The 7 Sneakiest Ways Corporations Manipulated Human Behavior

The Deviously Simple Plan:

Edward Bernays, aka the godfather of spin and the forefather of modern PR, was given a simple task: sell bacon like a motherfucker. Bacon seller Beech-Nut Packing realized that sales of their products were slipping and they hired Bernays to fix that. Seeing as this was the same Bernays who convinced women that smoking was totally the best way to stick it to men back in the '30s, they figured he was up to the task.

His target would be a specific meal: breakfast. Now, at the time, breakfast wasn't considered a big, heavy meal -- it was a cup of coffee and some toast for most people. Bernays needed to convince America that breakfast was Bacon Time.

Being the nephew of the legendary Sigmund "You're always thinking about wangs" Freud, Bernays knew that to a customer, the words of famous spokespeople were nothing compared to the words of a trusted professional. So Bernays approached a doctor with a simple question: Was a hearty breakfast better for a person than a smaller, shittier one?

Once he had the obvious answer, he then asked whether bacon and eggs could be considered a hearty breakfast. Again the doctor agreed. That was all he needed; Bernays repeated this process with 5,000 doctors, using this roundabout method to get them to actually say that strips of fried pig fat was a healthy way to start your day. Newspapers across the country treated this bullshit publicity stunt as a scientific study and ran story after story about how if you weren't starting the day with a big plate full of bacon and eggs, you were signing your own death warrant. Beech-Nut's sales soared.

We can't really do the story as much justice as the man himself, because you can totally tell that all the way through the story, he still can't quite believe that people fell for his bullshit:

But when McDonald's head Ray Kroc noticed that some of the local store sales were starting to plateau in the 1970s, he hired a guy named David Wallerstein to figure out why.

Wallerstein started his research by going to several McDonald's locations around Chicago to watch people eat, presumably through a newspaper with eye holes cut into it. Wallerstein noticed a peculiar trend: People would sit picking at the bottom of their fry bags while others fruitlessly tried to suck nonexistent soda out of their insultingly small cups, but they never went back to buy more.

This is when Wallerstein realized that there was a social stigma in being seen ordering extra portions of anything. People who loved fries didn't just ask for a double order, because they thought other people would judge them for their gluttony.

The Deviously Simple Plan:

Wallerstein's solution was simplicity itself: Normalize the idea of ordering bigger food. Put it right on the menu, promote it and just charge more up front. Tell the cashiers to offer the larger sizes to customers, sending the subconscious message that "It's totally OK to eat twice as much food as is recommended for a person your size, and in fact we would prefer if you did." Wallerstein pitched his idea to Kroc, who promptly shot it down.

But Kroc eventually came around, and McDonald's would fully embrace the idea of "supersizing" meals in the 1990s. An entirely new model for selling fast food was born, booming almost as dramatically as the worldwide obesity epidemic that mysteriously occurred around the same time.

But the initial sales were terrible. To housewives, it almost seemed too easy. How could a cake worth eating come from a "just add water" mix?

So, the people at Betty Crocker knew what they had to do: make the process harder.

The Deviously Simple Plan:

For help, the company turned to Ernest Dichter, a pioneer of advertising and one of the first to use focus groups and psychoanalysis to aid with product development and advertising. After countless hours of probing the minds of customers with surveys, questionnaires and a terrifying gaze framed by his heavy '50s era glasses, he had his answer: make the customer add an egg while baking.

It was completely unnecessary -- the first mixes had powdered egg built in. But this pointless and symbolic extra step worked like a charm -- sales skyrocketed, to the point that today you probably have never eaten a cake that didn't come from an instant mix. It turned out people who bake things still want to feel like they're doing something.

So why have them add the egg, instead of some other ingredient? Some claim the egg held a special significance as a symbol of womanhood and fertility. But it really seems more likely that cracking a fresh egg just makes you feel more like you're actually baking something homemade, instead of feeding your party guests a powder-based dehydrated space food. In an age when everything was becoming instant and automated, people just wanted to feel like they were still needed.

Regardless, one of the most popular treats around Easter is the Cadbury Creme Egg, a seasonal candy that is just a chocolate shell shaped like a chicken's egg, with a sugary white-and-yellow filling inside. You know, so you feel like you're eating a raw egg. So what were the people at Cadbury to do when sugar prices started eating into their profits, with consumers unwilling to pay more?

The Deviously Simple Plan:

Shrink the eggs, and tell consumers that they're simply misremembering how big they were before.

Because the eggs are a seasonal item, that means that for nine months of the year, no one has any access to them. In 2006, when the company shrank the size of the eggs, they posted a message on their website saying that the eggs hadn't gotten smaller, your hands and mouth had just gotten bigger (or as they phrased it, "You've just grown up").

