I read an article about why this is (but can't find it on Google to link, sorry).
It is an old sales axiom that to sell, you must find a need and fill it. But you can't generate ginormous sales by only selling people what they need. So marketers create a need and fill it. This works best when it happens on a subconscious level. That's what you are seeing here.
Most people (such as you) will watch the commercial and have no personal experience of ever struggling with whatever faux difficulty the infomercial actor is having with some everyday action. If you see the ad enough times the image of that struggle wriggles into your subconscious. It is nowhere near as strong as the mental image of your own personal struggle would be, but nevertheless it's there. So now buried deep in your brain is this mental image of a struggle with an everyday task that did not exist before you saw the ad (because you had never struggled with this thing nor seen anybody else do so because it's not a common thing to struggle with). In a weak moment, when presented with the object being sold, you might buy it on impulse for yourself or for somebody else (even though you never saw them struggle with this everyday activity, there is now an image in your head that they theoretically could).
Many people (such as you) won't buy the advertised object. But enough people will to make the company a profit, even if they had never personally experienced or even witnessed the unlikely struggle shown in the ad. The ad creates a need at a subconscious level that will work on enough people to make it a succesful advertising strategy.
12 Dec 2012, 4:25 am
