To me, it's the end game for consumerism. The products themselves just get in the way -- the feeling is what you really want to have.

It's not new, I think. Just perhaps a little more blatant, and for more companies, than previously.

It is at least the end game for marketing and advertising. E.g. Red Bull marketing wants to sell you the feelings of a life style, not a caffeinated beverage.

It’s definitely been around for a long time for some companies (I think auto manufacturers have been trying to sell cars = personal freedom and status as long as the car has existed) and you could argue that governments and religions have been doing it all of history, but I do agree that a lot more companies have been doing it the past several decades. Every damn podcast ad has to be about how a razor, mattress, or pair of underwear is a defining, empowering lifestyle choice.

I think there is a danger, because to many having a car is a person freedom (and a not inconsiderable one). If you are selling the benefits, selling the benefit that you can go anywhere you want with a car is a pretty obvious choice.

As for the style: conspicuous consumption may have been the first consumption, after basic subsistence.

Yep, this. It's branding 101. Rolex is not in the wristwatch business! They sell luxury, period.

[Off topic] I'm a chess fan/player, and that 'endgame/end game' metaphor always confuses me (and a lot of players) and seems wrong. It seems to just mean endy things like result, final result, outcome, final phase etc.

In chess games, often there is no endgame - the game ends in the middlegame, or sometimes even in the opening. If there is an endgame, not uncommonly most of the whole game is the endgame, 60% or 70% or more.

In movies, almost every time you see people playing, someone moves and says "Checkmate", which is also, I guess, around the time meant by 'end game' - right at the end of the game. That's just not much like what the word means in chess. except, sure, it's the last of 3 phases (opening, middlegame, endgame).

It's not widely perceived as a Chess metaphor anymore; like David S. Pumpkins, it's its own thing.

I think that is a pitfall of specialization and fiefdoms actually. To focus on finer and finer details they must start to disregard or abstract away the other portions because otherwise they aren't specialists by definition. While needed at times it comes with disadvantages of focusing on the 'art' as it were as opposed to the end result and it crops up in all sorts of large projects. The car actually being controllable gets in the way of making it more powerful.

"Sell the sizzle, not the sausage"

The lifestyle depicted IS the product. It’s an entire ecosystem of values, where buying a Pixel allows you to participate.

This is the bullshit ads try to sell you. Few of the products have actual ecosystem of shared values, much less have those values shared by the company making the product.

consumers are ok with ads that have basically nothing to do with the product because we aren't paying for them and they are not offensive.

companies who pay for them are ok with them because they work.

How could you possible draw any kind of line in the sand on how closely the advertising needs to be to the product being advertised? I don't think that's possible. For something tangible, like an iPhone, sure. Show the product, talk about its features, whatever. But lots of things aren't that tangible, or if you talked about them that way the people who saw the ad wouldn't even understand what was being offered.

#1 rule of sales is that people don't buy products, they buy transformation. The product is the tool to get that transformation, so it's often more effective and more relevant to pitch the end result (which can be something immeasurable like a feeling) instead of the actual product. And there's nothing inherently wrong with that.

The issue here is different entirely. It's making a person a brand rep without their consent, because they're conveniently deceased.

> #1 rule of sales is that people don't buy products, they buy transformation.

It is so, and yet here I believe is the point where ads/sales become dishonest. I'd gladly seen all of them banned past this point. Ethical ads should communicate existence of a product/service, the products it solves, and the special features it utilizes. They shouldn't abuse people's emotions.

I think it is occupational ease more than anything else in marketing. Having to deal with the actual details is 'boring' even if it is relevant and advertising is all about what sounds good instead of actually being good. That is a widespread issue with society in itself and trend following. And metric-itis operates based upon things like 'was the ad or brand remembered' as opposed to 'did it actually improve sales'? You get what you measure for.

As for being okay with it the whole thing falls into tautology logic - it works because it works until it doesn't. If people actually cared enough about relevance than the problem would take care of itself by being absolutely useless.

Let's not assume the industry is irrational in it's metrics.

Coca-cola sells 5 cents of sugar water for $1.75 via advertising, except the advertising for some reason is about poorly-animated polar bears or some demographically-balanced group of people having a good time. Maybe they know more than we do.

