Although I guess I'm talking about individual resistance to the influence of individual commercials, and maybe you're more concerned about scope issues - people are only aware of what's being advertised, and ignore stuff that doesn't advertise effectively...
Still doesn't seem that problematic to me; the solution would be more advertising, so that all options are making themselves known. Less advertising would just enlarge the pool of options that no one knows about.
No, I think that for advertising to be a serious problem, it would have to be the case that it is exerting some kind of forceful control over people. I can believe that your scope issue does influence people for sure, but as I said, the answer to that seems to be to increase the advertising of the underexposed choices. But do I believe that advertising is overriding people's decision making process in a harmful way? Causing coercion or overwhelming influence on any given individual? I have a hard time believing that, except perhaps on a statistical average kind of scale, and influence at that scale just means, to me, that there were enough people out there predisposed to want whatever the product is that when the commercial came out, all those predisposed people then became aware of the product (or got reminded of it) and then went and bought it...
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branchandroot
(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-16 05:41 pm (UTC)Still doesn't seem that problematic to me; the solution would be more advertising, so that all options are making themselves known. Less advertising would just enlarge the pool of options that no one knows about.
No, I think that for advertising to be a serious problem, it would have to be the case that it is exerting some kind of forceful control over people. I can believe that your scope issue does influence people for sure, but as I said, the answer to that seems to be to increase the advertising of the underexposed choices. But do I believe that advertising is overriding people's decision making process in a harmful way? Causing coercion or overwhelming influence on any given individual? I have a hard time believing that, except perhaps on a statistical average kind of scale, and influence at that scale just means, to me, that there were enough people out there predisposed to want whatever the product is that when the commercial came out, all those predisposed people then became aware of the product (or got reminded of it) and then went and bought it...