"The Persuaders" is a documentary that talks about the things that brands do to reach people and how they try to excel in their ads.
The people in the documentary (marketers) do a lot of analogies, like for example they compare their consumers with cockroaches and their ads are bug spray , the more ads people are expose to, the more immune they become.... Which means they need to change their marketing strategy because people(consumers) are not buying the same crap anymore.
There are so many ads out there and many advertising companies are trying to break through that clutter, but at the same time it kinda backfires them because they are also becoming part of the clutter by making an opening to more clutter and the clutter cycle of ads keeps going...
Companies try to reach consumers' emotions, so they feel more identified with their brands and that way they will make profit of that. Yes it may sound cruel, but that's what marketers do, they find ways to get in to peoples heads so they can control their "needs" and manipulate them.
For example;
An Apple computer
It's just a computer.. But when you add a little something called "marketing"...
It's not a computer anymore, its a whole experience filled with emotions and promises that makes people think that with that computer they are part of something "different" and that will fulfill their need in "changing the world" just by buying it.
The last section of the film covered politics. This was my least favorite section out of them all.I know a little bit about politics and have an idea of what they are about but other than that I despise them. What the documentary said about marketing in politics was really messed up. It also mentions how they can manipulate the image that they want others to see to get elected to office and then keep that power. It's just like if the candidate was a product that they need to sell to people, sometimes though how they are marketed and how they really are don't match up. So yeah, politicians can lie their way through election and bend the truth the way they want, because its not marked as illegal like unlike marketing in products(if you lie about a product, it's illegal).
In conclusion, this documentary is like a review of all the things we've seen in our class, they mention stuff like branding, emotional branding, product placements and among other things... It pretty much describes how Marketing relates people's "needs" with their products, also it creates a need for a certain product with their ads.
