Andrew Shaffer Quotes

We function in a pack mentality. This is our tribe. And this is how we are exploited - sold a bill of goods and a household of products.

I've spent a lot of time trying to understand how all the big cosmetics companies get away with the placebo science and unscientific claims.

Things that price at $4.99 sell very differently than things that price at $5.

If the price is very cheap then it's almost certainly a fake.

People used to complain that selling a president was like selling a bar of soap. But when you buy soap, at least you get the soap. In this campaign you just get two guys telling you they really value cleanliness.

Marketers are out there trying to figure out how to get your money out of your child.

People who get to express their voice are paid by the people who make profit from it. So they're going to make you believe you have to spend your money buying these products otherwise you won't be happy. This is really wrong. Especially the implication it carries.

What really decides consumers to buy or not to buy is the content of your advertising, not its form.

When Republicans went to college and studied business, they took a course in marketing and found out how people really think. Progressives need to take a lesson from that.

The media, when it's functioning properly, protects the public against marketers and their ceaseless attempts to trick people into buying things.

There are some very plain, very simple offences in the Fraud Act 2006 that can be applied to price manipulation. For example, there's fraud by false representation. This is aimed at people who say something misleading to line their pockets or cause financial harm to someone else.

I want to make it clear to people that the idea of putting subliminable messages into ads is ridiculous.

And, in addition to all the miseries, the young are not wise. They have very little understanding about life. Who wants to live every day when you don't know what's going on? When people are manipulating you, telling you to buy this perfume and you'll be beautiful, or this pair of jeans and you'll be sexy-and you believe them! It's such nonsense.

I'm also looking for the psychological elements that fuel commodity culture. For example, if we imbue girls with deep insecurity about their bodies through images of an impossible ideal, we create a really vulnerable and avid consumer. If somebody feels that they're not OK without a certain product, you have a very deep and loyal market that will come back to the product again and again. Sometimes, this process is both rational and irrational.

I don't believe in asking people to spend $15 on something they've never heard before. That's just unreasonable.

I love advertising because I love lying. I think spending your life trying to dupe innocent people out of hard-won earnings to buy useless, low-quality, misrepresented items and services is an excellent use of your energy.

It did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase.

The language of salesmanship was no doubt born with the first fashions in fig leaves in the garden of Eden. A strange concept has grown around it: if something is to be sold, inaccuracy is not immoral. Hence the art of advertisement - untruthfulness combined with repetition.

We're all subject to the daily pressures of consumer persuasion.

What the advertiser needs to know is not what is right about the product but what is wrong about the buyer.

Consumers have to understand that the purpose of these claims is to get them to buy the product.

The triumph of advertising in the culture industry is that consumers feel compelled to buy and use its products even though they see through them.

In the end, advertising rests upon the fact that consumers are a fickle and superstitious mob, incapable of any real judgment as to what it wants or how it is to get what it thinks it likes.

You notice how they always put the fruit and veg at the entrance to the supermarket? You go in thinking 'this is a fresh shop, everything in here is FRESH! I will do well to shop here'. You never go straight to the bit with the toilet paper, loo brushes and such do you? You'd think 'this is a POO shop! Everything in here is themed on POO!

It doesn't take an incredible manner of analysis to reveal that our primary desires are incessantly stimulated to keep us basic consumers.