Advertisement Failure: Be Ashamed not to Buy

Galleria Riga Advertisement

You rarely see advertisements, which give facts, technical specifications, and an explanation why some product is going to be useful for you. Instead, marketing people prefer to make annoying appeals to emotion. Advertisements tend to be made with the assumption that buyers are irrational, impulsive, and their emotions are easy to manipulate. I’m long since used to marketing people underestimating my intelligence. Most of the time their appeals to emotion are just annoying. Occasionally, however, they get outright disgusting. This is one such example—people are told to be ashamed for not buying some crap.

Why the Society Wants You to Feel Ashamed

1944 French Women Shaved Heads
Paris 1944: French women accused of collaboration with Nazis had their heads shaved and were paraded through the streets barefoot.

Human sense of shame, embarrassment, and humiliation is a purely social construct. There is nothing inherently embarrassing about any situation that a human being might experience throughout their life. This brings up the following question: why do people perceive certain specific experiences as shameful?