I can't see why - the sales clerks at brick and mortar stores do the same thing. Like, if I went to a bike shop they would make off-handed remarks about someone buying a certain style helmet recently or perhaps emphasize the DOT rating (instead of the lacking Snell). Seems natural.

It depends. I have two supermarkets within about a similar distance, a Safeway and Trader Joe's. Safeway has all branded goods, a larger selection, they send coupons to my mailbox every week (a very common form of marketing in the US, for people who live elsewhere), and they have a store loyalty card I'm encouraged to pull out every time I go. They are always having sales and special offers and so on. Trader Joes send me brochure about once a month talking about what they have that I might want to buy, most of the good are under their own house brand (often just relabeled versions of brand products), they never give any discounts and they have no store loyalty card, plus the supermarket is smaller and the selection is inferior in terms of # of goods on sale. And they sometimes run out of a particular thing for a week or two and if they don't have they just don't have it. And they're probably a bit more expensive, like 5-10%.

However, I do most of my grocery shopping there, notwithstanding the disadvantages. The reason why is because I can concentrate on choosing the actual things I want to eat or otherwise consume on their own merits, whereas if I go to the Safeway I'm constantly bombarded with over-engineered promotional messages and in encouraged to focus on this week's special offer!!! and so on. The time spent figuring out how to get the best deal is IMHO often worth more than the amount of money you save in the process, and it shifts the focus of my attention from what I want to what the store has too much of and wants to get off the shelves, ie it substitutes the store's economic interest for my own. Now, of course sometimes I go to Safeway to pick up particular goods or if they have some especially enticing offer, or if I need something that's not available or good value at the other store. But I try to limit my Safeway visits to less than one a month, and when I do go it's with a very narrow agenda, ie I go specifically to purchase a small number of specific items and get out as fast as possible, rather than drifting around the aisles throwing this that and the other into the cart. It's a mentally toxic environment for me, whereas at the smaller supermarket I sort of enjoy doing the grocery shopping and I know quite a few of the people who work there by name.

Both stores are engaged in marketing - getting me to fork over money in exchange for consumables - but I much prefer the one that emphasizes a general level of quality and good value for the products on offer over the one that emphasizes endless choice, limited-time offers, and cart optimization ('buy 3 get 1 free' etc.).

With Trader Joe's it seems you could trust them to have done the curating for you. That is you might not like the taste of some products, but you wouldn't get something absolutely horrible. That is you wouldn't get something which pretended to be health but is absolutely not.

With other supermarkets you have to really check the ingredients and even then you might get taken for a ride.

That is a huge cognitive load to deal with if you know how, and even worse deal if you do not know how to find decent products.

Intentionally deceptive communication is evil in brick-and-mortar stores too. That's one of the reasons that many people prefer online shopping -- to escape aggressive and manipulative salespeople.

If often pitch our product as "the online equivalent of a good 'offline' sales person".

An 'offline' sales person also makes a judgement and tailors it's story to that judgement. How does the customer look, what are his questions, what can I upsell, etc etc.

Why? To me this just sounds like intelligent marketing. If it's not lying, what's wrong with tailoring the message to the audience?

I also think 'scumbag' is going too far, but marketing of this sort flirts with dishonesty and often leaps right into bed with it. If the consumer goes looking for, say, a bag of apples, I'm fine with the sort of marketing that says 'we have lots of apples' or 'our applies are super tasty' or 'Mmmm, crunchy tasty apples, yum!'. It's OK to reflect some version of the consumer's desire for your product in hope that the consumer will identify with that desire and make a purchase.

But if you say 'OMG, running out of apples' or 'study: apples cut cancer risk' or 'everyone's eating Valar_m's apples', then you're no longer addressing the consumer's desire to eat apples, you're playing on the consumer's latent anxiety about missing a good deal, or eating the right food, or fitting in with peers - things which have nothing to do with the apples themselves, but with the consumer's socioeconomic position and the desire to maintain or improve it. It's as if you bait them with a picture of the apple they desire, then switch to making them feel anxious about the consequences of not following through with a transaction.

I don't mean to imply that you or anyone else who practices this sort of marketing is some sort of cartoon villain, cackling as you part anxious consumers from their money. But if you think it through, I think you'll agree that there is a fundamental difference between the two styles of communication, and that the latter one involves a semantic turn.

Couldn't the same be said about manipulating a child or someone with a mental disorder? That you are tailoring the message to the recipient, that it's a smart strategy to get what you want?

