The marketing of feelings

Peter Kopa, 14.6.2023, Prague

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFyax-qNfKw

The marketing of feelings

When we read a newspaper or look at the Internet, we often immediately get the impression that the world is on the brink of the abyss. But does this image really reflect the reality of our times? Statistics show that there is reason for optimism. We are living longer, infant mortality has halved, air and water quality have improved considerably. Worldwide, far fewer people live in extreme poverty than fifty years ago.

So why does the media often paint such a black picture? Christian Fichter suspects that the underlying business model is the “outrage economy”. According to this logic, content is more successful the more it is emotionalized. In essence, it is a fight for the reader or ‘follower’ against a marketing background, which always seeks to ‘sell the fish to the highest bidder’.

Feelings are something genuinely human and precious that manifest, with an inner motion, the search for the good, beautiful and true or the rejection of evil. Thus, the basic feelings are respectively love and hate. From these are then derived various subordinate emotions such as fear, hope, joy, etc. In a well-formed and educated person, feelings are something that belongs to his intimacy and are prevalently expressed to the loved one, for example, in the sphere of the family.

However, in the last century it has been used more and more as a means of commercial marketing. But we have reached such an extreme, that emotions are produced industrially, to lubricate sales at the maximum price. Thus, the heart itself is in a certain way prostituted, so often in exchange for the flesh of less noble feelings. And what comes to the fore as bait is the ego itself, which is emotionally flattered by offers and sales in the immense supermarket of consumerism. Then there is sexual exhibitionism or the generation of feelings through a beautiful face. Other resources are the provocation of fear and even terror, for example, when faced with prophecies of ecological collapse, or that the end of the world is coming, or that a strong flu in the style of COVID 19 requires paralyzing the whole world. La verdad desnuda sobre el CO2 y el clima

The scenes of sentiment marketing

The first big stage is the social networks, where the aim is to capture the consumer’s attention by means of information supported by images and sound. And all of this is coated with emotional vaseline, which can take various forms: prophetic dramatism, according to which the end of the world should have happened dozens of times already. Or else we resort to sensationalism in relation to discoveries of all kinds, destined to change the world, or also to scandal, to give the consumer the feeling of being a very good person. Another brutal resource is Satanism and its aberrations, and pure and simple sex. The ultimate motivational cause of all this production is to make money in proportion to the number of consumers or ‘clicks’.

Another scenario of the marketing of feelings is the cinema coming out of the Hollywood studios. It is the great pioneer of all this, using ‘feelings’, initially, as ingredients for the creation of ‘suspense’.  Since the beginning of cinema some ninety years ago, it must be recognized that films of high quality in every sense have been made, and that they have also had the highest box office results. However, with the cultural downturn in society, cinema has become more and more a spectacle of continuous violence, with Superman-like heroes who never get hit by a single bullet. The subject of cinema is beautiful and complex, and its importance is crucial to understanding modern mentality and culture.

But in the last twenty years, Hollywood cinema has lent itself to partly transmitting globalist ideologies in a subliminal way, centered on the attempt to degrade man and exalt animals and plants. Paul Schwab and his accomplices in the Davos 2030 Agenda seek to change the traditional high valuation of man, as a child of God, to a being equal to animals, with the aggravating factor of being presented as the executioner of nature. This condemnatory sentence is pronounced every time it is said, lying, that man is solely and directly responsible for an ecological crisis that in reality does not exist.

The public reaction is right now before our eyes: for example, the boycott against Netflix and Disney for trying to propagate the globalist agenda of genderism and sex education to young children. This led to the fall of their stock prices on the New York Stock Exchange and at the same time resulted in the cancellation of subscriptions of many millions of parents.

A little historical background

We offer some summarized excerpts from an article that appeared in the Neue Zuercher Zeitung a few days ago about the nefarious sentiment industry.

Alongside the deification of reason, the Enlightenment has also exalted feelings. This is according to historian Ute Frevert, who has researched the history of feelings. Obviously, something has gone wrong over the centuries. Feelings themselves have become the hardest bargaining chip in the battle for the public’s attention. The commercialization of feelings has reached a perfection that deserves to be called a true emotion industry. What is happening today has become much broader, even total, than what Israeli sociologist Eva Illouz described love as a commodity in her 2003 book The Consumption of Romance. Every expression of feeling seems marketable and exploitable. Emotions have become the lubricant for the marketing of feelings.

For her part, the American sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild first described this fact in 1983 in her groundbreaking study “The Purchased Heart”.  She tells us that it is difficult to escape the influence of the media, that there is no more digital hermeticism. So one has to ask: What does the exacerbation of feelings do to us? Does it make us more compassionate, more sympathetic, more human? By no means. The omnipresent display of emotions does the opposite of what it intends. It breeds mistrust between people. It divides. For example, because the main representatives of emotional excess are guilty of hypocrisy.

But ego staging, self-marketing, collapses at some point. And there’s nothing people hate more than being disappointed. As a result, they turn away, get angry, lose faith in justice and distrust everything.