A Good Night for a Presidential Debate is a Good Day to Launch a Blog on Marketing Spin

Tonight is the night of the second presidential debate.  This seems like as good a day as any to launch a blog on how you are marketed to by advertisers, politicians, experts, media, and sometimes even your friends. If you think you might hear at least one lie, fabrication or stretching of the truth by Barack Obama or John McCain tonight raise your hand.  (Wow!  That’s a lot of hands!)

Even better, we’ll sometimes cover ways you influence, sell to and market to your friends and sometimes even to yourself.

You are blindly influenced many times a day and you blindly influence others at least a few times a day.  Have you been told an interesting “fact” from a friend today that fit into your beliefs?  Maybe it was about Barack Obama, or John McCain, or Wall Street or any number of newsworthy topics.  Chances are that the “facts” you heard were somewhat truthful and somewhat dubious.

This isn’t a slam on you or your friends.  It’s simply a result of how the human brain works and how our marketing-saturated culture operates in 2008.

Blind patrotism is an obvious example of this.  The first few years after 9/11 we witnessed blind patriotism on steroids.  Emotions ran high which concurrently made critical thinking run low.  This resulted in Americans swallowing gallons of lies that fortunately became obvious in only a few years instead of a few decades.

Again, this is nothing personal, it’s how the human brain operates. Why do you think Tony Robbins and others using NLP (Neurolinguistic programming) have done so well?

As this blog grows we’ll explore how our minds deceive us and how others can use this against us.  By realizing how this happens you’ll be one of the few who isn’t going to fall for the B.S. – well, at least not as much of it as your neighbors.

So as you watch the debate tonight, and politicians speaking on any night, keep your critical thinking hat on and put on your glasses to see through the blind influence.