this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2025
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Apparently it's mostly about familiarity. Even if we are annoyed at the time, we will often forget about it completely between then and shopping. By the time we are in the shop, we just have a vague sense of familiarity with the product. We instinctively buy the more familiar, as the "safer" option. It takes conscious effort to overcome this (which most people don't have to spare).
In saturated markets, this leads to a zero sum situation. Every customer you get is stolen from a competitor. Apparently the tobacco companies actually loved the UK ban on tobacco advertising. Their ads were intended to counter the ads of their competitors. None of them were roping in new smokers at a high enough rate to matter. The only ones winning were the ad agencies.
Sounds like a perfect pitch to sell more ads. Like I said, I would hesitate to actually trust any statistical analysis of the effectiveness of advertising done by the same people wanting to sell more ads.
In a capitalist economy there's just not a real motivation for researching advertising unless you are a marketing agency. So the vast majority of information is intrinsically biased.
I think it's more that if you stop advertising, you start seeing a significant drop in sales. It's an easy experiment to test.
The dark art is increasing sales via advertising. That's where the marketing people pull off the real bullshit.