OCTOBER 2004 IN
RICK ASTER’S WORLD
It is not hard to find people who are completely sick of advertising. To these people, television commercials are annoying, junk mail is a major nuisance, billboards are an eyesore, and car sales people are people who don’t have the skills to get an honest job. What is it about advertising that bothers some people so much? In a word, the problem is push.
Push is, actually, the sales culture’s own word for what they do intentionally that drives so many people up a wall. Push is a whole panoply of tricks that advertising, marketing, and sales people use to get people to do things they don’t really want to do. If a manufacturing company is introducing a new product with little obvious value and wants to sell it in huge volumes, sales culture says there is only one answer: lots of push.
Push means getting people to pay attention to something that won’t help them do what they want to do. If you know how to get people to try a product that they probably aren’t going to like at all — if you ever said, “Just try it!” about soggy, salty brussel sprouts — then you have some push in you. Sales people go to workshops to learn push. The workshop leaders tell them they are learning how to overcome people’s resistance to change, how to get people to take a chance on something new that might or might not help them. To the customers, though, these sales people are just pushy.
Of course, the same workshop leaders will warn you not take push too far, because there is a problem with push. The problem with push is that eventually, people will see it as aggression, and they may respond in a defensive manner. But, as sales culture says, you have to take that risk because there are so many people out there competing for people’s attention that you have to push, you have to be in people’s faces just a little bit more than everyone else if you want people to pay any attention.
From a sales point of view, that sounds logical, but it means the potential customer is faced with a cacophony of sales talk. And how do people respond to all this push? The natural reaction is to respond, in one way or another, with more resistance than you had to begin with. In sales culture, this is called push back.
How do people push back? A few will actually argue back, dismissing a sales person’s ideas or yelling insults at the most amazingly stupid suggestions from commercials on the television screen. Some become more demanding, saying, in effect, “I won’t buy unless you give me much more than you want to.” But it’s human nature to want to get out of any kind of unnecessary conflict, so almost everyone eventually adopts a strategy of avoiding push. We “push back” by tuning out and going away.
You have no choice. If you read all the mail that came to an average American household, you would have no time to do anything else. If you seriously watched all the commercials that interrupt a television program, you would have a hard time remember the program itself. And if you bought everything that sales people emphatically recommended, you would have no money left to spend. You have to have ways of filtering out most of the push. And this has become so automatic that it’s easy to forget how far people go to avoid marketing messages. We all know people who:
This list could go on forever, and you might find that many of the actions on the list are things you’ve done even though you never really stopped to think about it. If you did stop to think about it, though, you could always find more ways to avoid the hassles of commercial culture.
Advertisers say they have to do more than ever to reach you with their messages, but in the long run, you have more power over your environment than advertisers do, and they can’t force to you to receive the ever-increasing volume of sales talk that they keep sending out.
Next month: Back to Vanilla
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