The Puppeteers of America

Now days, advertisers try to attract and hold on to customers using physiological tactics. Although many consumers may be angered by this because it may leave them feeling completely hopeless in the battle against it, i find it genius. I have been interesting in marketing for some time now mostly because of the psychological aspect of it. Matthew Blakeslee asks readers if marketers are taping in to that system unknowingly and answers yes himself. This may indeed be true but I would have to disagree. The main goal of marketers is to figure out what the consumer  likes and cater to those wants. In order to promote the exchange of their goods or services they come up with scheming ways to do so such as product placement, distribution, advertising etc. This is where advertising comes in. In order to sell or create a want for a product, there has to be knowledge of what the customer wants. For example, let's take a commercial for McDonalds. In these commericals there are happy families eating, women (specifically) laughing in to their salad bowls, people on cheap dates having the time of their life, singing and beat boxing in cars, etc. The person sitting on the couch is there right along with them like "wow, i remember when that was me at McDonalds." or "I remember the last time i was that happy" or even, "man, i wish that was me. Mcdonalds looks like its the place to be." They give off this image that McDonalds is a place full of joy and happiness, go there with family or friends and have the time of your life. It creates a feeling inside of you that goes along side other memories of happiness you may have and triggers that chain of memories. Blakeslee talks about the limbic system structure called the amygdala. The amygdala makes memories with strong emotional attachments a more prominent memory. Speaking about how these emotion ridden memories effect our new encounters he says,"...whenever you re-encounter that stimulus you will immediately associate it with the pleasure [or aversion] you first experienced. Now every time you think about or watch McDonalds commercials, subconsciously youre relating it to your own past memories of happiness.There is a quote in Anthony J. Greene's article about the connections we make which states,"It means that memory is integral to thought and that nothing we learn can stand in isolation; we sustain new learning only to the degree we can relate it to what we already know." Advertisers know that they have to trigger an emotion in the viewer in order for their product to be retained in the consumers mind. They also know that these have to be happy emotions if it is something they want someone to buy. The emotion completely depends on what kind of product, service, or idea is being sold because consumers have different motivations for buying or indulging in something. They play on who we are and how we came to be that person with the emotions involved. They just pull on our emotional strings like puppeteers, manipulating us to indulge in this world of consumption.