup has no major bias towards pink for girls (actually even deliberate in their avoidance of such stereotyping). My wife secretly detests pink and girly stuff and is/was a tomboy at heart. We do not discourage or encourage any particular colour or style. There are no obvious factors in my daughter's life that should bias her towards pink girly toys, yet she is absolutely obsessed with girly pink clothes and toys. I honestly can't fathom it. Pink attraction seems to be built in. Like a moth to a flame. Recently she asked for a pirate ship for her birthday, so it isn't all bad.

maxerickson 13y ago
If she is friends with even just one girl that likes pink, she has someone to copy from (share with, whatever). I would also guess that there are individuals that she prefers as friends in the play group (so a survey might not be very revealing).
- alandarev 13y ago
  The same logic could be applied other way around: "If one of her friends does not wear pink, she now has someone to copy from." Not saying it is likelyhood. And I agree, that majority can influence minority, especially in youngster social circles.
  - maxerickson 13y ago
    Well, in your example it would not be a potential explanation for her preference for pink. But peer influence is probably a likely explanation. For the second, part of what I was getting at was that there doesn't need to be a majority if she only really identifies with a few members. The members that she thinks of as her friends are likely to have much more influence over her than the overall group.
    - alandarev 13y ago
      Yah, totally agreed with you. I might have expressed it wrong. Using term 'majority', I meant the majority of friends around her.

AlexandrB 13y ago

Diamonds. > Americans exchange diamond rings as part of the engagement process, because in 1938 De Beers decided that they would like us to. Prior to a stunningly successful marketing campaign 1938, Americans occasionally exchanged engagement rings, but wasn’t a pervasive occurrence. http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/45768546804/diamonds-are-bullshit http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/45768546804/diamonds-are-b... I think it's naive to think that marketing doesn't in some way shape and reinforce what one thinks is "normal".

k__ 13y ago
The point OP made is the opposite. Everyone already thinks marketing shapes our idea of what is "normal". The question is "Does it really do this?"
- shawabawa3 13y ago
  And he posted some evidence that yes, it really does. The diamonds marketing campaign shows that marketing really can completely change cultural norms
  - trothoun 13y ago
    Would examples of large, unsuccessful marketing campaigns, be equally strong evidence that marketing does not affect our perceptions of cultural norms?
    - thedz 13y ago
      No, because you only need one example to prove that it is possible (and that, therefore, marketing can change our perceptions of cultural norms).
- AlexandrB 13y ago
  If marketing doesn't, then what does? Culture? But marketing is part of culture. In fact it has become inseparable from it. When I was growing up the "I am Canadian"[1] rant was a super-popular thing in my school. But this is from a beer ad of all things! And yet in some way it helped shape what being Canadian meant for a significant number of people at the time. If you make the argument that your peer group influences what is normal that's still no escape from marketing as friends of mine were literally quoting this ad word-for-word. I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a straight line between marketing and a specific effect. Ideas and culture don't work like that. But they do work, otherwise nothing cultural would ever change - fashion, as an industry, wouldn't exist. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMxGVfk09lU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMxGVfk09lU

runarberg 13y ago

Just think of two opposing theories. One account scribes that humans are not rational thinkers, our actions constitutes of the stimuli around us. We can be pursued against our best interest. The other accounts for humans having 'free will'. Our free will explains our rational thinking, we will always maximize our utility. Advertizement has no effect if it doesn't meet our utility. Now if you thing about those two theories and compare them. Look at evidences for either ones and evaluate their validity, surely you must come to the conclusion that either we humans are special in nature of being able not to respond to stimuli due to some 'free will apparatus' or, more likely, marketing agents have the ability to control us. Or at least, by Okham's razor, the media explanation is the more plausible one.

rmc 13y ago

Gay people. There are considerably more open gay people today than 50 or 100 years ago. Either there are more gay people naturally today, or the societal pressures 50 to 100 years ago to marginalise gay people were successful and were able to convince lots of people to stay in the closet. If society can do that to gay people, can the same happen to gender roles?

