David Foster Wallace Quotes

'Be comfortable with who you are', reads the headline on the Hush Puppies poster. Are they mad? If people were comfortable with who they were, they'd never buy any products except the ones they needed, and then where would the advertising industry be?

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

Advertising is so touchy-feely. You have to speak to the psyche of the people. I'm not very good at that.

All our advertising is propaganda, of course, but it has become so much a part of our life, is so pervasive, that we just don't know what it is propaganda for.

One cannot sell anything to a satisfied man. Ergo, make him want something new, or take away something that he has and then sell him something to take its place.

Enchantment is the purest form of sales

To be a success in advertising you must want to fill other people with a passion for possession.

The point of advertising is to destroy markets.

Promotion and perception are synonymous twins of art marketing.

We've been sold a concept of joy through advertising. It was somehow sold to us through a Gucci bag or something.

It seems to me probable that of all our economic life the element on which we are inclined to place too low an estimate is advertising.

The American conception of advertising is to arouse desires and stimulate wants, to make people dissatisfied with the old and out-of-date and by constant iteration to send them out to work harder to get the latest model - whether that model be an icebox or a rug or a new home.

I think the central metaphor of the movie is this notion of what the advertising industry does. In order to make someone want to buy something, they first have to make them feel bad about who they are in order to sell them that thing which will make them whole again, and happy again.

You shake a slogan at an American and it's just like showing a hungry dog a bone.

True marketing starts...with the customer, his demographics, his realities, his needs, his values. It does not ask, "What do we want to sell?" It asks, "What does the customer want to buy?"

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.

Advertising is a symbol-manipulating occupation

I just saw an ad the other day that I couldn't believe. There was this woman-and I think it's degrading to womankind-she was going out of her mind over a new product called "A Thousand Flushes." Here she was in her toilet, saying, "Oh, I love this product!" and, "My life is complete!" Good God-if your joy depends on "A Thousand Flushes," you're sick!

We learned that a product doesn't sell just because you're trying to do good in the world. You still have to have a healthy distribution, a good marketing strategy, and price the product properly.

Good advertising does not just circulate information. It penetrates the public mind with desires and belief.

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

These ways to make people buy were strange and new to us, and many bought for the sheer pleasure at first of holding in the hand and talking of something new. And once this was done, it was like opium, we could no longer do without this new bauble, and thus, though we hated the foreigners and though we knew they were ruining us, we bought their goods. Thus I learned the art of the foreigners, the art of creating in the human heart restlessness, disquiet, hunger for new things, and these new desires became their best helpers.

Good marketing offers us a view of the world. Bad marketing offers us a product to buy.

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

Ads push the principle of noise all the way to the plateau of persuasion. They are quite in accord with the procedures of brainwashing.