How to Win Stuff and Influence Yourself

You might scoff at the so-called “Law of Attraction,” but advertisers use its principles very effectively — to attract you.

Can you have anything you want? According to the law of attraction, yes. This New Age rule states that by raising your energy frequency to match what you desire, you can manifest it in your life.

This idea might sound a bit out there, but many claim to have experienced the law of attraction as a real force in their lives. There are countless testimonials like the one from Jen Mazer, the self-proclaimed Queen of Manifestation, who claims one of her clients “manifested” $20,000 in one week just by thinking.

Believers in this law generally subscribe to four tenets — positivity, specificity, visualization, and affirmations:

1. Positivity attracts the desired object, and negativity repels it.
2. The more specific you are about what you want, the better.
3. You need to clearly and intensely visualize what you want.
4. Affirmations help you sustain the energy needed to attract the desired thing.

Sound dumb? Well the same basic idea is used — very effectively — by the advertising industry. Only in that case, the object is you. A successful ad campaign uses:

1. Positivity: advertisements with bright colors, inspiring music, and happy-looking people are more likely to make an impression.
2. Visualization: The most successful ads make consumers picture themselves using the product, provoking “psychological ownership.”
3. Specificity: The more specific advertisers are about the benefits of a product, the more prospective customers can understand how it might fit in their lives, and the more interest it sparks.
4. Affirmation: In other words, repetition, repetition, repetition. The Rule of Seven states that by the seventh time a consumer sees an ad, they’re either convinced or annoyed.

And is New Age spirituality — or at least the kind that’s focused on material gain — really so different from advertising? Both are concerned with “manifesting” benefits, whether for brands or individuals. And the subconscious is the key to both.

From desiring to acquiring: the role of the subconscious

The subconscious stores and processes a lot of information, but because it is subconscious, we don’t always realize this. One thing that the subconscious is especially good at is recognizing patterns. It helps us notice what’s out there and where we might find it.

One peculiar way the subconscious encourages us to acquire things is through the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. Also known as “frequency illusion,” the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon is what happens when you buy a red car and suddenly start seeing red cars everywhere. A related brain quirk is confirmation bias, which ensures that we not only notice patterns, but we use them to confirm beliefs that we already hold.

Advertisers take advantage of both frequency illusion and confirmation bias to turn targets into buyers with ads that employ positivity, visualization, specificity, and affirmation. Let’s say you see an ad for a vacuum. The ad describes all the qualities your current vacuum is lacking: it’s light, quiet, and fits in tight places. By creating a positive atmosphere and setting a scene that shows how effective this vacuum has been for other people, advertisers make you visualize its value in your own life. Through repeated exposure to the advertisement, your positive impression of this vacuum is constantly reaffirmed. It looks like this is the vacuum for you. When you finally notice it in the store, buying it seems fated.

Of course it’s impossible to convince everyone to buy a product. It’s estimated that we see up to 5,000 ads a day, so we don’t buy most of things advertised to us. But advertisers can still effectively hit their marks targets — people who already want a better vacuum — by triggering psychological biases from the point of interest to the point of purchase.

The New Age law of attraction can work in a similar fashion, but instead of an external trigger, like a commercial or billboard, the process starts within. By taking a moment to set an intention and visualize it, attraction practitioners are basically creating mental advertisements for the things they want.

Let’s say you’re trying to attract a vacation into your life. You frequently imagine yourself on that vacation, complete with details: sand in your toes, sun on your skin. Your subconscious is now primed to notice anything related to your imaginary vacation. For the next week, you walk around and notice every vacation-related word, product, and image. You see a really sweet deal for a tropical getaway at a travel agency near work, and voilà! You’ve manifested your vacation.

In this case, it’s pretty clear that you weren’t magnetically attracting your getaway. You were just paying more attention to the opportunities around you because the mental advertisement you were running on a loop inside your skull. But from your perspective it might have really felt like the universe was throwing those things your way for a reason.

As to whether the whole practice of attraction is silly or shallow, well, maybe it is, but what’s the harm in using it on yourself for your own benefit? After all, advertisers are using it on you.

Sarah Blake is a writer who helps small businesses find and communicate their brand voice. She also writes poetry and blogs about money at sarahblakecreative.com.

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