spindritf 13y ago
> There are considerably more open gay people today than 50 or 100 years ago. There are considerably more people having pre-marital sex, too. My pet theory is that with the increase of wealth and progress in technology, medicine, we can afford more risk including tolerance of risky behaviour. With things like the antibiotics, condoms, hormonal contraception, abortion (that is not likely to kill you) and just generally low risk of destitution, people don't need to be as careful as they used to. Many religious taboos are guidelines for surviving in a harsh world, and the world just isn't that harsh any more. But those are real, material changes. It's not a matter of perception.
- aestra 13y ago
  >There are considerably more people having pre-marital sex, too. No there isn't. http://www.nbcnews.com/id/16287113/ http://www.nbcnews.com/id/16287113/ More than nine out of 10 Americans, men and women alike, have had premarital sex, according to a new study. The high rates extend even to women born in the 1940s, challenging perceptions that people were more chaste in the past. “This is reality-check research,” said the study’s author, Lawrence Finer. “Premarital sex is normal behavior for the vast majority of Americans, and has been for decades.” The study, examining how sexual behavior before marriage has changed over time, was based on interviews conducted with more than 38,000 people — about 33,000 of them women — in 1982, 1988, 1995 and 2002 for the federal National Survey of Family Growth. According to Finer’s analysis, 99 percent of the respondents had had sex by age 44, and 95 percent had done so before marriage.
  - philwelch 13y ago
    Women born in 1940 were 20 in 1960 and 30 in 1970, which is roughly when the sexual revolution happened.

leokun 13y ago

> I don't buy it. There's an entire branch of social science that spends a lot of time on marketing, sociology. I recommend reading up on it from an academic perspective. Marketing is very influential but it isn't mind control. I'd say it shapes expectations more than create demand for particular products. And from an anthropological perspective I'd say marketing actually reveals more about a culture than it creates.

omonra 13y ago
You know, saying 'I recommend reading up on X from an academic perspective' is a fairly useless cliche. If you want to be helpful and feel that there is a specific book or study that someone should read - go ahead and mention that. Just saying 'go read a book or paper or something' adds nothing.
- leokun 13y ago
  All I was saying is that is possible to actually have an informed opinion about this other than to rely on whatever you think you might have picked up from your own personal life experiences.

joosters 13y ago

Look at the gigantic sums that companies spend on advertising. They can't all be throwing their money away. You can either assume that all these companies are complete fools, or the marketing works. In fact it's getting easier to prove nowadays, with so much more data from the likes of adwords, loyalty cards and so on. Marketing has more 'real numbers' behind it to give confidence in spending the money. Everyone likes to think that advertising doesn't affect them. But, it does. You are not immune to it.

spindritf 13y ago
They can probably make Coors sell better than Miller, or vice versa, OK. But that's a minor adjustment, even if worth a lot of money, not a massive change in behaviour like stopping half the population from discovering readily available video games.
- joosters 13y ago
  It's not minor. What you should be considering is how many of the coors+miller drinkers would have drunk other things without the blanket advertising. A better example: Coke vs Pepsi. Two big brands. Lots of people will claim they choose whichever they drink without advertising making their mind up for them. Yet there are plenty of other colas out there, with very similar tastes, that hardly anyone drinks. This is low technology stuff, sugar water, it's not that hard to make a cola drink taste good. The reason why people only buy the big brands? Marketing.
  - VLM 13y ago
    "Yet there are plenty of other colas out there, with very similar tastes, that hardly anyone drinks." This also applies outside colas; lemonade, limeade, fruit juices, bottled water, sports drinks (non carbonated non cola sodas). Cokes enemy isn't pepsi so much as tapwater.
  - philwelch 13y ago
    It's worth pointing out that "marketing" includes such things as distribution and availability. If I really liked RC Cola, I would be disappointed often. But every corner store, fast food joint, and taco truck has at least Coke or Pepsi and often both.

samsonasu 13y ago

I think we as a group tend to underrate the power of marketing because it doesn't make s lot of analytical sense, but marketing is hugely important as anyone who had founded a business learns very, very quickly. This is just more anecdotal evidence, but the effect the hunger games movie/books have had on female enrollment in archery clubs is staggering: http://www.npr.org/2013/11/27/247379498/more-girls-target-archery-inspired-by-the-hunger-games http://www.npr.org/2013/11/27/247379498/more-girls-target-ar... Here's another article that purports the rise (and now domination) of women in forensic biology to be predicated on the media's portrayal of the career and the large number of female role models in the field. There is nothing special or innately "male" about video games, and I think the real thesis of the article is that player demographics are much more evenly split than we think; we just assume video games are for boys because the video games that girls play (candy crush, the Sims, etc) aren't marketed as being "video games" at all

girvo 13y ago
You have to admit the two types of games are very very different, though.

michalu 13y ago

I am not sure there is evidence our brains are wired differently http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/02/men-women-brains-wired-differently?CMP=twt_gu http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/02/men-women-bra... and different behaviour can be observed among girls and boys in a very young age (<5) J. Medina describes it in his book "Brain Rules" women have some areas of more developed and vice versa, therefore they perceive some things differently, such as they they tend to process information in more complexly. So I am not sure it's "all marketing" although I think it plays part.

chongli 13y ago

Yet when you dig a little deeper, studies on priming usually get wee p-values and barely significant, temporary changes in behaviour, if any. And when they do show something more, they're impossible to replicate, or straight-up fraud. You're right in that these studies do not support the article. The question I have is this: how do you study this alleged phenomenon in a controlled way? Culture, by its very nature, is a vast and complicated mess of interactions between individuals in society. If you take a group of people out of society and study them in isolation, you aren't going to see the same effects. It's like trying to analyze a drug in vitro and then draw conclusions about it in vivo; it just doesn't give you the whole picture.

