When Corporate Spin Backfires: From Pepsi’s Protest Fiasco to Dieselgate When Brands Try to Shape Reality - And Fail Corporations have long used persuasion, positioning and crisis PR to bend perception in their favour. Whether through glossy advertising, “values-driven” messaging or emergency comms, brands often try to steer public opinion rather than simply serve it.
Reefer Madness, D.A.R.E. and the Video Nasties: Marketing Lessons from Propaganda Fails What the Satanic Panic and Kony 2012 teach about audience insight, truthful storytelling and avoiding the Streisand effect. Propaganda tends to evoke images of heavy-handed political messaging, but at its core it’s simply a form of marketing, or at least communications; an attempt
Why the Best Adverts Appeal to Both System One and System Two Thinking Understanding the psychology of fast and slow decision-making in marketing When we talk about how consumers respond to advertising, it’s tempting to believe that decisions are made through cool, rational analysis. Price points, product features, and comparative benefits seem like the
The Persuaders: The Top 5 Most Famous Uses of Propaganda From wartime posters to cinematic persuasion - and what marketers can learn from history Propaganda might feel like a dirty word in marketing - but many view it simply as; persuasion at scale. The line between propaganda and marketing has always been thin, as explored
What Marketers Can Learn from Cognitive Behaviour Theory For advanced practitioners who want more than heuristics and headlines. Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) is a family of evidence-based methods designed to change what people think and do. Pioneered by Aaron T. Beck and building on Albert Ellis’s Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy, CBT has amassed decades of
Public Relations vs Propaganda: A Historical Perspective for Marketers How Marketers Can Learn from History’s Greatest Persuaders - from Edward Bernays to Wartime Campaigns Public Relations (PR) and Propaganda both revolve around influencing public opinion, but they have evolved along very different paths. For marketers, understanding the origins, evolution, and key distinctions between PR and
The Psychology of Persuasion How Amazon, Colgate, Innocent and John Lewis Influence Us Marketers may talk endlessly about data, segmentation, and creative execution (and rightly so!!), but beneath it all, one truth remains: marketing is about people. And people are not perfectly rational creatures weighing up costs and benefits like calculators. Instead, we are
Frightening the Competition The Dark Art of Fear-Based Marketing From anti-smoking campaigns to Burger King vs McDonald’s, how brands have used fear to spook consumers - with mixed results As Halloween creeps closer, marketers love a seasonal tie-in. Pumpkins, skeletons, and a suspicious number of discount sweets all reappear like clockwork. But in marketing,
Psychology, Research, and Marketing How to Turn What People Say into What Brands Should Do Marketers love a good stat. But numbers without psychology can mislead you, and psychology without numbers can seduce you. The art is joining the two - understanding how human minds actually work and then designing research that reduces bias, surfaces
What Part of the Brain Does Marketing Really Affect? A Modern, Practical Guide for Marketers Marketing works when it fits how the brain actually makes decisions. Not the old “reptile brain vs rational brain” story, but the contemporary picture: fast emotional systems interacting with slower, reflective systems spread across multiple regions of the brain. In
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