Is Advertising a Sham?

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Mises can make your head throb in pain but many of his works are sheer brilliance. Got a shelf full of them here. Fellow Austrian School father Friedrich von Hayek was the first writer I ever literally had to stop reading and go get a dictionary, which at the risk of seeming snooty or pretentious like Mises was the first and to date only time that's ever happened. The Austrians just couldn't write for the masses (one reason they never caught on, imo, despite the best efforts of Rothbard and Hazlitt to dumb it down a bit.)


Frank
 
guerilla said:
It is impossible for man to act without thinking. Thought and human action are intertwined. Propaganda or advertising, aims to inform our thinking in a manner that influences our ends. And since we are rational animals, he doesn't dismiss that when someone acts irrational according to your or my perspective (buys Acai Berry products) it may be perfectly rationalized by the person based upon their unique objectives and their interpretation of information.

An example might be showing 100 overweight people Acai berry landers. Then showing that same 100 people information about rebills and placebos. Both are advertising and propaganda, but they have decidedly different effects.

So to put it simply, Mises isn't saying that advertising can't influence decisions (or that we always have perfect intel, far from it), he's saying that advertising cannot supplant the decision making process which is internal and rational. Advertising can only seek to inform it.
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Maybe advertising has changed a lot since then and has become more of a science, but these days a lot of advertising is specifically targeted to the irrational mind.
There is more to our mind than the part that assesses, calculates, judges, etc.

There are parts of our brain that evolved before the parts that work rationally, and some of those parts even effect our actions/behavior.
So I agree with the fuck the FTC part, but think this article is naive in its confidence of people's ability to make rational decisions.

Another thing to consider is that when Mises wrote that there probably wasn't a huge middle class that depended on an economy where people buy and sell each other stupid shit.
 
Midas Touch said:
This not always true either. If the manufacturer were to go to cheaper materials/components, like in computer system building, he could increase production and keep his expenses close to where they were with the lower output. If the demand still increases he could save more money on production by getting his materials/components in larger quantities. So, again production increases but the costs for that production do not change too much.
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exactly - esp. if a large part of the actor's cost structure is fixed, i.e:

cost_curves_ALL5.gif


Midas,
You might enjoy this book - How We Decide:

Acclaim for
HOW WE DECIDE

"Explaining decision-making on the scale of neurons makes for a challenging task, but Lehrer handles it with confidence and grace. As an introduction to the cognitive struggle between the brain’s "executive" rational centers and its more intuitive regions, "How We Decide" succeeds with great panache.
- New York Times
 
guerilla said:
It was written in 1949. Mises has been dead for around 30 years or so.

It's not about tactics. It's about the economic value of advertising from a utilitarian perspective.



You are the last person who should be lecturing people on business models, right?

McDonalds got where they are originally by innovating, and mastering the franchise model. You might not think the food is good, but people like it, and will go out of their way to get it. Sure it's low quality, so is pizza. Cheese and tomato sauce on bread. Not exactly ground breaking.

But it is branding, and product differentiation, advertising, quality control, and customer service. There is a lot to running a business (as you well know) and if only advertising was enough (as the article states) then the candle makers might have been able to hold off the lightbulb.
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To me all the situations you have mentioned actually are a form or avenue for advertising.

Branding - How do you brand a product. Get it well known and sought after.

Product Differentiation <-- fuck thats a long word - You have to show and market the difference between your products and others

Quality Control - No to sure where you are going with this. Let's say it is the intention to give an item a better perception of quality. To accomplish this again you need to market to the person.

Customer Service - Even though good customer service should be a given. The presentation of the experience being attempted is a form of advertising. You think they where the retard white shirts and ties because Mcdonalds is some upscale place.

I am by no means a scholar on these things. I hate reading long winded, self pretentious crap.

I have failed in the past, I know. I will continue to do so in many things. There is one thing that puts me apart from most. I refuse to give up and learn from the mistakes.

I respect you let's not get that twisted.
 
Couldn't find the original article on Stanford's database, so here's another: Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med -- Abstract: Effects of Fast Food Branding on Young Children's Taste Preferences, August 2007, Robinson et al. 161 (8): 792

Cliffnotes: Children prefer food wrapped in McDonald's packaging, saying it's tastier, even when it's the exact same food as the non-McDonald's packaging, and even when it's not even food made by McDonalds.

The reason I mention this is because in the 40s, you can sure as shit assume that children were not being marketed to directly in the ways that they are now. TV was basically non-existent, radio was something for adults.
My point is that children are nowadays actually being taught to be consumers. Especially so in light of the number of corporations "sponsoring" school curriculum so they can actually pay for teachers and equipment

Not making a moral judgement on that issue, just pointing out that people actually are being taught to "obey".
 
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