How Brands Manipulate You To Be Loyal

hey if you've been a long-term subscriber of mine if we've been in a long-term relationship together through this screen then you've probably heard me talking about making a video like this for upwards of two years or hey maybe you're new here and you arrived via a link that somebody sent you in an argument where you were digging your heels in about why a product you purchased was the best and anybody who disagrees with you is an idiot welcome after all one can only be coke or pepsi iphone or android pc or console xbox or playstation amd or intel target or walmart ableton or fl studio but god forbid if you don't have a binary position on all these things you're a centrist well this video is about how and why you and i are complete imbeciles when it comes to making logical educated decisions on how to spend our money and it's about how pretty much every brand exploits that let's dive right in in 1954 psychologist musafir sharif sent two dozen eleven-year-olds on buses to robbers cave state park in the mountains of rural oklahoma they were separated into two groups and each group initially didn't know that the other existed they chose the names the eagles and the rattlers and stenciled the names onto shirts and flags while spending five days participating in various summer camp activities after this the two groups were introduced and would compete in a baseball game and tug of war for a trophy before the end of the first day the rattlers spent the day practicing baseball and decided they'd put a sign on the baseball field that said keep off and threatened to physically harm anyone from the eagles who touched it the eagles burned the rattler's flag and the rattlers broke into the eagle's cabin and stole or destroyed their belongings the group started physically fighting and researchers had to separate them sharif improvised some ways to get the groups to work together like a bean collecting contest or showing a film for everyone but reintroducing the groups actually made them even more agitated with one another so researchers blocked the water supply on top of the mountain and blamed it on vandals and had the children climb the mountain to eventually find the problem and work together to remove a giant sack stuffed in the water outlet only the rattlers had canteens not only was there no fighting but when the water finally started flowing the rattlers let the eagles ahead of them in line as they were thirstier without the canteens this is one of the many studies and examples that led to social identity theory which breaks this down into three stages i'm going to use pre-agriculture evolutionary examples so it makes more sense why it is that we are this way stage one categorization social environments are incredibly complex but they are required for survival so we need to quantify ourselves into them i am a tall light-skinned man with dark hair stage two identification this is where we adopt the behavior of our categories or subcategories and when we were hunters and gatherers this was required to maximize reproductive fitness all the other tall men in my tribe are hunters i am a proud hunter as well stage three social comparison once we have identified our group identities it's very easy for us to distinguish between ourselves and others and in fact an individual's self-esteem depends on this hey come here i was just out hunting and i saw this group of short guys they had different skin markings and scars than we do not to be racist but they had darker skin than we did as well and we need to protect our resources immediately because as you know everybody who doesn't look like us is known to be evil again not to be racist it's quite easy to see how tribalism made a lot more sense for our survival in the early days but through many horrific examples it's also quite easy to see how we have long outgrown it that robber's cave study is infamous in psychology but what is not so infamous is that it was actually a do-over sharif had initially sent a different group of boys to robbers cave and once they realized that they were being manipulated they bonded together regardless of team affiliation and the entire experiment had to be aborted it seems like one of the solutions to tribalism is a common enemy whether that common enemy be another tribe or a larger problem i could think of some examples in my lifetime of sudden unity in the face of something bigger for example politics immediately after 9 11 or in the first few weeks of covet 19. this is just my thought but brands seem to be immune to this when they do horrible things there is some backlash but you're identifying with the logo rather than communicating with other customers for example if all google pixel phones got an update that bricked your phone two years after the first date that you turned it on to force you to upgrade it would be unimaginably ridiculous however there would be no mass exodus to samsung phones for example maybe what makes brands so immune to revolt is that the social identity with other humans is fractured by default and that's only multiplied by the fact that we've already spent so much time and money in the ecosystem speaking of brands i'm really curious to see which ones we'll be buying ad space in this particular video now this isn't part of the three social identity theory stages but i'm going to mention it while we're looking at our psychological origins because it plays a really strong role in all of this abandonment if your tribe abandoned you you were pretty much left for dead so even today just the idea of being abandoned or not fitting in triggers an immediate trauma or anxiety response that's why it feels so so bad to get broken up with or why a lot of people even say that getting dumped felt worse than losing a family member it's why the number one phobia in america is public speaking that's because public speaking risks ostracization and we associate ostracization with death all right let's have a thought experiment close your eyes come with me we're hanging out at a casino i generously give you two hundred dollars we decide to go over by roulette and you decide to put one hundred dollars down on any old random number so you put a hundred dollars down on 32 the wheel spins the ball rolls it lands on seven how upset are you from a scale of one to ten that you lost that game of roulette remember that number now i notice a server walking through the casino and i flagged them down and before you have a chance to put down another bet i pull you aside and ask you if you want a drink