Coca-Cola plays in different league than 99% of companies. Coca-Cola and McDonalds are ages-old established brands, a huge parts of western culture. They can't possibly get any more exposure than they already have. I do not know what is their exact strategy, but to me it seems more about maintaining constant level of presence in people's minds, so that everyone just remembers they're still there and still good.

Seeing as they made their name an adjective in Japan “I feel Coke”, I believe it.

I can't speak for society but, personally, I don't have any more issues with brand advertising than I do with product advertising.

And, equally personally, I wouldn't want anyone to do anything about this. I find it quite useful.

I realised some time ago (actually is was when Claudia Schiffer advertised a Citroen, but that's not important) that, if the ad agency wants you to be distracted from a product, that's valuable information about the product.

Because we live in the end stage of our civilization.

Because products are rarely compelling enough on their own to occupy brain space, but feelings and experiences are.

Which is one of the reason I call most ads abuse (and got into a lengthy subthread because of that recently). If a product is not compelling enough on its own to occupy brain space, what entitles the seller to perform emotional trickery to gain the place in people's minds they're not supposed to?

If the ad is engaging, that's enough for consumers.

We'd rather be entertained then listen to some boring talk about a product we don't really care about.

Seems a funny thing to moralise over. Is it a problem?

No matter his personal practices, this guy was basically a secular saint.

So I personally do think it matters that his name and image would be used to sell smartphones.

I realize the production company has a good sized staff, a board and ambitions to carry on their mission.

But paying for it this way looks cheap and like they aren’t really trying.

Given the weight and voice of this brand I suspect they could have earned just as much through some kind of crowdfund.

I think it is a bad sign of things to come w regard to the use of me Rogers content, unfortunately.

This taps into a bigger question about the use of a dead persons name and image to make money.

This came up when Kurt Cobain was made to sing any song on Rock Band a few years ago: https://www.alistdaily.com/media/bon-jovi-weighs-in-on-cobai...

While I carry no celebrity, it would matter to me if my name and image were exploited in a way that was against my values.

One of the things that supposedly sets us apart from “animals” is that we have respect for and bury our dead. I’d say that foundations, organizations or “estates” that need to exploit the persons image for financial reasons fail to meet this test.

I would say it can be because it makes ads manipulative. Think for example of the Axe ads that try to tell people that the deodorant will turn them into attractive romantic partners, I don't think that's very likely.

Advertisement in a good sense increases the information a consumer has about a product, and would help a consumer make a more accurate choice. Advertisement that just plays to the lizard part of our brains accomplishes the opposite.

The entire advertisement industry is basically a hundreds of billions dollar experiment on how to reshape human attention. If a group of scientists or a government would run an experiment of that size on the human cognition, people would probably be very concerned.

This is part of why the concept of the free market economy makes little sense to me.

The free market revolves around the idea that eventually bad players lose and good players selling what's best for the consumer win. Rational buyers buy what's best, so producers have to adapt to that.

But if the sale of your product depends not on its quality, or its benefit, and is so influenced by a "gut feeling" and irrational association of your brand to an idea, then what gives? The whole thing devolves into "who can advertise best" instead of "who can build the best thing".

Which is actually largely what we are seeing is happening. Both in industry and in politics.

In industry some of the biggest companies in the world live off of ads. This is crazy if you think about it. So much of the internet, TV, radio-- these huge infrastructure and production projects employing thousands upon thousands, producing billions of dollars. Google, Facebook, other SV companies employing some of the brightest minds solving some of the biggest SW engineering challenges-- exist off of the value people put to ads.

In politics, it's all increasingly about advertising a feeling and less about the product (policy). Is it that strange that the guy who had the most air-time, shook people the most, and has most experience with being a screen personality won the last US presidential elections, when the population has, thought the years, learned to be susceptible to gut-advertising via constant, steady bombardment from the advertising industry?

I've concluded this is what a free market economy gets you, because as a company or producer optimizing for survival doesn't mean optimizing for being the best out there, just "seeming" the best.

>But if the sale of your product depends not on its quality, or its benefit, and is so influenced by a "gut feeling" and irrational association of your brand to an idea, then what gives? The whole thing devolves into "who can advertise best" instead of "who can build the best thing".

Ding ding ding. Advertising is deception. Arguments otherwise are dancing around the issue. The whole point is to make you do or buy something that you otherwise wouldn't, and the ways they resort to to make you do this are getting ever more insidious.

