The Dark Reality of Consumer Psychology
What marketing really is
“People want to be told what to do so badly that they’ll listen to anyone.”
- Don Draper
99% of marketing is just alleviating natural human anxiety.
Go outside and sit at a cafe or some other people-watching spot on a busy street in the business district of your city.
Look at all the people walking by.
They seem so confident, so put together. They act like they know exactly what they want out of life and how to get it. They seem like Real Grownups.
But that’s just the facade they’re presenting to the world.
Deep down inside, everyone is still a terrified little kid looking for a daddy to make everything OK. The carefully crafted image they present to the world is just a smokescreen covering up the sheer terror that’s lurking beneath the surface.
There’s a reason why Edvard Munch’s The Scream is such a famous painting. It’s because everyone can relate to it. The horror of existence is inside of all of us, 24/7.
The marketer’s job is to calm that feeling, at least temporarily (i.e. the amount of time it takes to swipe a credit card).