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Ads work on you too
Ads work on everyone
It's easy to resist the most obvious sales pitches, which gives people false confidence in their own independence of mind. They assume advertising only works on other people. Anyone who can't acknowledge its likely effect on himself is doubly deceived.
Sales hides behind titles
Sales works best when it's hidden, which is why almost everyone whose job involves distribution has a title that has nothing to do with it. People who sell advertising are called account executives. People who sell customers work in business development, people who sell companies are investment bankers, and people who sell themselves are called politicians.
Silicon Valley underrates sales
Silicon Valley underrates sales even more than most places. Customers will not come just because you build it, and making them come is harder than it looks. The most fundamental reason even business people underestimate sales is a systemic effort to hide it at every level of every field, in a world secretly driven by it.
How do ads work without making you buy?
Psychologists call the mechanism the mere exposure effect. Robert Zajonc published the classic demonstration in 1968, showing that people rate words, symbols, and faces more favorably after seeing them repeatedly. Familiarity feels like safety, so a known brand name gets a small head start at the moment of choice. The effect builds slowly over many exposures, which is why a campaign pays off weeks or months later.
Why do skeptics fall for ads too?
The effect works below conscious awareness. In a 1980 study, Kunst-Wilson and Zajonc flashed shapes so briefly that participants could not tell which ones they had seen. Participants still preferred the shapes they had seen over new ones. Memory of the shape was gone, but the sense of familiarity remained.
Why do brands advertise things everyone knows?
Marketing scientist Byron Sharp argued in his 2010 book How Brands Grow that brands grow by being easy to think of and easy to buy. Ads keep a brand present in memory for the moment a shopper stands in front of a shelf. Sharp's research with the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute found that big brands win mostly by reaching more buyers, not by winning more loyalty.
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