Check out this video on marketing tricks of the trade! (You need only watch about the first two and a half minutes.)
Disgusting? Amazing? Inspiring? Painful? These marketing tricks of the trade are wild. And you’re right to feel both a little bewildered and betrayed by your favorite places after knowing that everything you’ve seen them push out to grab your attention has been fake. But if it didn’t grab your attention in the first place, would you have tried it to begin with? Maybe. But that’s not the case for everyone.
Who knew marketing was so devious?! Or at least it can be. Especially considering that the average person is exposed to nearly 5,000 ads a day. Pulling the wool over the eyes of an unaware, influenceable audience does feel conniving. And that’s mainly because of how advertisements affect our brain.
For example, beauty product ads are often cited as damaging as evidence suggests women’s exposure to models with different body types than them can increase their own bodily dissatisfaction, disordered eating, anxiety, and low self-esteem. Advertisers know how novelty and unexpected moments activate dopamine in the brain, causing our mind to correlate desire and pleasure with the source of the surprising elements we see in ads and even just moments of interruption. The best ads are proven to utilize the cognitive processes of emotions, which are strongly correlated with attention, decision-making, and memory.
Granted, marketing entails more than just advertisements. But that is a huge part of getting the potential customer/client/buyer/user to realize your product or service is exactly what they need. With all the ways social media sites and corporations store and track our data, it is becoming easier and easier for them to “corner the market” and feed the relevant ads directly to the widest audience that is already interested (even if they don’t actually know that they’re interested).
The fact that an ad can pop up on your Instagram feed after you searched for a similar product on Amazon or even just mentioned it at dinner is a bit unnerving. Even more so is when the ads pop up for things you have only begun to think about, but haven’t even started “shopping” for yet. Spooky. But effective. It helps to put into perspective just how much we (the general population in a capitalist society) are actually not the consumer. At the end of the day, we are what is consumed.
In the midst of all this, we’ve found it best to practice mindful habits when consuming media. Our goal is to see Mindful Media replace Social Media after all. But as a company, we see the necessity for marketing in order to grow and scale. That is the goal of our clients, as well as our desire for them. When mental healthcare practices thrive and expand, the mental health ecosystem does so too. And thus more people can find help and healing. Using proven methods to find your niche and focus promoting advertisements on them while still utilizing mindfulness is possible.
Marketing doesn’t have to be complicated. Simplify your practice with Simply Psych! We excel in practice management so you can grow and scale your practice. And that includes marketing! Videos, blogs, social media, advertisements, websites, t-shirts and merch, and more! Our team has your back whenever you decide to expand out to reach even more patients. Reach out to us at www.SimplyPsych.com to get started today.
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