Influences and Behaviour: How to manipulate people and sell products.

As is becoming common, I have something of a foreword to add to these blog posts just to add a slightly less academic statement before we kick off with the intellectual studies.
This lecture makes us sound a great deal like terrible people, and I'm almost certain there are some graphic designers that aren't, I just figured that was worth mentioning.
Anyway, on with the writing.

This lecture was all about how we, as graphic designers, design around our audiences to influence their behaviours, so their reading to whatever it is we produced won't be opposed or negotiated, but rather preferred.

This is more commonly known as Manipulation: Changing someone else's actions and/or beliefs,       often without them knowing.

This concept was popularised after the second world war, when propaganda was no longer needed to stimulate the masses, men like Edward Bernays created Public Relations off the back of what was learnt, using the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses to get results in marketing, and such.

One such campaign that focused heavily on this, produced by Bernays, was the 'Torches of Freedom' campaign, which ran tangential to the women's rights movement at the time, essentially using is as traction and associating the brand with it, meaning one would be synonymous with the other, at least in the public eye.

Another set of similar, public relation marketing campaigns were employed on during the run up to the 2012 London Olympics.

The first being the logo created to represent the London 2012 games. This logo was created by Wolff Olins specifically for the Olympics, and is constructed out of a series of natural earth lines. However, the reason it was designed as it was, and why it won the bid, was because the logo was extremely flexible, allowing for it to be modified in a wide variety of colours and animated in a series of ways, all the while remaining true to the brands using it, showing the importance of flexibility and modularity in designs and branding.

One of the brands that had won the London 2012 sponsorship was Adidas, essentially claiming the monopoly on all shoe based advertisement relating to the London Olympics... so Nike needed to find a way to tie in their shoes with the events, otherwise it'd be a huge wasted opportunity for marketing.

They way they did, was by finding sporting people, in other places called 'London', and filmed acts of 'greatness', in order to appeal to a much more broad identity of people. Runners, divers, fighters, women, men, races and creeds were all included and advertised to, leading to a near across the board capitalisation on their potential market during the games, all the while staying in line with their advertising restrictions placed on them by Adidas.

Finally, there are potential dangers when trying to manipulate an audience, specifically when you pass into the realms of 'Deception'

Red Bull fell into this trap when, after being taken to court, they stopped using the slogan 'It gives you wings', because no mental or physical benefit was found after consuming Red Bull, leading to a loss of money in legal fees.
Brands are designed to inform their products, which perpetually feeds back into the brand, creating exponential growth for both product and brand. However, exaggerating (or just flat out lying) about the truth, whilst can be initially affective, can create a dissonance between both your brand, product and the audience consuming it.


In conclusion, whilst manipulation and deception shouldn't be the intention for a campaign, they are still something worth considering when trying to market to a specific audience.
It is always easier to market towards (and be extension, manipulate) audiences when you understand their mind set. Why they think they way they do, feel the things they feel, make their choices, all of these things are important to consider when designing an advertising campaign.