What Advertising Strategies Are You Falling For? Is It Costing You Money?

In a 2021 report by Yahoo!Sports on the Sports Apparel Company Nike, the company is said to have made US$ 42.3 billion from Its Jordan brand. This is a 17% increase from the previous year.

Of course we know why the Jordan brand sell well. This is because many associate the Air Jordan shoes with Michael Jordan who many consider (Americans at least) as the greatest basketball player in the world.

But the appeal of Michael Jordan goes beyond the shores of America. I have lived for example in both countries of Australia and the Philippines and could attest to the fact that I don’t fail to see people wearing Air Jordans when I walk the streets.

This is one of advertising’s most potent strategies in making consumers part with their money. Its what is called the “Just Like…” Label. Where people buy a product because they associate themselves with the celebrity who also owns the product they are buying.

Here are a few more advertising strategies that you should be aware of:

You would often hear about brands being advertised as “Old Fashioned… Goodness” or “Made The Old Fashioned Way”. As soon as you hear these words your brain which has been preconditioned from hearing thousands of advertisements in your lifetime would think:

“This product must have been made by senior employees who have grown with the company and are therefore caring of their products and customers. They must be located in quiet towns with hardly any pollution…”

In short, you think of lofty things when you hear the word “Old Fashioned” which gives you the instinct to buy the product at a premium as compared to a more “commercially” made product which you think is made in a modern sweatshop factory full of low paid workers.

But old fashioned can mean many things. It could mean “made with old, dirty, rusting, polluting, dangerous, and inefficient equipment” for one. You know, equipment made before the days when there was government quality assurance checks on factory machines.

This is especially important if you are buying food items which can be contaminated by old and dirty facilities and machines and even workers! I suggest that you don’t pay premium on a product just because its labeled as “old fashioned”.

The Home Made label can have many iterations: “Made from the Great Country Of…” or “Bottled At The Source From…” and so on. All the iterations like to paint a picture that there’s something special about a product just because it’s been made at a certain place.

But consider the fact that almost all the products we see at the supermarket and even malls are all being mass produced in some sort of factories which are very unlike houses which are too small to handle large scale manufacturing facilities.

It’s more than likely that the advertisers are not telling the truth to you. Besides words such as “Home Made Goodness” is supposed to mean products made with ingredients found in an ordinary home.

But we all know that for example, canned goods cannot be home made because they use preservatives and other chemicals which are not found in the ordinary home using ordinary home machines.

And to put nail in the coffin, there are government laws (at least in the US) which prohibits the use of houses as manufacturing facilities especially regarding food products. Again, you’re wasting money if you pay premium for products with these kinds of labeling.

Right off the bat, there’s no such thing as a 100% Fresh… product except maybe for the live animals you have to slaughter yourself, but I guess the majority of consumers don’t buy live animals and slaughter it themselves.

Even the bottles of so called “100% Fresh Oranges” you see at the supermarket is not fresh. To prepare these orange juices, they would have to be picked from the tree, juiced, and added with preservatives. Yes, the orange juice you drink come from dead plants/fruits/vegetables.

Yes, this is correct. As soon as an animal is slaughtered and becomes meat it is not fresh anymore. Once a fruit has been plucked from the tree/plant or when a vegetable is plucked from the ground, they’re not fresh anymore.

Frozen foods gets a bad reputation just because they’re frozen and not sold as soon as they’re collected. But frozen food has been scientifically proven to maintain their nutrient content even though they are several months old already.

As usual, please don’t pay premium for products just because they’re advertised as fresh. Even the much cheaper frozen foods can be a better option at times because at least they retain their nutrients for a much longer time and don’t rot easily.

Speaking of nutrients, every food can be nutritious if given the advertising twist. For example, many see fast food dishes as unhealthy but given the advertising twist and they can be marketed as food that is full of energy.

This is already being done with breakfast cereal. These foods are full of sugar but are being marketed as breakfast energy food to keep people going all day. Of course they don’t advertise that the energy is actually derived from all the sugars that cereals contain.

Advertisers especially like to market fruit, vegetables, meats and so on as full of nutrition of some kind. But in essence, one company’s fruit, vegetable and meat has basically the same nutrition content as another company. The only difference is in the way they’re advertised.

