Advertising: Manipulation and Deception

High school students engage in the weirdest fads, making up words like Swag and acronyms like YOLO. That’s where the trend usually increases in popularity because of the music they listen to and the videos they watch. Usually these trends grow with those people for the rest of their lives. They don’t start at high school or college though. Most trends start from the media in order to sell products to consumers. Advertising, like commercials and billboards, has a lot of behind the scenes psychological antics that only trained professionals can catch in order for us to buy the product their selling, which we as people should note and use to our advantage.

The heads of advertisements use different techniques in order to gain customers. Psychology and marketing go hand in hand when it comes to advertising because of certain principles that drive customers to their product. It’s when there is a time limit on a product is also the time people want to buy the product they see more and more as time dwindles, which is called the Principle of Scarcity (Cialdini). The opposite of this is the Principle of Consistency. When people get the quality product that they get at certain periods of time without fail. In other words, keeping old business while also bringing in new business (Cialdini). Another is the Principle of Reciprocity, a moral standard of giving the same “behavior, gift, or favor”(Cialdini) to one another. For instance, when a waiter or waitress is kind to their patrons, the patron is more likely to give a tip. The principle of census, instead of being persuaded, people are told what other people like them are doing, making the purchase seem more reasonable (Cialdini). All these principles seem obvious to a normal person and alm...

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