When you see beer ads, they don't actually advertise beer. Their job is to implant the idea that beer will make you fun, attractive, that without it you're missing out on incredible life experiences. That if you just go out and get some you will leave your drab miserable life behind and dance with a smoking hot girl in a sunset. That all those beautiful, young, fun, attractive people are laughing and having fun and having beer. It's all about manipulating your weak mammal brain to make you buy stuff. It's manipulative and immoral.

In every economy, companies optimize for survival by "seeming" the best. The only part that changes is the audience to which it seems.

This is a reason to keep iterating on and fixing "economies" until we can get as close match as possible between "seeming" the best and actually being the best.

The "best" by which metric and whose evaluation? This is another way of asking, "Who are we going to forbid from determining for themselves these answers?"

In this case, by universal metric of honesty. The evaluated party is the one both creating their product and telling about it; it would be nice if that party was incentivized to create a) quality products, that b) work as advertised.

How do you think a reputable perfume manufacturer should advertise their product?

Should they not?

What dry information can they give you about their product to better inform you with images and audio alone?

Sniff strips (in pretty much every fashion magazine) are the obvious answer here. Unlike most products, the actual end-product itself can be shipped inside a magazine. If you like the smell, there's an obvious paid action to take. If you don't, you're at least informed that it's not right for you. Perfume advertising with samples is one of the most direct and pure forms of advertising I can think of: pure information and pure product.

The GP is talking about deodorant, not perfume. The main selling point of deodorant isn't how it smells, but how it makes you not smell. That's not something you can ship as a sniff strip.

Besides of course the obvious issue with the target market of a "manly deodorant" line having almost no overlap with people who read fashion magazines.

You'd have a point if the deodorant in question here was scentless, but it's not. It heavily markets its fragrance, like its ability to supposedly attract hot women.

It's absolutely a deodorant + perfume combo, and primarily the latter from my experience as a niño. Go smell some Axe next time you're in Walmart and see for yourself. Or smell a junior high boy's locker room.

The comment I was responding to here says "perfume", so i was responding to the inquiry as to how one could advertise perfumes.

FWIW, a lot of things are fashion magazines, including GQ, which is mostly read by Gentlemen, as the title implies. There is plenty of space to advertise to Manly Men in magazines, both fashion oriented and not.

Separately, I've yet to see an ad for men's deodorant made in the last, say, 30 years, that emphasized as its primary selling point how it makes you not smell. I'm open to counterexamples, I just can't think of any.

Which makes me wonder, is deodorant something that should be advertised at all?

If your deodorant has some new unique property, etc, then it makes sense to advertise that. And I remember deodorants that did advertise they were careful on the skin, or didn't stain your shirt, were "invisible", longer-lasting, etc.

But if deodorant development has reached a point of stagnation, where no new deodorant tech is being invented and all deodorants are essentially the same, then we're in an interesting economic arrangement.

Macro-economically speaking, is this a company or industry that should keep on growing? The point of capitalism was supposed to be that there was competition in R&D (which brought about progress) and margins (which brought about availability through affordability) and eventually things like the ballpoint pen came to be: ubiquitous products that are extremely cheap and effective at what they do.

You don't see advertisements for the ballpoint pen any more: it's period of R&D and cheapening are long past. The industry is mature, it's done developing and is now producing a steady supply of ballpoint pens for a steady number of employees making a living off of it.

It's just companies today seem addicted to unbound growth and have discovered that R&D and margins aside, they can use advertising to sell more of anything by meddling with emotions.

> You don't see advertisements for the ballpoint pen any more

Google "Ballpoint pen" and you get a whole top row of sponsored links trying to sell ballpoint pens to me.

But sure, ballpoint pens aren't advertised on prime-time TV like products sold to 20-something trying to get an edge on the dating life (deodorant, hairspray etc.). That's an especially lucrative market, but not the target audience of most products.

> Macro-economically speaking, is this a company or industry that should keep on growing? The point of capitalism was supposed to be that there was competition in R&D[...]

One of the main points of capitalism is to decentralize the decision making about what's worthwhile economic activity to a bunch of uncoerced individual decisions.

Does that result in a bunch of money being spent on "pointless" products? Sure, but who's to say what's so important that everyone should do without it?

Look at how websites describe scents:

e.g. https://www.luckyscent.com/product/21631/black-by-comme-des-...

