Retail Sales: Could Suggestive Selling Hit a New Low?

Retail sales people have always been known to use the suggestive selling technique to make people believe that they have to have their particular product. It is done every day in thousands of different stores and occurs in our televisions in the form of advertising. That is just one way to get people to believe that a retail product is a must have. Retail has even used the mind game of repeating a product name over and over again within a certain period of time to get people to remember the product name and convince people that it is the best of that product that any company has to offer. In fact, a huge portion of the things we buy, we do so because of advertising, which, of course, is a mind game in and of itself. There is a possibility that the low for this type of advertising is going to get even lower within a few years as reported by CBSNews.com.

The idea that our personal profile pictures in social networking sites like FaceBook could be altered to include product placement so as to make the mind believe something that it doesn't really believe. That sounds impossible or nearly impossible, but the truth is, things like this can happen. The article in CBSNews.com compares it to the Leonardo Dicaprio film, Inception. The movie is quite different than just using photograph changes to alter the mind though. In the movie, they use dreams to alter the mind to suit their own purposes which they thought they could control. Things soon get out of control though and the world, their world is turned upside down. The two things don't seem to be all that much alike, but it is still all suggestive selling. It changes the memory in one form or another. Could we be made to think that we love something that we always hated just from a simple photo change that is associated with our faces? Stranger things have happened and the concept isn't as wild as it sounds.

Consider the idea of brainwashing. That is when someone is trained to believe something that isn't true or that they don't believe. For instance, cult members have often been brainwashed to believe things that they wouldn't otherwise believe. They are told over and over that it's right and that is all they hear. After a while, they begin to believe it is true. The mind is a strange thing at times. Though we all like to think that we have a mind of our own, all of us has been brainwashed to some extent. Sometimes we break away from it and at other times we stick with it. Our parents, to some extent, brainwash us to their beliefs as we are growing up. As we grow older, we either adapt to those ways or we change our actions as not to follow in our parents footsteps. The idea that a PhotoShop altered picture could brainwash us isn't that far fetched.

Advertising can control our minds to a certain extent. We see an image and we think that the image must be correct. As we all know, that isn't the case. Today we are far more aware of how photographs can be altered to make it appear differently than what was actually going on. We see it all the time on the internet. With computers, it is easier than ever for people to change a photograph just slightly to get a reaction from people. Why wouldn't advertiser try to jump on that. Whether this will really happen or not is yet to be seen. It is an interesting concept that could definitely occur. It would be a new low for advertisers trying to win your business though. There isn't a legitimate company out there that would use this type of mind game to lure in customers. It makes more sense to just make good products and give good customer service.