Lies

Everyone likes to talk about manipulation in marketing; how the big corporations are evil and morally bankrupt etc etc. I can get annoyed with these people sometimes because it seems to be another example of bandwagon hatred (the worst kind of bandwagon). People, it seems, love to shit on things as a community, especially when they know no one is going to come to that thing's defense. There's a certain pleasure in expressing righteous anger towards something, and then someone else feeding off that anger and reciprocating with even more anger. It goes something like this:

person 1: "I hate [thing], it's always doing [bad thing]"
person 2: "I know, fuck that [thing], and it also always does [other bad thing]"
person 1: "Yeah, [thing] is just fucking despicable; did I mention it does [bad thing]?"
person 2: "Ahhhh, I just hate [thing] so much!
person 1: "Ahhhhh I'm so angry!"
person 2: "Ahhhhhhhh me too!"
etc.
etc.

It's like one big circle-jerk of hatred, ending in a final cathartic release of anger. The whole thing's very therapeutic. But the outcome of this is that people build extremely negative views towards things based on very little evidence, and a whole lot of griping with their friends (mutual gripesturbation).

With that in mind, I like to try and play devil's advocate a lot of the time, arguing against people's fast held beliefs in things like morals and politics. I've mostly found that it's a good way to lose friends and piss people off, and ultimately little ground can be won. It's not easy to argue with someone when they automatically think you're an idiot for even defending the counter-argument (which is the case much of the time).

This post, though, is nothing of the sort. Marketing campaigns are manipulative and evil, it's an undeniable truth. I think, though, better than being mad at abstract entities, we should try to inform ourselves about these manipulations, and so make informed decisions as consumers. And so, here are three misconceptions perpetrated by advetisements:

1) You need to wash your hair with shampoo every day:
This is one is kind of a personal battle, as I've officially gone without shampooing my hair or putting any product in it whatsoever for a year now. Aside from it smelling like hair, and not some lemon-fresh wonder bouquet of sent, I've had no complaints, and it actually looks a lot healthier than before. Without doing any real research, this is what I believe to be the trap of shampoo: First, we're raised on shampoo, which periodically strips all the natural oils from the hair and scalp. Second, our body compensates for this by producing way more oils on the scalp than it would normally. Third, we notice that, if we don't shampoo our hair, it becomes oily. Fourth: we conclude that our hair needs shampoo to look clean, and not greasy.

I've discovered for myself that within a month of not using shampoo all these oils can balance out to a normal equilibrium, at which point I realized that the whole shampoo thing is a fucking scam. The only reason to buy it would be to fix a problem that the shampoo itself created. To me, it sounds not a lot different than chemical dependence on cigarettes.

2) Antioxidants are always good for you:
Since I can remember, antioxidants have been touted as vital to any healthy diet. Billion dollar industries have emerged from this idea; 50 cent was able to sell people bottles of sugared water for over four dollars because of this idea. And so I was pretty surprised to find out that there's hardly been any conclusive evidence of a real medical benefit to antioxidants alone (source). Virtually everyone I can think of was fooled into believing in them (even my mom, who made me take vitamins), and now look where we are. There are entire stores devoted to selling vitamin supplements, and you can look down any aisle in a supermarket to see foods proudly claiming of their antioxidant enrichment (I should note that vitamins and antioxidants aren't the same thing; whether we actually should take vitamin supplements is another story).

What seems to be the case is that foods which commonly have antioxidants in them (fruits, vegetables) have lots of good shit in them for your health. There was then a highly illogical leap made from this fact to the idea that antioxidants alone prevent disease and are good for you.

3) The alcohol sold in hardware stores (not meant for drinking) will kill you:
Yes, the final product that they sell there will kill you; but that's only because the manufacturers have intentionally added toxic chemicals so that you won't drink it. It seems that there's all sorts of bureaucratic hoops that a company must go through before it can sell  something which could be used as a drug. It's much easier to just add a toxic chemical into the mix and avoid the whole issue (source). So ostensibly the ethanol in there is actually intact if you have the chemistry know-how to extract it.

Admittedly, this isn't really a case of manipulative marketing. I just sort of tacked it on for interests sake. The article I linked to goes into more depth about the issue (it's not just alcohol that they do this with).

So there you have it, three reasons why, even if you don't participate in mass hatred orgies, it's generally a good idea to distrust anything advertised without doing a little independent research. I mean, everyone knows that ads lie, but I think real examples can drive the point home. At least it did for me.