Advertisers can teach us a thing or two about human nature.
They know that they need to appeal to our base instincts to get the job done, without appearing to do so in the first place. Manipulate the target audience in a covert way, without giving the impression that you are; pull the right strings with the intent of generating favorable emotional and instinctual responses.
Advertisers have to deal with many constraints
- Knowing the core message that people respond to
- Getting this core message across in a lucid manner
- Appealing to an audience whose attention span is sub optimal
- Cutting through the clutter and leaving an impact on the audience
- Package all of this in as short a time slot as possible
- Covertly influence consumer behavior without giving the impression that they are
Needless to say, advertisers have my respect though I may not like them all the time. The more I see the subtext of today’s adverts, the more I see a reflection of the prevalent social narratives. They leverage contemporary narratives to push through their own agenda. One can’t really blame them for this, they are just doing their jobs.
One of the activities I genuinely enjoy is inferential reasoning, getting to the subtext of things by observing the way the world is without getting influenced by the morals of how the world is supposed to be. Let’s do this for some of the recent ads.
Disclaimer: The product, service, brand of the ads in question is largely immaterial, this is neither a critique nor an endorsement of these.
Observe these ads by two of the best-known brands in the country. They are both getting their own message across using the context of a married couple.
Q: What is common to both?
A: It is the woman who educates the man on the benefits of the offering.
Now take a step back and think for a few minutes. Think of all the ads you see on TV where the context is that of a married couple. Almost every ad follows the same script/narrative – the woman is the smarter one while the man is a likeable idiot who cannot get his own life together, leave alone making important decisions.
Can you recollect an ad where the roles are reversed? Good luck with that!
Why is it this way?
Women control > 80% of the consumption decisions in any household, irrespective of who earns the money.
The unsaid reason is that the world today has deep rooted feminist leanings. Men are shown in a dominant position only when the intended message is negative. Patriarchy and toxic masculinity are the favorite punching bags of the society today. When men hold the power, it is almost always portrayed in a negative manner, when women are shown holding the power it is almost always portrayed in a positive manner. Just thrown in a bit of humor so that men aren’t offended. Forget being offended, most men don’t even notice this subtext till it is pointed out to them. Yes, men are that clueless at reading between the lines. They have been conditioned over decades into laughing at themselves and not taking offence.
However, when the product in question is a car, the subtext of the message changes completely. There are very few automobile ads where the target audience is women, more often than not it is men who are the decision makers when it comes to buying automobiles.
Watch the imagery of car ads, men are shown to be masculine, dominant and in charge of themselves and their lives. You are not going to see too many car ads where men are shown as bumbling idiots. A car is seen as an extension of a man’s masculinity and his ability to provide, women are rarely shown to have intelligent opinions in this aspect. These ads do have women, but their role is to just doll up, look pretty and to go along for a good ride.
You always appeal to the base instincts of the decision maker, intellectual honesty and integrity be damned.
In this context I find one of the recent ads where the script is that of a wife educating her husband about ETF’s a little off. For more than 90% of the time, investment decisions are made by men, even when it is the woman who has earned most of the money. Take me at face value on this, I do this for a living.
Name three famous women stock market investors across the world. I bet you will struggle to come up with even one name immediately.
It is not about ability; it is about preferences and mindset. We have women becoming CXO’s at Fortune 500 companies on a global scale, yet we seem to have only a few women who are good investors even after 25+ years of equal opportunity in the developed world.
Investing calls for risk taking, conventionally a masculine trait. Whereas in insurance the key message is that of safety and protection, conventionally feminine traits. No wonder it is women who drill home the message of safety and protection in insurance ads. Men are goaded into buying insurance so that they can continue to play the role of a provider even if something were to happen to them. Watch a few ads, observe the world around you and come to your own conclusions.
Before you come at me and label me a primitive MCP who deserves to go back to the stone age, I did not make the world this way. I just observe and call things the way they are. For almost a decade now, I have been managing other people’s money. I must have worked with more than 100 families; I have seen just 4 instances where the decision maker is a woman. Of these four women, two of them do not have a spouse; so them making investment decisions is by design and not by choice. The preferences are that obvious and evident once see the data for yourself.
I care about data, facts and how the world actually is. Not about what sounds and feels politically correct. If not, I wouldn’t be a good investor in the first place, nor would you be reading what I write.
If you want to get a pulse of the dominant narratives in a society, watch the movies and advertisements. Rely on inferential reasoning and draw intelligent conclusions based on data. Watch the Indian films of the 70’s and 80’s, Nehruvian socialist ideals reflected in almost all of them. The capitalist was by default greedy, a bad human being and had sketchy morals. The factory worker was always the good guy, the victim and morally the superior person.
You cannot educate people and sell your product/service. That takes too much effort and resources.
You instead use the prevalent social narratives to position your product/service to appeal to the base instincts of the target audience in a subliminal way.
Appeal to their emotions and get the desired outcome, logic is too boring. Ask the politicians and the advertisers, they know this better than most others.
