Lifestyle Advertising, Signalling & Personalisation
In The Elephant in the Brain, Robin Hanson and Kevin Simler talk about hidden motives and everyday life. In fact … that is the subtitle.
In the book, Robin and Kevin argue that Lifestyle Advertising (aka Image Advertising) works indirectly by changing your perception of what other people think of the product being advertised.
In other words, lifestyle ads are effective because you believe that they influence a third person (your friends, or those you want to impress) and that in turn changes your perception of the products’ worth.
As a corollary of this, one reason that lifestyle ads target non-buyers is to create envy. According to evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller, “Most BMW ads are not really aimed so much at potential BMW buyers as they are at potential BMW coveters.”
So where does this leave lifestyle advertising in the Age of Personalisation and highly targeted advertising?
As awareness of targeted advertising becomes mainstream — as it has in recent months — will this third person effect diminish?
Put otherwise, is this third person effect directly linked to the rational knowledge that other individuals will see this ad or is it a purely imagined third person (that we know won’t see this ad) that we consider when our greedy eyes yearn for those German pleasurekraft?
If this is a truly imagined third person, it’s business as usual for lifestyle advertising.
But if it we do in fact behave rationally in these considerations (as the BMW theory pre-supposes) and personalised advertising continues to colonise mass media advertising — then we’re in for a big shift in the advertising playbook.
And a big shift in how we signal our genetic superiority to unsuspecting bystanders, by our unsuspecting selves.
Thank you for Reading 🙏🏻
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