THE MEN WHO MADE US SPEND EPISODE2
Many psychological principles are discussed on this website, but they are all in text form. In this case, the second episode of The BBC documentary published in 2014, The Men Who Made Us Spend, visually and directly, indicates that merchants utilize consumers' fear to sell the products. The documentary includes many examples of different industries to comprehensively explain the idea of fear, which makes it worth watching as a supplement to the website's content, even though the information source from only the seller's perspective makes the documentary a little bit biased.
There are three episodes for The Men Who Made Us Spend, and episode 2 is the most related to the website, specifically, the Fear principle that I discuss in the Other Principles section. The presenter interviews experts and representatives from different industries like car manufacturing, pharmacy, and public hygiene in the documentary. It informs the audience, the consumers always shop irrationally without realizing merchants' manipulation, how merchants utilize consumers' different fear like the fear of aging, insecurity, and disease to improve sales of their products.
The Men Who Made Us Spend is filled with various examples in interviews with experts of different industries. It builds the documentary's credibility because the interviewees are all in charge of their respective industries, who know the industry's information and selling tactics the most. For example, the presenter interviews a consultant of General Motors to reveal that people's fear of unsafe makes SUVs so popular. People tend to feel a big and powerful car is safer even though SUVs, in fact, have a greater possibility of rolling over because of their higher center of gravity. Besides, the presenter interviews the planner for a campaign of Zantac, a product from Glaxo that can treat heartburn. It shows that pharmacy companies always create anxiety by exaggerating people's symptoms, making them believe that they have chronic diseases. Instead of seeing doctors, who will usually regard heartburn as a normal phenomenon and give no medicine, consumers tend to think they have severer symptoms and buy Zantac from the pharmacy. These two examples show that people's fear is always irrational, keeping them from doing the right thing. And it is such fear that gives merchants opportunities to utilize and sell their products. The interviews with representatives of different industries, in an extremely credible way, reveal the secret of the industries and can therefore help consumers to understand how their fear manipulates them.
In addition to mere interviews, The Men Who Made Us Spend also contains many video clips about the advertisement itself, which enables consumers to feel the selling tactics besides the analysis of experts directly. For example, when talking about the first advertising campaign that utilizes fear in history, the documentary shows the advertising video of Listerine. When discussing people's fear of aging, which reflects in the loss of memory, the documentary shows the advertisement video of a game of Nintendo, and the presenter even experiences the game himself. It is hard to understand the utilization of fear in selling tactics if the audience merely listens to the conversation between the presenter and experts, which is also boring. But once the conversation combines with the visual illustration, the explanation of the idea becomes powerful, and the audience will definitely be more engaged.
However, there was still a limit to this documentary, which is the information source from only sellers' perspectives. That is to say, the documentary only focuses on the conversation with experts, the selling tactics users, but ignores the conversation with consumers, the crowds who are influenced by the selling tactics. As consumers are also an indispensable part of the consuming process, I think the documentary should also include interviews, or surveys, with consumers to ask their feelings about advertisement and selling tactics and thus reveal the power of fear more objectively. If the audience understands the tactic merely from the perspective of sellers or designers, the description of the strength will be a little bit biased and exaggerated because it is the sellers that make the selling tactics.
Despite the limitation, The Men Who Made Us Spend is still worth watching because it includes so many real-world examples and visual illustrations from different industries, which can undoubtedly further the audience's understanding of how selling tactics utilize their fears.