Propaganda
What do you think of when you hear the term "propaganda"? If you're like most people, you immediately think of totalitarian regimes and brutal dictatorships. Most people tend to associate propaganda with something bad. Most people think of Communist propaganda posters, Nazi propaganda movies, and other similarly sinister things. If you take a step back, you might also think of propaganda as being posters like the "Uncle Sam Wants You!" recruitment posters for the Army. Propaganda can also be seen as ads that play upon emotions to get you to think and act a certain way. A most common current example would be election ads. Politicians run ads which paint their opponent as evil while painting themselves as bringers of good. If you vote for their opponent, then you're making sure that your kids won't get education, your parents will starve in the streets in their old age, and you will end up giving all of your money to the government as you watch them take away your house.
Now, these are extreme examples of propaganda, but they give you some sort of idea of what propaganda does. Propaganda tries to make us think and feel in certain ways. We can see propaganda as acting the opposite way of how news casts supposedly do. We generally think of the news as providing us with totally objective information that isn't biased one way or the other. Whether or not the news actually does that is another matter, and depends on who you talk to, of course. Propaganda is aimed directly at manipulating your emotions, your opinions, and your behavior. Propaganda wants to make you act in a certain way.
Now there are a few ways that propaganda works. The first is to appeal to your emotions. The election day ads that we talked about above are a way of appealing to your emotions in order to get you to act a certain way. This kind of propaganda can be really, really obvious. But it can also be more subtle. One of the most subtle ways is to appeal to universal emotions and beliefs that most people hold. An example of this kind of propaganda are the Sponsor a Child ads that air on TV and that we see in the newspaper. Nobody wants children to starve, and rightly so. Nobody should want people to starve. So sponsor a child campaigns play off of the fact that most people are decent human beings who can't stand to see children starving to death. Once they've made you feel sorry for those kids, then you're influenced to act in a certain way. See, propaganda doesn't have to be bad and doesn't have to be selfish. It just tries to make you act in certain ways. In the case of Sponsor a Child, it tries to make you act in a positive way. The Red Cross airs ads that have similar propaganda effects.
Another way that propaganda can work is by simply smothering the public in information or in advertisements. This propaganda approach works by following the idea that if you repeat something enough, then people will believe it. Well, it works. The same thing works for product brands. If you totally flood the market with images of your product, then people won't even know that there are other options out there. Apple did a great job with this kind of propaganda when it started marketing the ipod. It's still doing a great idea. So many ads were run, so many stories aired on TV, so many newspapers wrote articles about the iPod that few people were, or are, aware that there are other digital music players that are out there.
Basically, propaganda is another term for public relations. What you're doing when you start a public relations campaign is you're trying to make your potential consumers, the public, think of you in a certain way. You have to market your product or your services. You can do this in lots of different, subtle ways. One of them is to set yourself up as the key expert in your field. Another way is to make your product or your brand so physically visible that nobody will think of anything else. You might want to consider hiring a public relations specialist who will help you develop propaganda, or public relations, in a way that will work for you. The point is, propaganda isn't just for bad guys that want to take over the world. If you ever want to influence anyone to buy your product or hire your services, you need to learn how to make propaganda work for you.
Here are some general tips about public relations and publicity techniques. Or, in other words, good propaganda.
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