Comment by jdietrich | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jdietrich | Hacker News Reader

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> Does this actually work cross-culturally?

With a degree of care, yes. Major marketing and advertising agencies are perfectly au fait with these challenges, because they're responsible for multinational brands. A company like Coca-Cola or Procter & Gamble is very used to selling products to consumers in radically different cultural contexts, as are the agencies they employ.

Marketing within the US is meaningfully cross-cultural - the connotations that sell a Ford F150 will fail hopelessly if you apply them to a Toyota Prius. There are very few brands and messages that will work in every cultural context, which is why marketers are acutely aware of the importance of segmentation.

Just telling people to change their behaviour is rarely successful; you need to surmount some very complex cognitive, emotional and social obstacles to change. The marketing industry has an extremely deep, sophisticated and powerful set of tools and skills in this respect. They spend all day, every day thinking about how to facilitate behavioural change. We're used to thinking of that practice as essentially amoral or evil - they persuade us to max out our credit cards, they convince us that smoking is cool, they peddle junk food - but the same skills could be used for good if only the right people decided to hire them.

That sounds a bit like marketing for marketing. I do think marketing agencies actually did loose a lot of influence in recent years. 15 years ago nearly everyone could hum the latest jingle from the newest ads and influence was indeed profound. But these times are long gone. Today there are many channels for cutural exchange that don't transport marketing messages.

15 years ago, western culture was substantially more monolithic, with much more centralized distribution channels, in comparison to the increasingly balkanized and fragmented niches that abound today.

marketing -> education

To emphasize the flaws of this argument, flip it around. You are effectively arguing that you can change the views, values, and beliefs of an entire nation by marketing. This doesn't sound so unreasonable when it's an 'us vs them' because it's easy to underestimate others. So instead let's make it a 'them vs us' argument.

If what you're saying is accurate then similarly you ought be able to radically shift the views, values, and beliefs of America using marketing. Saudi Arabia has a surplus of money. They'd certainly love to spread their cultural values. Perhaps all they need to do to, for instance, get American women to start dressing 'modestly', as they define it, or American men to ostensibly abstain from alcohol and porn would be to spam Americans with advertising for such?

I'm sure you'd agree such notions are quite absurd. Marketing appeals to cultural values, it doesn't define them. I think the one thing that can make this somewhat confusing is that in certain segments of society, consumerism is itself a cultural value. And as advertising feeds heavily off of this, it can blur the relationship. But this goes back to times before modern marketing even existed. For instance the connection between royalty across the world and the color purple was driven exclusively by the fact that purple dyes, Tyrian purple in particular, were extremely rare. There was no purple marketing agency, just people defining and displaying themselves in terms of having things that others could not.

With enough time and money, I don't see why this is out of the question. Time already changes all norms, so the money just speeds things up. I can absolutely see my society being changed, and I along with it. Smoking has had buckets of money thrown at it to hold it afloat for a long bloody time, but it has only taken 30 odd years to really cast it as being shunned by consistent government health campaigns (Australian perspective here, but we're seeing it elsewhere as well).

Nothing was ever propping smoking up. We've been smoking for literally thousands of years, long before any notion of formal marketing. Nor was it killed by some sort of marketing campaign. A large part of what happened was we had a generation grow up with ubiquitous electronic devices. You see a cascade of similar social effects such as declines in teen pregnancy, declines in violence, and a wide array of other phenomena all on the same timeframe (also alongside declines in fertility, testosterone, increases in obesity, increases in mental illness, etc).

You can even see this phenomena in practice by looking at the reverse -- quite a handy tool for measuring the soundness of an argument. In many parts of the developing world there have been similar bans on advertising and you also have plain-packaged cigarette cases with absolutely disgusting examples of what can happen if you smoke, such as people with facial disfigurations from oral cancer. Some countries have even seen extremes such as cigarettes being literally blurred out on television and push back against media that contains such to begin with. But again, negligible effects. Large part of the reason being nothing's replaced it as a past time. Bring in the zombifying pale glow of our digital screens and it'll get dropped like a bad habit.

Another counter-example to this would be things such as 'D.A.R.E.' It was a decades long well funded government program that tried to reduce drug usage through 'marketing.' It ended up having a paradoxical effect and increased various forms of drug usage.

You mean like my country, where plain packaged cigarettes came into effect? I'm not sure where you're getting negligible from. Anyone who smokes has stigma attached to them and the only ones still smoking are those who have too little willpower left over to pull themselves out of that social hole.

>If what you're saying is accurate then similarly you ought be able to radically shift the views, values, and beliefs of America using marketing.

If someone had the money and the motivation, I have no doubt that they could. There's reasonably compelling evidence that Russia is engaged in exactly that as we speak, albeit on a fairly modest budget. It's undoubtedly true that the USA has done so overseas; the CIA, the State Department and the DoD allocate substantial funding to "soft power" and PSYOP initiatives. The US Agency for Global Media alone has a budget of $750m, with the explicit objective of fostering support for America's definition of freedom and democracy.

An obvious example of marketing-driven cultural change is the diamond engagement ring, which became a norm almost solely through the marketing efforts of De Beers.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-27371208

> There's reasonably compelling evidence that Russia is engaged in exactly that as we speak.

I mean, not through marketing. Through exposing the DNC's treatment of Bernie, yes. But...I mean... Have you seen the Facebook ads they put out? It's possible they convinced more people to vote, but they didn't change any votes. It's stuff like "Jesus loves Trump and hates Hillary" level rhetoric.

Giving rings, frequently of precious metals, as a symbol of marriage is, once again, a cultural value and one that dates back thousands of years. De Beers simply increased the popularity of one rock. They didn't even invent the tradition of diamonds which again predates their founding by hundreds of years.

As for the Russia thing, do you think if our tech companies were so directed they could not find evidence of, for instance, Saudi Arabia, Israel, or any other countless other nations also funding various organizations, purchasing ads, etc in ways that they perceive likely to benefit their interests? In my opinion the only reason the Russia thing was given the light of day is because Hillary lost and threw an extremely well connected temper tantrum in an effort to undermine the presidency. And Russia makes a pretty good bogeyman due to the mixture of their 'outsider' status and competence of their agencies and individuals. In any case it's obviously not some meaningful cultural shift. At best they played a negligible role in appealing to preexisting divides within society.

Soft power I think is a much better argument. The Cold War era in particular would be much more meaningful than e.g. Voice of America et al as funded by the USAGM. But there too I'd question the notion of marketing. This [1] is a list of socialist states, past and present. These nations invariably end up resorting to force of arms, suppression of expression, and repressive secret intelligence organizations in order to sustain their power. Unsurprisingly, they don't last long. The USSR, lasting almost 70 years, had quite a long life relative to average. When people have no freedom and your economy collapses (at least relative to free market societies), a nation is already on its way out.

People longing for free markets, free expression, and so on are not doing so because of marketing from the freer nations. The desire for freedom is inherent. It was their governments holding them back. And while we certainly played a significant role in flaunting our successes, the USSR would have inevitably gone the way of all socialist nations. As an aside, no conversation on this topic is complete without this [2]. It's a great list of some Soviet Era jokes told within the USSR. You couldn't criticism the government in public, but private politicization and criticism was ubiquitous.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_socialist_states

[2] - https://www.johndclare.net/Russ12_Jokes.htm

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