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Comment by elefanten | Hacker News Reader

>Is that manipulation of his preferences for good skateboarding shoes, the ad making him impulsive and changing his desires and making him buy a worse product?

In your example, yes.

>Or is the ad informing him he can buy access to a spirit that will accompany him on his self selected journey and help his own desires?

No.

One shoe is better for its purpose, the other has stronger associations with positive ideas and feelings.

The quality of the shoe you buy is the necessary determinant of how well it will perform.

Conversely, the brand you buy from is not necessary to having certain thoughts, feelings, dreams, aspirations, etc.

The notion that buying X product with Y association in some way supports Y is exactly the deception. Flowery language about buying access/hope/a way of life is romanticizing the deception.

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>The quality of the shoe you buy is the necessary determinant of how well it will perform.

Is that really true if the mind is what makes it so?

Product advertising convinces you that you can do a thing, so you succeed. Emotions are much more powerful than rational thought and in the case of the shoe, can be a catalyst for a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Performance is almost never purely mechanical with products that interface directly with the human body.

Yes, it's necessarily so. The quality of the shoe determines how well the shoe performs.

Whether the customer performs better based on the (sub)conscious influence of the brand on the shoe is a different question entirely. But it's not one that anyone in these comments has provided the faintest whiff of evidence for.

So far, we've had romanticized assertions about emotional impacts nobody has measured.

The real question is whether this advertising process produces any unique benefits vs. a more product information based process. People found motivation and inspiration in things before the rise of modern branding. IMO, the presumption should be that sources of ephemeral emotional inspiration could be replaced without requiring the attention-hijacking form of advertising.

Rejecting the spirit doesn’t mean it’s a lie or deception, you haven’t disproved it for the teenager and if we study his behaviour he will act as if his Nike’s are more uplifting.

Nike (née Kay) used to be the Greek goddess of victory. Nike the shoe brand is the updated copywritten form of that spirit that has been a part of humanity since forever. It’s not brand related despite the commercial rules, but the spirits are real.

Teacups can be bought with a gold trim that does nothing for performance and yet is seen as higher quality. You can’t divorce the mind from qualitative judgements.

There are qualitative ranks of fictional stories. You can judge the quality of spirit something embodies. We reject a lot of soulless, dispassionate product because it may be functionally viable or performant, but looks like it belongs in the soviet era (ugly concrete, hard unfriendly edges, ect). The US military puts high value on making sure it's equipment looks the part as well as plays the part, because of the impact it has on judgement.

> Nike (née Kay) used to be the Greek goddess of victory. Nike the shoe brand is the updated copywritten form of that spirit that has been a part of humanity since forever. It’s not brand related despite the commercial rules, but the spirits are real.

This is ridiculous. The name of the shoe is the brand name, the name used to market the shoe! It is used in advertising! Any company can name themselves after some Greek goddess, regardless of the quality of their product. The name of a shoe has no impact on its utility/meaning to consumers, unless that name has been associated with flowery, false emotions instilled in them by ads. No one intrinsically feels uplifted by the mention of some Greek goddess that likely very few people would have heard of if not for Nike's decision to name themselves after her. The spirits are not real; survey a group of random people and ask them what Nike's namesake is; most will not know. Ask them if they like Nike shoes; they likely will. But hey, maybe Greek mythology enthusiasts do buy Nikes because the name gives them pleasure or confidence. But in comparison to Nike's ad budget and mindshare, this is minuscule.

The spirit isn't the name of some "greek goddess", it's the concept of victory and the associated conscious and conceptual space.

I'm not dumb enough to say that Nike is a reference to a dead culture from thousands of years ago. I'm saying that the concept and conscious idea of victory expressed as a piece of culture has existed for thousands of years, in roughly the same way despite the different window dressing; like seeing it as a god or as a brand. It's the same spirit in a different frame.

It's the same as the idea of a rich man being framed as Mansa Musa, Bill Gates, Aladdin from the 1992 film and many more examples. They all have similar culture connotations in some sense that make up the spirit of the 'rich man' and if you kill all cultural representations of the 'rich man', people will make new ones regardless of who it is. They will be framed in a way that is culturally successful at the time. Bill Gates is occupies the spirit of the rich man, framed as smart guy business savvy leader with a touch of ruthlessness. A catholic priest from before lutherian protestant reform would have occupied the spirit of the 'rich man' though he would have been framed very differently to bill gates, draped in catholic finery and religious imagery. When people want to access the spirit of being rich they would seek a catholic influence instead of a SV tech influence. Ages before that they would have saught the culture influence of Mansa Musa and his billions in gold. It's still the same spirit of the 'rich man', with different frames.

The same way Nike and Nike are the same spirit of victory with different frames.

Jesus christ. Read some Paglia.

I’ll give you a better example: motorcycle helmets. There is little information about relative safety of one vs the other (they are all basically “tall enough”). They do all have slightly different features but there are so many little ones that it’s nearly impossible to compare a good $400 helmet with another good $400 helmet. But some helmets are worn by MotoGP champions and some are not and yes to some people that will be a deciding factor.

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