VLM 13y ago

Although its a bit off topic, the "standard american hearty breakfast" simply didn't exist more than a century ago. Highly processed breakfast cereals are also relatively recent. Corn syrup soda apparently becoming primary/sole source of hydration rather than a special treat. All humans must consume vast quantities of dairy products is fairly recent. Could just say "diet in general". How about "Natural is good for you". Or greenwashing sells.

twoodfin 13y ago
Going out to restaurants more than once a month or so wasn't a common household experience either. Essentially all of these things are possible due to a rise in living standards and income. That money was going to go somewhere, and no matter where it went, you would inevitably be able go back and tell a just-so story about how it went one way instead of another because of marketing.
- VLM 13y ago
  "tell a just-so story" That is theoretically possible, but with some of the more off the wall ideas like highly processed breakfast cereals, it should be easy to run statistical correlation tests. I do agree with your point WRT established and ingrained ideas like "someone cooks your food for you and someone puts it on a table while you relax" which is not all that weird or new of an idea, just previously too expensive. In contrast, considering something that's a bizarre idea like packaged processed breakfast cereals, that demand simply had to be manufactured because its too weird to organically grow itself. I mean, you're going to do what to corn, and then put it in a plastic bag, then drown it in cow milk even though you're an adult human not a baby cow, then eat it? Really? That's just weird.

parasubvert 13y ago

One could argue the whole distinguishing feature of modern for-profit organizations is that they are marketing entities with a side of innovation. Markets aren't created by God, they're created by marketers (or entrepreneurs acting as marketers). Advertising (and broadcast media in general) seems to be an amplifier of existing beliefs or desires. I agree there's little statistical or scientific proof it can convince people of something the opposite to something they already believe -- though there's centuries of evidence that people CAN be sold to. Marketing itself is a much broader function that also includes the supply-side: understanding the customer, and shaping the customer's complete experience with the company. Thus why it also includes branding, segmentation, and even product design / quality.

twoodfin 13y ago

If marketing really were that powerful, why the hell would the console makers decide they're only interested in half the market?

alex_c 13y ago

Is there any non-anecdotal evidence that marketing has anywhere near the power this article ascribes to it? I think you're overstating how much power the article ascribes to marketing. The article makes two arguments: 1) Video games being mostly "male" is a feedback loop of marketing (targeting) and product design, amplified by most of the industry being male. It's not that marketing has overnight caused everyone to decide that video games are for boys: it's that video games designed for boys are marketed to boys, sell well, and lead to more games for boys being produced and marketed. 2) Video games are not as "male" as we think, but video games that do not fit the stereotypical mold - The Sims, Farmville, casual games - are dismissed as "not real video games". The reasons for this are complex and the article does not go into them (that would be an essay in itself). Marketing is certainly part of it, but far from the only factor. You're doing a big disservice to a great article by reducing it to something it does not claim. It's a bit unfortunate that this simplification is influencing so much of the discussion here (not attacking you, it's just a property of ranked threaded discussions).

gcb0 13y ago
No, the article just stirs a lot of empty fox news style outages. First makes you feel bad because there are a girls toy section. Then right away tries to make you feel bad because there isn't one game girls section. Anyone with half a brain would notice this paradoxical trolling and ignore this article. The fact it has so many votes is scaring. Nobody reads anymore.
- mindcrime 13y ago
  The fact it has so many votes is scaring. Nobody reads anymore. Votes don't necessarily mean "I read this article and agree with every word in it" or even anything close to that. In fact, as ill-defined as the semantics for voting are, a vote could just as easily mean "I read this article and disagree with almost everything in it, but I think this is a topic that is worthy of discussion so I'm upvoting it", or even "The headline sounds interesting, and since 'upvote' and 'save' are the same thing on HN, I'm upvoting this so I can find it to read later".
- alex_c 13y ago

splintercell 13y ago

> Boys liking different toys than girls? Marketing. But...but...but its so convenient. We won't have wars if there weren't armament industry, we wouldn't have alcoholics if we didn't have brewery, we wouldn't have crappy music if we didn't have Robin Thicke. Humanity is better than what we see around us!