At the risk of sounding repetitive, please don’t buy a product just because of the nutrition content. If you can, research if the nutrition content of a product actually benefits you or maybe you’re just wasting money buying said product at a premium.

We have been preconditioned by advertising companies and society itself since birth to substitute a product’s quality with the celebrity endorsing it. While there are celebrities who wouldn’t sully themselves hawking low quality products, there are those who do.

This is especially true in the age of the Social Media Influencers where just about anyone who has attained some level of fame can become product endorsers. There are in fact many people who are so enamored by a celebrity that they don’t question their endorsements.

This is especially very apparent in the area of personal care products especially skincare. It is well documented that in countries predominantly dominated by colored-skin people, advertisers would use a white skinned model to advertise their skin whitening product.

This is because advertisers know that the buyers of their product would buy their skin whitening product because they think their skin could be as white as the white skinned model’s skin which is not at all true.

I am currently living in a country where most of the people are colored-skinned and I can attest to the fact that a lot of local and foreign companies have been capitalizing on this advertising strategy to make lots of money off unsuspecting customers.

This is has many word iterations. For example: “Used by most mothers…” or “The Number One Choice Of Doctors” and so on. Whatever the wording used, the message boils down to this point: “Use our product because a majority of people use it.”

But the question you should ask is: “By how much?” Is the majority 100%? 75%? or most cunningly 51% only. This is the reason why you should be wary of such labelings in a product especially if percentage information is not being stated.

Another question you should ask yourself is this: “Does the majority decision even count? What if I want to be in the minority?” For example, Nike shoes might be the most popular and best-selling sports shoe brand but what if you don’t like Nike shoes on a personal level?

Advertisers use this strategy because they know a lot of people or consumers like to have the feeling of “belonging”. People or customers don’t want to become social outcasts. Many big companies grow even bigger because they are able to harness the “belonging strategy.”

The central point of their message is: “Everyone else is using our product, how come you’re not? There must be something wrong with you.” Don’t let yourself follow the herd principle and only buy products that really appeal to you.

I think this is best explained with an example: Remember Jared Fogle? He became rich because he became an endorser for Subway after losing 200 pounds. He allegedly lost this much pounds in weight after eating only Subway and exercising.

At first, he became an instant influencer for many ordinary fat people and even normal people who are finding it very hard to shed weight. He was marketed as your average guy next door which all the more made him very convincing.

Later on, it was discovered that his extreme weight loss was not only through a diet of Subway dishes and exercise. He in fact had lots of help in losing his weight. This damaged his reputation but this was not the worst.

A US court has also sentenced him in 2015 from up to 15 years in prison for possession or distribution of child pornography and traveling across state lines to have sex with a minor. This revealed to the world that: “Normal Person” Jared Fogle is not normal at all but a sex criminal.

Many advertising companies use supposedly “normal” or “plain” people as models for their product because they know that they can elicit the trust of consumers into buying their brand. As Jared Fogle has proven, there is hardly anything normal with some product endorsers.

There are some companies who would go as low as slinging mud to their competitors. They would publicly berate their competitors while at the same time praise the virtues of their products.

But their actions hide the fact that no product is perfect. For example, you might have the best tasting cheese as an advantage of your cheese product but it could also be very expensive. Some cheese companies would go as far as insult the taste of a competitor’s cheese.

This is also for example, very apparent in the murky world of politics. Political candidates would smear mud at another candidate just because they are their competitor and for no other reason.

Most often, consumers don’t give a second thought on the virtues of a product. Many consumers for example buy on the basis of price alone and learns too late that it is actually costing them more to buy the cheap product.

It is a well known fact that many cheap products are cheap because they are also of cheap quality. This is not saying that you should buy the most expensive product but rather, the advice is to study first the merits of a product before buying them on impulse just because they’re a bargain or on sale.

Advertisers/Companies use a lot of strategies to make customers buy their products. Many companies are for-profit businesses and their main goal is to make money for themselves and their shareholders. That is why they like to earn as much many as they can.

Consumers should be very wary of the advertising strategies previously mentioned because as the saying goes:

“Caveat emptor”: This is a Latin phrase that translates to "let the buyer beware.” “It means that an individual buys at their own risk. Potential buyers are warned by the phrase to do their research and ask pointed questions of the seller.” (from Investopedia)

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