Behind Zohran Mamdani's impactful and colourful campaign

thehindu.com

7 points·thunderbong··4 comments

It's a sign of an uneducated populace that a political campaign's success depends on visual design. The good thing for that kind of populace is that it can be made to think it's doing better, or on the way to better, when it's actually not.

Marketing works and propaganda works. It's as much of a science as it is an art. When done effectively, both leverage characteristics that:

1) exploit known aspects of indivdual human behavior (more reliable when based upon aspects that stem directly from physiological processes)

and

2) play to the the social climate of whatever emergent phenomena are presently occuring in society.

Strategies for 2) tend to be less evergreen. Many people are always hard at work doing reaearch to bolster techniques for 1) and 2).

I agree with you that education helps build immunity against "cheap tricks" used to influence human behavior.

I also want to add that if one has the privilege of decreased susceptibility to these strategies, it's only that: decreased susceptibility and not immunity. At which point, if the goal is not to be influenced, then a useful strategy for the "marketed-to" is to maintain a healthy respect for the power these techniques can have.

Thought experiment: do you think he would have won with the same design and messages in California, or Massachusetts? I don’t think so, it’s less about what he’s saying and how he’s saying it, it’s more about what he’s promising to do. People look for the message that resonates with their personal reality, he won on affordability politics. Same for Trump, he won over poor and struggling American counties with a similar message, albeit with different promises.

https://archive.ph/q5LQx

Reply on news.ycombinator.com