I not really sure I like that analogy but what I'm trying to say is this: there is an information and power asymmetry. While one side has people working 40-hour weeks, using marketing techniques exploiting gaps in human attentiveness developed over generations, with machine learning algorithms crunching data on that person to find their most effective lever - at the other side of the table sits someone hapless and ignorant that they are the target of covert forces. No person, no matter how rational or smart or educated, can stand up to manipulation that they aren't informed about.

It's like calling sleeve cards a smart blackjack strategy. It is. It absolutely is. But the misgivings of the parent are't misgivings about the effectiveness of the strategy.

And to take it further, do we want businesses competing on who can manipulate customers into coming to them? Isn't the whole point of competition that businesses are supposed to try to make better and better products to attract business?

What you have today are identical products made overseas by child labor being sold by two stores, where the two stores compete on brand, labeling and customer advertising because at the root their product is identical. Is that optimally functioning Capitalism?

I understand where you're coming from. But that's kind of a slippery slope argument. It is based on the premise that manipulation is evil. Manipulation isn't evil.

Let's consider for a minute an event where persuasion psychology is used to have someone buy services from a personal trainer. This PT helps the lad. She becomes healthier, happier, and fit as a result. Isn't manipulation good, in this case?

What if your product is awesome and makes people's lives better. Isn't it your moral imperative to market it to people? Isn't it moral to manipulate people into using and buying it if it makes their lives better?

Am I trying to convince myself here? Maybe. But I was reading "The Ultimate Sales Letter" this morning and there's a passage in it which says

> "ALL Successful Selling is by Nature and Necessity manipulative"

That's just how the game is played (?)

I agree wholeheartedly with you. Not all manipulation is evil. In this case the argument is that this specific class of manipulation is not altruistic. Cui bono? It's not the consumer.

I don't think I would agree with the universal that all market transactions are manipulative. But even if we granted that, it would come to your distinction: what kind of manipulation is it? Who benefits from the manipulation, and is anyone taken advantage of? Beyond the singular instance, does the sum of individual actions taken together constitute something good?

There's theoretical instances where strong manipulation may benefit the manipulated (PT? Medicine?), but this too is a slippery slope towards a justification for paternalism. I'm sure that the business, in whatever form of cognitive dissonance it can muster, may think that the prospective consumer will benefit from its product. A great example of this are the people who sell healing water and crystals. What we want is for consumers to be informed and we want a healthy society (friends, family, neighbors, society) to encourage people to make choices that have clear indicators that they will benefit. We don't want the crystal seller to be the one educating the consumer on crystals - just as we would rather have a person choose for themselves to get physical therapy than be coerced into it. (The difference between societal encouragement and education versus marketing is overtness, necessary in hypothesis for us to call it manipulative).

There's also the other question you didn't touch on. In the aggregate do we want a market system that competes on being better salesmen or one that competes on making better products and manufacturing them more affordably? Recognizing here that these are not mutually exclusive which do we want to be emphasized?

I don't think that the above argument is grounded on the premise that all manipulation is evil. A more reasonable interpretation I think categorizes the type of manipulation being done in the instance, and the motivations for it, as being selfish and underhanded - the sort of thing we might think about condemning. Furthermore it suggests that the type of manipulation being done on a larger scale is not a healthy economy make.

I wouldn't use the "scumbag" term, but "intelligent marketing" can sometimes be quite "scummy", in my opinion.

Take the example given above: "Scarcity: '3 products left in stock'"

Why should the number of products left in stock be useful to me if I was planning on buying the product? (So long as there are as many as I was planning on buying, that is).

It's only useful for converting someone who would not have otherwise bought the product. So suddenly through this bit of extra information (which is in itself almost certainly unrelated to why you were considering buying the product in the first place), you're overriding someone's decision from "don't buy" into "buy". There's a fuzzy argument in there about "might have bought tomorrow and buys today, instead", but my gut tells me that's more of a rationalization than anything.

So suddenly, you're selling products not based on the product itself, but based on some bit of metadata wholly unrelated to the performance of the product itself. I know it seems like such a little thing (and generally, I'd agree that it is, really), but the original article itself shows just how often people think we're making rational decisions, but in reality have been manipulated.

> It's only useful for converting someone who would not have otherwise bought the product.

Its not useful for converting someone who has decided "do not want". It is useful primarily for converting someone who is on the fence and is considering deferring a purchase decision on the assumption that the decision can be later with no cost (other than delay in getting the product).

