Lauren Greenfield Quotes

Advertising is the art of convincing people to spend money they don't have for something they don't need.

Maybe it's naive to say, but it almost seems like, in the past, people tried to sell you something you would actually need, like a hammer or a broom or a toothbrush. But now there's this notion that they can sell you anything. And all they have to do is convince you that you need it.

Once a teen has been identified as part of the 'target market,' he knows he's done for. The object of the game is to confound the marketers, and keep one's own, authentic culture from showing up at the shopping mall as a prepackaged corporate product.

A lot of the advertisement is done by saying: first of all, have a complex about who you are.

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

In today's world, marketers reach inside the home and attempt to figure out not what's good for your daughter, because that is not their business, but what deep desires they can manipulate, stimulate and ostensibly satisfy in order to produce cold, hard cash.

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.

If you can pay enough people to buy your .99 ebook and review it positively, and crack one of Amazon's bestseller lists, readers are going to check it out. Especially at a low price point like .99. Customers are suckers for the fallacy that the cream rises to the top.

If you come up with something that's useless and promote it the right way, everybody will have to have it yesterday, even though they get up the next morning and wonder why they bought it.

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

No one has ever gone broke underestimating the insecurities of the gay and lesbian consumer.

Pink is female - but why? Are girls any more pink than boys? Are boys any more blue than girls? It's something that has been sold to us, mostly so other things can be sold to us.

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

The fashion industry [is] built on, and thrives on, our collective insecurity.

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

Brands are the solution, not the problem. Brands are how you sort out the cesspool. ... Brand affinity is clearly hard wired. It is so fundamental to human existence that it's not going away. It must have a genetic component.

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.