or a snack while that happens without you betting the roulette wheel spins the ball drops on 32 winning you nothing from a scale from 1 to 10 how upset are you now if you're like the vast majority of human beings your second answer is a higher number you are much more upset with the second scenario even though you didn't participate you're less upset with losing a hundred dollars than you are with completely breaking even what you're experiencing is the visceral evolutionary glitch in logic known as loss aversion and it's very well tied to our fear of abandonment we hate losing something more than we like gaining something and that is the phenomenon that drives the sunk cost fallacy stay with me it gets weirder in 1968 two researchers went to a horse track and approached 141 bettors about half were in the process of placing a bet and the other half had just placed it they were asked to rate the confidence of their horse winning from a scale from one to seven those who had not yet placed their bets averaged at fifty percent confidence those who had just placed a bet averaged at sixty nine percent confidence the only difference was that the money had changed hands on the bets on the flip side in a 2016 study 45 percent of ncaa sports fans refused a free 5 bet against their team this gets even crazier in 2007 the university of southern california conducted a study where participants had to make difficult decisions in sets between two different used cars each having their pros and cons one week later they were called back and presented with the decisions they had made a week prior except that 50 percent of them had been told that they made the opposite decision to what they actually had astonishingly there was no arguing people began to remember and even double down on decisions that they didn't even make somebody who chose a car that had low miles and high fuel efficiency now chose a car that had a powerful engine and a sunroof the results were actually repeatable in another experiment choosing between two different apartments our preferences are measured mostly by their consistency with our previous decisions even if we don't recall making a choice so what this suggests in all actuality is that if you've previously preferred shopping at target over walmart you will be happier shopping at target even if walmart has better prices and a better selection of the items that you need researching psychology in the way that affects how consumers make decisions is a very profitable path in science and there's no shortage of research to go through but by now you've probably already come to the conclusion that our brains are at odds with our ability to make objective logical decisions when it comes to how we spend our money i'm going to risk royally pissing off half of my viewers i'm going to frame all of this up with the lowest hanging fruit the daddy of long-term emotional manipulation and abusing our visceral fallacies in 1981 steve jobs took over the macintosh team and moved the entire department off campus to a two-story office building behind a gas station that was dubbed the texaco towers because all of apple's offices at the time were only one story he hung up a big pirate flag and spread the slogan it is better to be a pirate than it is to go with the navy which agitated other apple employees he very publicly made a 5 000 bet with the head of the apolisa team over which project would be done first and it wouldn't be long before the lisa team and the macintosh team had developed some very bad blood and allegedly the flag was vandalized and there were even some physical altercations now i have no idea if steve jobs was familiar with the robbers cave experiment but it would be quite a coincidence if he wasn't and either way it worked the macintosh team enthusiastically worked 80 to 90 hours a week while being paid the same as they were before that the leesa was more or less a flop mostly due to its price and lack of compatibility the macintosh came a little bit later and the iconic marketing wasn't about how good the macintosh was it instead painted ibm users as slaves to the point where jobs referred to ibm's dominance in computing as orwellian and hired ridley scott to direct the super bowl ad and it worked the macintosh was impossible to keep in stock at computer shops for about a year then sales started slumping as apple struggled to get software developers to rewrite their code for it by 1985 apple's board of directors supported removing jobs from the macintosh team and he wouldn't return until 1997 when apple was losing a billion dollars a year this is where the real conditioning begins where apple's marketing strategy is a social identity theory playbook here's to the crazy ones this is the famous ad where apple abstractly compares themselves to martin luther king or gandhi to quote the ad while some see them as crazy ones we see genius all right mack vs pc let's pick our teams here we'll take einstein picasso mlk muhammad ali amelia earhart yo pc since you think that all these people are crazy ones who you choosing for your team this guy john hodgman apparently a white screen literal infant music a cool attractive guy representing apple users and a lame guy representing everybody else the mac rarely boasts or brags in fact he's not even competitive apparently you're the finest desktop pc on the market at any price very nice just one man's opinion instead a third-party figure of authority usually appears to make the technical distinctions if you were a windows or linux user these ads made you irate but these weren't to get people to transition to apple's platform they were to condition those already in it to get new customers apple often makes deals with colleges for example the school of the art institute of chicago bundled macbooks with tuition whether or not the students needed one like most brands apple obviously hires and aligns themselves with likable celebrities but they are by far the brand that pays the most for product placement in film and television in fact they will allegedly not allow you to use their logo or trademark if a villain is using one of their products seriously try to find one antagonist in a movie or show who's using an iphone for a very long time apple used the combination of a premium pricing strategy and artificial scarcity if you had to wait in a super long line for a phone that costs 30 percent more than its competitors then the easy conclusion that you would come to is that it's the best phone on the market obviously not everybody has a kind of money but the big