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This is no proof. You're assuming that the products and services marketed have little to no intrinsic or social value, and that the consumers do not engage with

by boken 12y ago

This is no proof. You're assuming that the products and services marketed have little to no intrinsic or social value, and that the consumers do not engage with the marketing critically--on any level. Certainly we all know some people who seem to act as automatically as this, but I doubt I've ever met anyone who truly does. You could say the exposure is necessary for the idea to be held. With marketing this is, of course, true. And in other aspects of life, certainly none of us comes into the world every morning with a blank slate of a mind. But would removing every expression of an idea, remove that idea? Perhaps in a generation's time? (It can't be done, but it's an interesting question to ask, all the same.) We do know that there was a time when certain hates--homophobia, for instance, to use an example from upthread--did not exist, at least not in a human mind. Yet they're here today. Did they require public fora? I can be exposed to an idea or an advertisement and subsequently walk away from it, having rejected its worth or its relevance to me. Without having done so, I cannot claim any agency in my thinking. Whether this kind of agency is worth protecting is another question altogether. The liberal ideas of free speech assume that it is.

zenogais 12y ago
I assumed no such thing. I merely assumed that the power of subliminal or unconscious suggestion is more the aim of marketing than engagement with the rational/critical faculties of the customers in an attempt to meet their internally generated needs. In addition, that often the purpose of marketing is to induce consumption on an irrational basis rather than a rational one. The resulting "intrinsic/social value" would then have been manufactured by the marketing process rather than having arisen from reasoned value judgments or needs met by the product but individually arrived at by the customers. To see that activating these mechanisms is the purpose of marketing requires a simple survey of the history of marketing and marketing literature. This, again, in no way precludes people from activating their rational faculties and rejecting those messages. But in those cases simple repeated exposure is often enough to win them over. Your assumption seems to be that consumers, or at least the vast majority of them, critically engage with marketing material. Psychological literature definitively doesn't bare out such an optimistic conclusion. So such an argument seems to me at the very least scantly informed, but more than likely simply an apologia for a cognitive bias that is pro-marketing and pro-classical liberal notions of human agency.

by boken 12y ago

zenogais 12y ago

I assumed no such thing. I merely assumed that the power of subliminal or unconscious suggestion is more the aim of marketing than engagement with the rational/critical faculties of the customers in an attempt to meet their internally generated needs. In addition, that often the purpose of marketing is to induce consumption on an irrational basis rather than a rational one. The resulting "intrinsic/social value" would then have been manufactured by the marketing process rather than having arisen from reasoned value judgments or needs met by the product but individually arrived at by the customers. To see that activating these mechanisms is the purpose of marketing requires a simple survey of the history of marketing and marketing literature. This, again, in no way precludes people from activating their rational faculties and rejecting those messages. But in those cases simple repeated exposure is often enough to win them over. Your assumption seems to be that consumers, or at least the vast majority of them, critically engage with marketing material. Psychological literature definitively doesn't bare out such an optimistic conclusion. So such an argument seems to me at the very least scantly informed, but more than likely simply an apologia for a cognitive bias that is pro-marketing and pro-classical liberal notions of human agency.