Advertising manipulates consumers into wanting what they are made to want.

Evidence

Consumers make their blunder-ing way, so many Alices in the Wonderland of salesman-ship; they buy not what they freely want, but what they are made to want. In the office of the advertising agency, human psychology is an open book. There is no strand or chord of it upon which the advertiser has not learned to play….But there is just a chance that the gentlemen who run this unparalleled side show may be putting on the acts a little too fast; just a chance that the superlatives have almost reached the limits of registering on the brain; that the sheer multiplicity of brand names dizzies the spectator instead of seducing him….In that hope this book has been written, but its authors have not deluded themselves with the belief that the triumph of science is inevitable. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 258

Categorization

• DEFINE: States the core early-twentieth-century claim about manufactured desire that defines the consumer-resistance critique.
• CANDY: ‘They buy not what they freely want, but what they are made to want’ is a compact, tweetable formulation of the whole manufactured-desire thesis.
• XREF: connects to: Advertising budgets, not product merit, determine what consumers buy — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 175; Marketing works by making consumers feel immune to it while they buy in — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 393; Post-war advertising shifted from selling products to manufacturing and commodifying desire. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 119 (+15 more)

Broader Connections

• Advertising compels consumers to identify with and demand the products imposed on them #corroborates (0.95) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 98
• Modern advertising manipulates desires through images largely unconnected to the product. #expands (0.88) — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 1819
• Advertising’s power to create demand is contested partly by definition #qualifies (0.80) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 284
• Children’s advertising manipulates kids into pressing parents for unwanted purchases. #exemplifies (0.78)
• Consumers buy culture-industry products knowing they are being manipulated #complicates (0.75) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 31