The dark marketing secrets behind the food you eat
In our video This is how the dairy industry lied to the world, we revealed the many ways in which just one of the faces of animal agriculture has been colluding with governments to mislead the world for over a century. Manipulative messaging has been a huge part of that lie, so let’s look at some “iconic” advertising that demonstrates the psychological tricks being used to fool people into consuming more animals.
‘Got Milk?’ and the deprivation strategy
The ‘Got Milk?’ advertising campaign has been running since 1993, and even though it has always been more of a Californian thing, the ‘got milk?’ slogan has found its way into the collective consciousness worldwide via references in TV shows and other popular culture plus a slew of parody ads for other brands and products.
Many famous faces have donned the infamous ‘milk moustache’ across print, TV and social media, giving powerful endorsements to the dairy industry and the myth that bovine lactation is a superfood of some sort. For that reason, it makes complete sense that they would choose athletes, such as Venus and Serena Williams, and actors known for roles involving lots of action including Hugh Jackman as Wolverine, milky ‘tache and all. This approach also taps into what marketers call the ‘familiar face effect’ where people respond better to brands that become familiar to them, and the ‘Elaboration Likelihood Model’ which bypasses people’s active thinking when deciding on what brands and products to trust (more on this below).
Interestingly, the campaign was first based on what was called the ‘deprivation strategy’ in that it sought to “remind” people what life would be like without milk. This emerged from focus group testing with respondents saying they felt deprived when they ran out of milk. What amounts to the manipulation of people’s fears - and could well touch on the neuromarketing principle of ‘loss aversion’ - is perfectly demonstrated in the very first ‘got milk?’ television commercial from 1993:
However, it proved to be an unsuccessful approach and in fact the national campaign was judged a failure and dropped... but only after 20 years. The campaign still runs in California where some commentators hypothesize that it’s purely down to popularity that it endures, with people more interested who the next ‘milk moustache’ celebrity will be, rather than actually taking home the message and buying more milk.
Despite its failure to keep milk the drink of choice for mealtimes, ‘Got Milk?’ has spawned a new national dairy campaign with a different slogan and approach. The ‘Milk Life’ campaign now seeks to reinforce the link between milk and normal, everyday people, shunning celebrities - now thought to be mistrusted by audiences who say they’ll sell out to any brand - in favour of kids, grannies and your local friendly parkour enthusiast.
Neuromarketing, kind of creepy
The story of ‘Got Milk?’ has already touched on one powerful way in which advertisers get into our heads - focus group testing - and the strategies that arise from those results. Testing has affected much of the way all products are marketed, and in the case of packaging, companies have taken the testing to a whole new level thanks to ‘neuromarketing’.
In addition to observation and standard questioning of focus group participants, instruments can be used to monitor brain activity and metabolic response to stimuli. For packaging, the stimulus of particular interest is visual. Campbells and Frito-Lays have reportedly used such techniques to make their products more attractive, by understanding which colours and textures elicit the most positive neurological responses. Neuromarketers also group colours according to the intended audience, with blue thought to be more attractive to professionals, and reds to everyone else with the example being McDonald’s’ red and yellow branding.
We should note that neuromarketing isn’t limited to products containing animal ingredients, but big multinationals are paying a lot of money to make sure the right buttons are getting pushed. A lot of advertising utilises other known neuromarketing principles, such as ‘reward and punishment’ and ‘loss aversion’, but also more traditional psychological insights like the ‘framing effect’ - basically changing the language used to be more glass-half-full than half-empty - and our friend cognitive dissonance.
Cognitive dissonance, for people who know what’s bad but do it anyway
We’ve covered cognitive dissonance before, both as a video - The most important video that you'll see on your behaviour (cognitive dissonance, explained) - and a guest article from Alex J O’Connor AKA Cosmic Skeptic, but more in the context of people making the individual, personal choice to consume animals despite being horrified when confronted by the reality of their deaths.
However, in regards to marketing, cognitive dissonance provides a powerful insight into how to get people to buy things they know are bad for them. The tobacco industry relies on CD, and the fast-food industry is no exception, using words that seek to reassure people that the choices they’re making to harmful foods are ok.
Fast food giants really know how to get in your head
In the course of researching this article, fast food companies have come up time and time again as examples of certain marketing tricks. Adverts presenting burgers in happy, funny or wholesome situations tap into the principle of ‘affective priming’, where the audience is shown a positive stimulus e.g. something cute like a happy child or a puppy and then a neutral stimulus like a burger or hotdog. This is the simplest example we can give, almost so simple that one would think we were immune to it nowadays, yet it is ubiquitous and enduring.
Celebrity endorsement
The last trick we’ll discuss is the good old celebrity endorsement. As we touched on above, there is some evidence to suggest that celebrities aren’t as well trusted as they once were, being seen to endorse anything for the right money.
However, we still often see it, albeit in clever ways that get around the immediate negative response. Here again is another example from McDonald’s, with its 2020 Superbowl commercial - celebrity endorsement, and lots of it, but without the actual celebs.
The tricks in play here are numerous, but one of the most unsettling is the ‘Elaboration Likelihood Model’ mentioned above in regards to the famous faces of ‘Got Milk?’. The idea here however relies on people trusting their favourite celebrities, and in the social media age that is especially relevant to ‘influencers’ and the modern phenomenon of ‘influencer marketing’.
Trust in this case isn’t actually a conscious thing, but the result of central and peripheral persuasion - central being our active and considered thought process, and peripheral being a shortcut or way to bypass our active decision making in regards to what we decide to give or entrust our money to.
In essence, marketers rely on many of us being inclined to defer such important judgements, unconsciously, to trusted figures. If they could pay your mother or father to tell you to buy a cheeseburger, they would, but the next best thing is to have someone else familiar do it, and even better if you aspire to be like them in some way.
In closing, the thing about marketing tricks is we believe we’re immune to them and so let our guards down. We might scoff or laugh off advertising, but we can’t always know when they’ve tapped into our unconscious decision making through psychological principles and neurological insights.
Hopefully, by the end of this, you’ll be able to spot some of the tricks being used, and as for your friends and family that have yet to see the light of veganism and a belief in the rights of all non-human animals, bear in mind that we are all constantly bombarded with stimuli deliberately designed to make us do what we know to be wrong.
Andrew Gough is Media and Investigations Manager for Surge.
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