Published: April 19, 2007 04:22 pm         

You will read this because it's full of juicy secrets

Everyone likes to think they’re the exception to the rule.

And that’s why people are susceptible to manipulation.

And in a brief flash, you just thought, “Not me. Not as much as everyone else, anyway.”

I just manipulated you.

I didn’t predict that you’d think that. I manipulated you into it.

It’s how most effective advertising works.

Telling you the features of a product is nowhere near as effective as establishing a trust relationship between you and the advertiser and then repeating a logo or a phrase so much that it becomes ingrained in your mind.

The Geico gecko is a perfect example of such manipulation, as is the Geico caveman series.

Quizzno’s, my favorite fast-food restaurant (you should try it if you haven’t), stumbled hugely with a campaign a few years ago that had two strange-looking rat creatures singing. Yes, it got your attention, but it also made you associate the restaurant with rodents.

Geico’s gecko works because the character establishes an affinity with the audience and then self-abases himself and his role as Geico’s spokesman. And it doesn’t hurt that he’s cute.

British mentalist Derren Brown recently showed how easy it is to manipulate even advertising executives by doing an experiment. He called them to his offices to come up with an ad campaign for a chain of taxidermy stores. He put in a sealed envelope his vision for the campaign and then gave the execs half an hour to come up with a name for the company, a logo, a slogan and a campaign.

The executives came up with a bear logo. The bear was holding a harp and standing in front of the pearly gates. The name of the company they came up with was “Animal Heaven.” The slogan: “Where good animals go when they die.”

When Brown came back into the room after half an hour, he opened the envelope he had left sealed on the table before the executives started. His company name: “Animal Heaven.” The slogan: “Where good animals go when they die.” The logo? A bear holding a harp standing in front of the pearly gates.

The executives were astonished. They were confused as to how Brown could have known what they were going to do before they even came up with the ideas themselves.

The trick was surprisingly simple. Brown had sent a car for the executives to bring them to his office. En route, they passed signs in store windows with slogans like “Animal Heaven” and “Where Good Animals Go When They Die.”

Brown had a stuffed bear in the office that he had shown them as an example of what he did for a living. The executives had passed several stores that had harps prominently displayed in the windows, and at least one with a drawing of a bear standing in front of the pearly gates.

They didn’t notice any of it on a purely conscious level, but when Brown planted the suggestion that they were to come up with a name, slogan and logo for a company that did taxidermy, all the small cues they had ingested in their minds came together in their consciousness and they developed the ad campaign that Brown had manipulated them into developing.

Brown is a master at such trickery. In one TV show, he gathered a roomful of atheists under the pretense of converting them to believing in God.

Brown himself doesn’t believe in God, so it was a tall order.

Using standard and well known manipulation techniques, Brown began to demonstrate the “power of God.” He touched one girl on the side of her head and she started crying and said she could feel God’s power coursing through her. Instantly, she was a believer.

About half the audience of atheists, uncomfortable with the display, left. Half stayed.

That also is a well-tested manipulation technique. The manipulator only wants those who are agreeable in the audience. He has to have a trust relationship with them, and those who aren’t trusting will just hinder those who are.

After the audience was pared down to half, Brown called on one guy in the audience who said he just couldn’t believe in a God, and that he didn’t think there was any way he could. Brown called him to the platform, and planted a few subtle suggestions such as, “you won’t hurt yourself. I’m right here,” and “let whatever happens happen,” and then “I’m not going to tell you what’s going to happen. Just let it happen.”

By that time, the subject already had in his mind what Brown was expecting to happen. He was expecting that as he held his hand out toward the subject, the subject would fall down, a la televangelist Benny Hinn.

Sure enough, the atheist fell down on the ground, filled with euphoria. Instantly, he was a believer.

Brown asked the entire audience to stand up and then, again spookily like Hinn, pushed his hands toward the audience and all of them fell back into their seats just as Hinn’s audience has often been observed to do.

The entire audience was convinced that a higher power, possibly even God, was working through Brown.

But it wasn’t God working through Brown (and I’m not saying it’s not God working through Hinn; that’s not even the point of this column). It was Brown using standard and fairly well known manipulation techniques to get the audience to do what he wanted them to do — what he had manipulated them into expecting would happen.

Brown has been very successful at manipulating even the most ardent skeptics by using simple mind tricks, redirection, cold reading and subtle implantation of ideas. To his credit, he makes it clear that he has no supernatural power; he simply uses tricks. On his British TV show, he even shows instances where his manipulation doesn’t work, which is something that most entertainers wouldn’t do.

The point is this: To a skilled manipulator like Brown, you can be convinced to do a lot of things you wouldn’t think you’d do, not because you’re hypnotized, but because the suggestions he places without your knowledge manipulate you into thinking you want to do those things.

Pick a card, any card. The stage magician will use a trick to tell him which card you picked. The manipulator will use manipulation to get you to pick the card he wants you to pick.

Which one is more useful in real life?

Advertising companies have known that for years, and they use it on you every day.

Of course, I mean everyone else, because you’re the exception to that.

That’s the secret stuff the headline promised. It’s that you’re the lone exception to susceptibility to manipulation. Shhh. Don’t tell anyone, because then they’ll want to know your secret.

Oh, and I just saved a ton of money by switching to Geico.



Leif M. Wright writes for Muskogee (Okla.) Phoenix. Contact him at lmwright@muskogeephoenix.com