Its also potentially useful for converting someone who is on the fence but subject to being swayed by the perception that other people are buying.

> So suddenly, you're selling products not based on the product itself, but based on some bit of metadata wholly unrelated to the performance of the product itself.

Scientific study of the specific mechanisms that work here might be new, and even moreso any particular result of that study may be, but that general fact is not even remotely new. Its pretty much a major part of what sales and marketing are about. Engaging on a rational level may be part of that, but its never been the major part.

> It is useful primarily for converting someone who is on the fence and is considering deferring a purchase decision on the assumption that the decision can be later with no cost (other than delay in getting the product).

That's the main argument I was expecting, (and I called it out somewhat at the end of the paragraph you quote). I'd be very curious to know what percentage of people do make that purchase at a later time. I'm under the impression that the in-person sales industry has a derisive term for this sort of person: "bebacks", meaning someone who says they'll "be back" later to buy, but rarely does return. That leads me to believe that someone who was "on the fence" and would have deferred the purchase, but is swayed by the scarcity argument should be considered a "do not want". We can argue on this one all day long though, I'm sure.

> Its pretty much a major part of what sales and marketing are about. Engaging on a rational level may be part of that, but its never been the major part.

See, that's the problem I have with all of this. The fact that we seem to condone psychological manipulation in marketing as okay because it's not outright lying and most of the time it's not that bad (whatever that means!) is kind of crummy, imo.

I mean, I get it. People can never make perfectly-informed decisions. Sales and marketing are a necessary evil in a world where they have to choose between seemingly-equal options. It's just weird to me that statements like:

> Its also potentially useful for converting someone who is on the fence but subject to being swayed by the perception that other people are buying.

Aren't viewed as...gross? "Don't buy Acme Laundry Soap for its form or function, buy it because everyone else is!"

> I'm under the impression that the in-person sales industry has a derisive term for this sort of person: "bebacks", meaning someone who says they'll "be back" later to buy, but rarely does return.

That's not because people are genuinely deferring purchase decisions are unlikely to return, that's because claiming to be deferring purchase decisions is a common polite way for a "do not want" to excuse themselves from a conversation with an in-person sales person.

On the statement at the end: humans are, in a significant respect, social imitation machines. Its a pretty strong factor. Recognizing that it exists isn't gross. You seem to have problems differentiating descriptive statements from positive value judgements on the thing described.

> See, that's the problem I have with all of this. The fact that we seem to condone psychological manipulation in marketing as okay because it's not outright lying and most of the time it's not that bad

That has nothing to do with what I said. In fact, I disagree, it often is outright lying and often is quite bad. All I said was that the badness isn't, in any respect, new, though the study of how it works may be.

Nice, you're describing a part of our process which sits at the beginning at our decision engine: segmentate visitors in three groups: buying for sure (no need to persuade), not buying for sure (no need as well) and people that have not decided yet. That last group is most interesting: they can be persuaded. Question remains: with what kind of message and at what time. That's our challenge!

The very idea that you can view "they can be persuaded" as anything less than behavior manipulation is interesting. If you're trying to impact behavior at a subconscious level, you're bypassing a person's conscious security controls and accessing their legacy brain API. An API that -- long ago -- saved the brain owner's life but today keeps modern humans trying to stock up on high calorie food because "winter is coming." Or as Clay Johnson put it, "brains want what WAS good for us, not what IS good for us." Your algorithms are counting on this and exploiting it. I know exactly how easy it is to feel OK about doing this given just how much manipulation design I used to develop, advocate, even teach. I'm now horrified I ever did it, and even more horrified that I cognitive dissonanced my way into thinking it was not just OK but perhaps even noble -- after all, those kids games I made for the [ginormous candy company] were educational. I suggest you read "Addiction by Design", about precisely what happens when personally-tailored adaptive algorithms are combined with behavior science. If reading Kahneman doesn't give you a reason to rethink this, Addiction by Design might.

> I'm now horrified I ever did it, and even more horrified that I cognitive dissonanced my way into thinking it was not just OK but perhaps even noble

Your whole comment is great, but this line especially stuck out to me. It's amazing how much effort people people in this line of marketing are spending trying to read (and then manipulate) other people's minds, without taking a moment to examine what's going on inside their own.

Based on the tone of bartkappenburg's comments though, I'd be afraid that the reading material you've suggested might come off as how-to guides!