Investigation of manipulation tactics in advertising

Abstract

The subject on how manipulative non-informative marketing is and whether or not it is manipulative in the first place is still debatable. The practice of intentionally putting an effort into marketing with the thought of obstructing free and fair trade in market by creating misleading conceptions about a product or commodity’s presence in market can be termed as market manipulation. The key aim of marketing is to pull the customers in a bid to encourage more sales and to convince them into believing that their need for a product can only be fulfilled by their product. But oftentimes, subtle signals are employed in order to influence the customer’s decision to purchase. Brands many-a-times resort to psychological manipulation and use indirect methods to affect and influence the buying decision or behavioural pattern of customers. We live in a world where most of our daily activities are heavily influenced by the content we consume on a daily basis. In such a scenario, it is very convenient for the brands to purposefully tweak their narrations in a way that presents their product in a specific light with the intention to affect your perception of the product or to elicit the need to purchase that particular product or service from the user. Massive sale discounts at peak season is a great example to demonstrate this. While not all the discount offers are a sham, but there are times where these discount offers are actually disguised under massively raised prices which are then slashed down to make the customer believe that they are paying less when they are subconsciously being made to pay more for the same product. Slogans like “50% off” are rather attractive from a customer’s perspective and these limited-time offers, further make the user rush to get that product off the shelves before they run out of stock, without hesitation. The kind of approached brands follow to drive customer have an enormous potential of convincing a customer to buy products and services that they do not need initially. Several brands set a narrative that makes us believe in a set mandate and create the want to “must” have a product for sure. Viral advertising is another trend that has been increasingly on the rise with the penetration of internet. Brands today use advertising primarily for the purpose of getting their content viral through engaging content that elicits customer buying decision rather than the actual objective of getting the customers to buy their products at the first look. Brands today want to create an engaging experience for the customer throughout to ensure that they do not fall off at any stage of the customer cycle. Every word in the communication that goes out from a brand is well-calculated and examined on a granular level to ensure that the customer is engaged. The impact that is has on us depends on how much attention we pay to the communication and how much of the knowledge we consciously process in order to understand whether it is just marketing or are we being duped. The stakes have risen today as with the right technique, customers can be deeply influenced through accurate targeting and retargeting. In such a scenario, it is necessary for the customers to be aware of how to assess the authenticity of the communication that is being shown to them. It is also debatable whether marketing gimmicks are entirely wrong in an ethical sense. This project aims at understanding how effective these tactics are, what goes on the mind of a customer when making a purchase based on an advertisement and if they are aware of the fact that they are being talked into buying a product they initially did not have a plan of buying. Through this report, we wish to identify the boundaries between coercion and manipulation and also understand the level of impact that various factors in an advertisement have on the user.