problem with apple's social identity marketing is that it's usually targeting a younger demographic and it's often detrimental i realize that it seems like i'm singling out apple here and i kind of am for the purpose of example and it's worth pointing out that pretty much every brand uses these tactics in one way or another but the one thing that apple does that is more utterly fascinating and toxic than anything else is the green bubble this doesn't really need explaining but if you're an iphone user and you get a text from an android user it is green the same color that you get if another iphone user blocks you if an android user likes one of your text messages it will send you a separate annoying notification telling you that they liked one of your text messages instead of simply putting a thumbs up in the bottom of the message iphone users can't leave a group chat if an android user is part of it making everybody incredibly annoyed with the android user now the problem here is extraordinarily easy to fix apple intentionally refuses to comply with rcs messaging standards to essentially ostracize android users and it would take about 24 hours for them to change that and for nobody to ever experience it again it's also a massive security liability that would be patched apple has designed and engineered this problem brilliantly the average person who uses an iphone has no idea how to get a company to change their messaging standards it's much easier for them to just think my friend should just buy an iphone but unfortunately what it does accomplish is forcing a lot of miners to choose between a phone that their family can afford or risk being ostracized by their fragile social groups 87 of american teenagers have iphones and the inconvenience of having an android user in the group chat tempts the group to not invite them in the first place and these group chats are not only places to make plans or socialize they're also often required for school work and keep in mind that all of this disclusion doesn't come from a place of hate it's not the children's fault this inconvenience is intentionally engineered by apple adults do it too in a survey of 55 000 single people 31 said that they would not date somebody who didn't have an iphone now that's obviously vapid and disgusting but what they don't realize is that this distinction of theirs is a lot more educated than it seems iphone users spend twice as much on both clothing and beauty products per month compared to android users they spend an hour and 16 minutes more on their phone and they send twice as many texts they tend to make more money be far more extroverted go on more vacations have more close friends and take twice as many selfies despite iphone users being nearly twice as likely to cheat on their partner and four times as likely to like a raunchy or suggestive photo on social media they are 76 percent more likely to get swiped right or matched on a dating app this is obviously a whole lot of correlation rather than causation but it does get oddly specific for example apple customers tend to love unassociated brands like h m and dislike ones like costco in fact there have been studies that have asked a series of very broad questions about things like family socioeconomic status honesty humility agreeableness and with deep learning predict with complete accuracy what kind of phone the person has decades and decades of clever marketing and exhaustive conditioning for what well in 2022 apple has a value of over 3 trillion dollars they are the most monetarily successful corporation in the history of the world apple is valued higher than the gross domestic product of britain or india that amount could give america a full ride to college for the next 120 years it could end world hunger for over a century as i mentioned earlier apple is a low-hanging fruit to use as an example of this and that's not because of how evil they are it's because of how successful they are and how well this stuff has worked i personally own plenty of apple products and i see plenty of pros and cons with the platform this video isn't about that i've teased doing a video like this for a while due to the hostility in my comments and on social media regarding my previous content people who have large vinyl record collections simply did not want to hear about the environmental problems that they caused people who owned behringer products had trouble separating themselves from the past behavior of the company's ceo some ableton users were angry or disappointed that i didn't like the software enough to permanently change my workflow why i would feel that this video is successful if your takeaway from it is understanding that we are all very vulnerable to bias and that if you buy something it doesn't mean that you become the brand and that you can leave an ecosystem the moment it stops working in your favor most importantly and obviously brands are not autonomous they don't feel empathy or sympathy they don't care if you are happy or sad or alive or dead because they can't brand loyalty is a one-way street they will never ever be able to reciprocate your support or allegiance this isn't only a byproduct of capitalism by the way the art of manipulating or controlling people can also be defined as governance or law it shouldn't be a surprise to anybody that politicians and governments use these tactics to manipulate us all the time from every single angle every single party they invent non-issues to divide us and invent third-party antagonists to unite us so when you're debating or arguing with somebody about what product is better or who they voted for or a life decision that they made often times you're not actually arguing about the semantics of that thing you're literally trying to talk them out of their own identity digging your heels in and becoming a fanboy is a very evolutionary trait that all humans suffer from and maybe if we understand that it'll help us be more empathic towards others and happier that sounds really mushy but it's important because brands and political parties will never care about you other humans will hey if you like this video subscribe to my channel and share it i'm pretty sure that the ad fueled algorithm gods are just going to love a video about deceptive marketing if you want to see more content like this and if you want access to ambisonic field recordings audio assets unreleased music an amazing community with monthly songwriting challenges and game servers then my patreon is for you and you can join for as little as one dollar alright bye