Strangely, it was actor B.J. Novak (Ryan from The Office, also seen in Inglourious Basterds) who decided to go on TV to prove that Cadbury was giving everyone less for their money:

Cadbury was forced to change their website messaging to the slightly more honest though incredibly vague statement that they offer a "broad variety of sizes and flavors of products." See, they only made them smaller to appease all of those people who insisted on getting less product for their money.

Two tablets, that's all it takes. "Plop, plop," just like the jingle says. Except you actually only need one tablet. The second "plop" isn't doing anything but dissolving your money.

The Deviously Simple Plan:

Up until the 1960s, the instructions only said to use one tablet, and that's all they showed people doing in the ads. But the company hit a rut. Sales were steady, but not great. They needed a way to market the product to younger customers, and to get them to buy more.

This is when inspiration struck: tell people to use two tablets, even if they didn't need to. It's not like taking two of them would kill you or anything. The problem was that nothing in the company's current advertising said anything about taking two Alka-Seltzers, and it's not like they could just arbitrarily tell people to double the dosage and never explain why, right? Oh wait, that's pretty much exactly what they did. They just had a cartoon mascot sing it. Who's going to argue with a jingle?

Thus was born the "plop, plop, fizz, fizz" campaign, aka one of the greatest and most terrifying ad campaigns of all time:

Just like that, all of the decades where they insisted that one tablet was enough were erased from memory, with utterly no explanation. Sales didn't exactly double, but people started doing exactly what the company wanted. Using two Alka-Seltzer tablets became the norm, with so-called "single fizzers" being stigmatized and beaten in the street.

But there is something unique about the liquor market that makes it different from selling other beverages. Perception is everything. But how do you change people's perception of your product?

The Deviously Simple Plan:

Leave the product exactly the same, and massively raise the price. And we're talking about charging far more than any of the major competitors.

Suddenly, people started buying it.

Yeah, it turns out that most people don't know anything about alcohol, or what makes for good-tasting scotch. You can't blame them -- besides looking at proof, there is no objective way to measure the quality of alcohol. So, in situations where there really isn't anything tangible to consider, people look at the price. People automatically assume that if the company charges more for a product, it must be worth more. And get this: They continue thinking that even after they drink it.

Scientists actually tested this: At the California Institute of Technology, they did an experiment where they stuck people inside an MRI and gave them a couple glasses of wine. Although the glasses were both from the same bottle, the people were told that one glass contained regular table wine, and the other contained an incredibly expensive vintage. As the subjects drank from each glass, the part of the brain that controls taste behaved the same, but the brain's pleasure center went off like crazy on the "more expensive" glass.

And if you're thinking that you'd never fall for a cheap trick like what Chivas Regal tried to pull, well, guess what: That's why it works.

Some of you reading this drink more coffee than water. But no matter how much it seems like a staple of our workday, the popularity of the drink comes and goes like any other product (you might have noticed there wasn't a Starbucks on every corner when you were a kid).

So, during the 1950s, coffee was going out of style. For whatever reason, people started thinking of it as something low class, only consumed for the side effects. To turn the tide, the coffee-growing nations of South America and the major coffee companies in the United States banded together to form the Pan-American Coffee Bureau. They poured a ridiculous $2 million a year into making Americans love coffee again. To do this, they recruited sociologist John B. Watson, now working in advertising after a previous career in scaring the shit out of babies, to lead their campaign.

The Deviously Simple Plan:

Watson noticed that during World War II, some factories started giving their employees a couple of minutes off every shift, during which time some of these workers would drink a quick cup of coffee to wake themselves up. Figuring that using the novel idea of "work less" to sell coffee was worth a shot, he ran a massive series of advertisements to get people on board with the new "coffee break" idea he had thought up. His ads featured happy people sitting around and conspicuously not working, all while drinking huge mugs of coffee.

It makes no sense whatsoever. At most jobs, you can drink coffee while you work. And there are a million things you could be drinking or eating on a work break. It didn't matter -- you don't question tradition, even if it's a tradition somebody just made up last week. Getting people to refer to their morning break as a "coffee break" was enough to cement the idea that if you consumed anything else but coffee on that break, then you were screwing it up somehow.

By the end of the first year, 80 percent of businesses were giving their employees a short break, and they didn't call it a "cola break" or a "candy bar break" or a "sit quietly and stare at the kitten calendar in your cubicle" break. No, it was a goddamned "coffee break," thanks to one of the most ingenious marketing moves in history.

Karl has a Twitter, Facebook and a blog. He also says hi. Jack Hall is busy chasing ducks right now, but can be hired to write funny for you by emailing coastyjack@gmail.com.

For more ways you're getting screwed out of your money, check out 5 Ways Stores Use Science to Trick You Into Buying Crap and Dickonomics: How 5 Everyday Businesses Trick You.

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