"Branded" (the movie), no, not with Chuck Connors.

[LotsaBadKarma]

http://www.brandedmovie.com/

I watched this movie last night on Netflix. For those of you who have that service it is in the Sci-Fi area.

This was a mind opening experience for me. For a while I have had sort of an understanding on how advertising/marketing works due to a summer mail room job I had as a kid at an ad agency in Chicago. I spoke to one of the ad guys there and he told me about how they marketed a certain brand of spaghetti sauce. They had consulted with a group of shrinks about what would potentially make the brand they represented more attractive to consumers. The shrinks actually did a study about this using focus groups etc and figured out that there were several ways to do this but the most effective would be the one that people wouldn't see coming. What they did was make the most annoying commercials about spaghetti sauce that had ever been made. The effect was that when people stood in the sauce aisle trying to make a decision that about 80% of the time they picked this particular brand because the ad stuck out in their mind. The result was a successful ad campaign that rocketed this sauce to the very top of the pasta ladder and it stayed there for a very long time, decades in fact.

So the shrinks  and the ad people relied on quirks in the human psyche to market this product. It seems to me that this is our continual attraction to the familiar. Even though people were annoyed by the ads they consistently picked that sauce because it was familiar. It was a good sauce but there were a number of good sauces out at that time (late 60s-early 70s) so the marketing people used a ploy to get people to try the sauce. Once they tried it they were content with it and it became their regular brand for the most part.

This movie goes one step beyond that idea. It actually operates on the premise of changing peoples' minds about what is preferable as a societal norm and then markets a product so that members of the society can achieve that norm. For example, a company that sells fattening fast food wants to open operations in an area where people are mostly slender and fit and healthy. They know that a fast food joint is going to be received like a beer fart in church in this area. So what they do is start off by marketing the idea that skinny is out and fat is the new standard of beauty. This message gets hammered into the public's head for a while and then the fast food chain starts opening restaurants in that area. The public understands that the quickest way to achieve this new standard of beauty is to dine at one of these new eateries and, sho nuff, in pretty short order the citizens start to conform to the new standard.

Really an interesting concept and not so far out of the realm of reality when I think about it.

Anybody else seen this?   

[DigitalBuddha]

http://www.brandedmovie.com/

I watched this movie last night on Netflix. For those of you who have that service it is in the Sci-Fi area.

This was a mind opening experience for me. For a while I have had sort of an understanding on how advertising/marketing works due to a summer mail room job I had as a kid at an ad agency in Chicago. I spoke to one of the ad guys there and he told me about how they marketed a certain brand of spaghetti sauce. They had consulted with a group of shrinks about what would potentially make the brand they represented more attractive to consumers. The shrinks actually did a study about this using focus groups etc and figured out that there were several ways to do this but the most effective would be the one that people wouldn't see coming. What they did was make the most annoying commercials about spaghetti sauce that had ever been made. The effect was that when people stood in the sauce aisle trying to make a decision that about 80% of the time they picked this particular brand because the ad stuck out in their mind. The result was a successful ad campaign that rocketed this sauce to the very top of the pasta ladder and it stayed there for a very long time, decades in fact.

So the shrinks  and the ad people relied on quirks in the human psyche to market this product. It seems to me that this is our continual attraction to the familiar. Even though people were annoyed by the ads they consistently picked that sauce because it was familiar. It was a good sauce but there were a number of good sauces out at that time (late 60s-early 70s) so the marketing people used a ploy to get people to try the sauce. Once they tried it they were content with it and it became their regular brand for the most part.

This movie goes one step beyond that idea. It actually operates on the premise of changing peoples' minds about what is preferable as a societal norm and then markets a product so that members of the society can achieve that norm. For example, a company that sells fattening fast food wants to open operations in an area where people are mostly slender and fit and healthy. They know that a fast food joint is going to be received like a beer fart in church in this area. So what they do is start off by marketing the idea that skinny is out and fat is the new standard of beauty. This message gets hammered into the public's head for a while and then the fast food chain starts opening restaurants in that area. The public understands that the quickest way to achieve this new standard of beauty is to dine at one of these new eateries and, sho nuff, in pretty short order the citizens start to conform to the new standard.

Really an interesting concept and not so far out of the realm of reality when I think about it.

Anybody else seen this?   

Haven't seen it, but will check it out, mang.