>Notes: Cedarwood, vetiver, leather, liquorice, birch tar, pepperwood, black pepper, incense

This is the information people who are buying perfume (for reasons other than brand image) actually care about. Sure, there's a lot of other marketing text there, but literally none of that information is in perfume ads (without sniff strips).

I don't think people need perfume, thank you. The fact that a perfume manufacturer is "reputable" has more to do with the efforts of their marketing department than it does with any sort of merit.

I think this is such an extreme and oppressive vision of society that it's probably not worth trying to debate it with you.

Oppressive? Did I say we should ban perfume or perfume manufacturers? No. Just because I think they're unethical doesn't mean I think they should be illegal.

Replying to myself because chrisseaton deleted his own post:

Nothing of the sort. I didn't say anybody should be banned from doing any sort of marketing. I merely said that I think people don't need perfume and that the sort of marketing in these industries is unethical.

Convincing people they need something they never knew they needed through psychological manipulation is unethical, period. It happens all over society and it's really too bad. But trying to ban it would create a dystopian society which is arguably worse.

There are more than 2 options for dealing with unethical behaviour, apart from "lock them up and throw away the key" and "let them run amok, doing whatever they want", there is the possibility of rational debate. The vast majority of the time, I choose the third option.

If my (hypothetical, future) daughter wanted to buy a bottle of perfume, I wouldn't forbid her from doing so, I'd talk to her about marketing and beauty standards and so on. I'd try to persuade her that she's a perfectly good person without needing a product like that to augment her.

>If my (hypothetical, future) daughter wanted to buy a bottle of perfume, I wouldn't forbid her from doing so, I'd talk to her about marketing and beauty standards and so on.

Some (most?) of us wear perfume because we like to be enveloped by a pleasant scent - it's for ourselves as much as it's to "impress" others.

The usual excuse for advertising being morally acceptable is that it informs potential customers about the product. If it has nothing to do with the product then its only possible purpose is deception.

The iconic "1984" Apple ad was about as abstract as anything on today's screens. It did tell users about the product, indirectly, by telling them about the values of the Apple brand and company.

And I'd much prefer to watch that than the harrowing "Head-On: Apply directly to the forehead" commercial.

  telling them about the values of the Apple brand and company

It was ad genius but said nothing about any Apple "values". It instead attacked the IBM/DOS world as an Orwellian nightmare disrupted by a hot, busty female. It was about destruction, not "values".

> And I'd much prefer to watch that than the harrowing "Head-On: Apply directly to the forehead" commercial.

Haha that commercial is so entertaining in its absurdism

I wouldn't say deception. It's more a manipulation. I'm sure there are hundreds studies in neuroscience and behavioral economics that tell advertisers exactly which buttons to push. Most ads, especially brand advertisement aren't supposed to effect an immediate reaction. Way down the line they may influence you subconsciously though.

> The usual excuse for advertising being morally acceptable is that it informs potential customers about the product.

And it's a bullshit excuse at that.

Advertising uses concepts developed in propaganda and psychological warfare to play on human insecurities in order to make them feel inadequate without your product.

If an advert doesn’t mention the product it seems very hard to say that it’s deveiving you about what the product will do, doesn’t it?

It's deceiving you in a far less obvious and ham-fisted way: it's associating a brand with your lifestyle and your identity. It's using insights gained from psychology research to try to hack your brain into thinking that this brand is part of your tribe.

And it works. To an obscene degree, really.

Sure. The simplest, and in my view strongest, argument for why we as a society should accept and tolerate advertising is that it provides a mechanism for consumers to learn about things they want. But, if you accept that, then you have to deal with this problem: why do we still allow advertising which cannot inform? Like, what societal value is provided by an ad for your local power utility? Either you already knew about them, or you don’t need to know about them. Conversely, what value is presented by an ad which is designed to not inform me about anything?

> The simplest, and in my view strongest, argument for why we as a society should accept and tolerate advertising is that it provides a mechanism for consumers to learn about things they want.

This is a solid argument, but it's used mostly as motte-and-bailey, a bait-and-switch. Ads are important because they are the mechanism for product discovery. But in reality, most ads are not like that - they're no longer about discovery, but about shifting where the spending goes. Personally, I'd be fine if all ads except purely discovery-related were to disappear.