Channel: Benn Jordan

Views: 67,393

Keywords: fanboy, apple, branding, capitalism, brand loyalty, customer retention, digital marketing, customer loyalty, marketing basics, apple branding strategy, emotional manipulation, manipulate, advertising, brand, loyalty, psychology, economy, psychology facts, economics, human behavior, human psychology, loss aversion sales, sunk cost fallacies, aversion, behavioral economics, robbers cave, sunk cost, robbers cave experiment, macintosh, steve jobs, social identity theory, psych, group dynamics

Id: HqMMRh3VRT8

Length: 20min 12sec (1212 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 11 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/sploogmcduck]

This entire thread is "BUT NOT ME, I MAKE ALL MY DECISIONS LOGICALLY"

[u/veni_vedi_veni]

Ugh, fanboys are the worst

[u/[deleted]]

I don't understand how people can be loyal to any brand. Everything is made like shit and it all comes from china.

[u/Wagbeard]

This is a really good video.

The main takeaway from this is that companies work together to create teams.

Apple didn't get that big on their own. They worked in cahoots with Microsoft to create the factions.

Coke & Pepsi did the same thing in 83 with the Pepsi taste test.

https://youtu.be/ghMYzo0rgrw

Now Pepsi and Coke are the two leading soft drink brands in the world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assets_owned_by_PepsiCo

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Coca-Cola_brands

A badly told story:

Once upon a time a store opened in a little town. It was the only place in town. Lots of people liked it. The owner lived downstairs.

One day, a new store opened next door. The owner put signs out listing lower prices. Part of the town went there and liked it better. The owner also lived downstairs.

The owner of the first store lowered his prices and put up new signs. The other owner did the same. This turned into a huge rivalry between the town taking sides and supporting their favourite store. It led to both stores becoming successful.

One day, one of the owners died. The next day, the other store was shut down, windows boarded up. The confused townsfolk set to investigate. They went inside and found a tunnel between both stores and that both men were brothers.

These types of nemesis rivalries are everywhere. Businessmen exploit this stuff, politicians exploit this stuff, it's horribly common.

[u/zelextron]

The only reason I will ever be loyal to a brand, in the sense that I'll buy the same product or the same product from the same place, or I'll go to the same store to look for a product, is because of a previous good experience, so it might be the case that someone else has a better product, but then I would have to spend time researching to see if someone else really has a better product. And I rather not spend time doing that.

But depending on the product, I'll do some research to find out which brand has the best product. And the moment I see that another brand has a better product, I'll change brands.

The example he gave of apple products. I don't have an iphone or an macintosh computer, but my mother has. As far as I know, for her, having an mac book is better than having a laptop with windows. So the reason she has that product is not due to being conned into buying the wrong product.

[u/PoorPDOP86]

And why after watching this video trying to manipulate people with the tactics discussed here will get you beaten to a bloody pulp because it doesn't make you an expert in psychology.

Seriously, don't try to manipulate people because you think watching a specific video, reading a particular book, or listening to a lecturer makes you capable. You'll just get hurt.

[u/jiggygoodshoe]

I liked his video but I wish he had more examples other than Apple. I think most people can agree that Apple are the biggest brand loyal successful company. I would have liked to have seen other companies involvement in tribal marketing.