Heir Conditioning

  At the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist, I will say that companies are always trying to convince us to buy their products. An innocent enough claim, no? The way they do it, however, is what makes it so dastardly.

They're constantly using behaviors we've probably acquired throughout life, or certain associations, to get us to buy their product. Now when I say associations or behaviors, I don't mean things like being quiet in a movie theatre, or perhaps your conduct around friends as shown in Chuck Lorre's The Big Bang Theory, these are examples of Operant Conditioning. Rather the emotions or actions we feel or take around certain family members, foods, or the like; This is known as Classical Conditioning. Typically companies like to strike while the iron is hot, per se, and take advantage of when the conditioning is at it's freshest and most malleable.
  You can see one such example of this in the old Lunchables Ad from 1998 (found here) where it first shows a child and his father playing basketball in the kitchen and obviously having a good time. Already we have one time where the advertisers have taken advantage of this conditioned response to family, because, as I can testify to, I like my family! So this child is playing in the kitchen with his dad, and after scoring a point his father offers him some egg salad for lunch (Yuck!), so of course the child tells his father 'We need an all-star lunch!' The child then proceeds to open the box by tossing it under his legs, catching the bun in his hands, and magically assembles the toppings with a clear disregard for physics. All this time he's making 'Mmm...' noises, which, I think I can speak for everyone on this, we have been conditioned to know as a noise of pleasure in eating or drinking something, so we assume that if it's tasty for this cool basketball-playing kid, it has to be tasty for us! Finally the ad uses the sounds of a crisp can of cola being opened as the kid opens his can of soda and proceeds to down it all in a couple of gulps, so we, as we've been conditioned to believe, assume that can of cola must have been extremely refreshing! 

Honestly not all that tasty!

  Now that I've shown an example of how advertisers take advantage of conditioned responses that we were never even wise to, let me give you all the basic tools you'll need to protect yourself, and your wallet, from these albeit clever ads. If you keep a watchful eye open whenever you're watching ads you'll notice a disturbingly high quantity of certain things. Commercials talking of family members and their cooking are the most likely to try and get you with conditioning. If I were to start talking about my grandmother's delicious flans which always made the house smell like warm caramel and custard, there's an incredibly likely chance that your mouth would (did) water! The best way we can guard ourselves against what is essentially subliminal advertising is to simply catch yourself before your mind drifts off! In addition if you should somehow find the ad working on you, look at the product you're about to buy and ask yourself, 'Why am I buying this?' because there's a good chance your answer will be 'I don't know!', and if this is ever the case, that is your cue to place that product back on the shelf.