Advertising

Learn about advertising techniques and how companies influence your buying decisions!

Do you think you are influenced by advertising? Give reasons for your answer. What different marketing techniques do companies use to make us buy their products? Name at least 3 of them. Describe one TV commercial or advert you really (dis)like. Name the product and explain why you (don´t) like the way it is advertised. Write a few words about the commercial / advert. Match the nouns and verbs below with the definitions:to launch jingle to promote trailer pop-up ad consumer slogan to purchase logo billboard brand flyer banner ad consumer trailer to purchase pop-up ad slogan to promote jingle billboard flyer brand logo banner ad to launch Complete the text with the missing sentences. They can be found below the text. Big business has always wanted to see inside our heads. The marketing and advertising departments of the major corporations spend millions every year trying to work out what we want and then find ways to try and sell it to us. The more accurately businesses can predict would we, the consumers, are likely to buy and when and how much for, the more money they can get us to spend.Understanding consumers has not been particularly easy. Marketing teams have watched what we buy in supermarkets, they have measured how we have responded to their various promotional campaigns, and they have carried out endless service asking us why we buy what we do. However, it is not by any means an exact science. It seems that people do not always know what they are thinking. And even if they do, they do not always tell the truth.This is where “neuro” or brain science steps in. For the first time researchers have begun to wire consumers up to MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) machines to watch what actually happens inside people's brains when they are faced with consumers choices. The researchers followed the areas of activity lighting up inside the shoppers´ brains. Eventually they found that they could predict when a person would make a purchase. Something which is definitely of interest to the marketing specialists.This new area of science is called “neuromarketing”. Marketing departments of companies say they won't need to watch us shopping or ask us what we´d buy, they´ll just “read your minds”. Advertising will be cleverly deployed to persuade us more accurately to buy the products on show.This is good news for companies, as their massive marketing budgets can be used more effectively, but where´s the benefit for us?If businesses can know more about how we think than we do ourselves, they´ll have the power not just to influence us, but also to manipulate us.This cannot be a good thing for the general public and something will have to be done about it.So far, advertising regulations have merely restricted companies from making unsupported claims for their products. In future, they may have to go one step further and assess whether the marketers are having our behaviour as consumers altered in ways we cannot ourselves detect. Match the verbs from the text with their definitions. to alter to change to wire to attach a piece of recording equipment to a person or room to face to deal with something which is difficult for you to purchase to buy something to deploy to use something for a particular purpose to assess to judge a person or situation after thinking carefully about it