A sloppy propagandist or competent marketer can be tolerated. Competent propagandists and sloppy marketers should be shot on sight.

Believable superstitions are the entry point for both. Starting with facts doesn’t ignite emotions, and appealing to blind faith only attracts the faithful. Knowledge is an option, but it is both tedious and invites competing ideas to our “alternative facts.”

But sink a hook into the lip of believable superstition … the angling marketer and propagandist won’t have to work hard to reel ‘em in.

As noted before, one key to this approach is to listen to the target audience and repeat back to them the believable superstitions they already tell themselves. That alone is quite successful. Modern academia has ruined an entire generation by teaching the tragically myopic notion that the world is only composed of oppressors and oppressed people (a poisonous distillation of Marx who pitched a chronically naive  notion of how capitalism works). This overly simplistic concept is intuitively believable if one has witnessed a single act of oppression … providing one is dimwitted enough to project that onto the entirety of humanity.

But it sells, and propagandist continue to get traction with the notion. Marketers have no interest in that as it fragments the market and thus reduces potential sales.

Marketers also rely on believable superstition, at least when composing ad copy for market segments. This often takes the form of pitch the possible regardless of the practical, such as when they sell a middle-aged man a sports car that can do 200 miles per hour when the highest speed limit in the U.S. is 85.

But both the oppressor/oppressed and speed demon fallacies are both believable because they are conceivable. After obtaining the buy-in to the believable superstition, the propagandist and marketers keep repeating the superstition while presenting assorted “facts”, features, anecdotes, specification, etc.

The overlap between marketers and propagandists is in the realm of emotions. Marketers tend to access positive emotions (safety, good looks, ROI) while propagandists trade in negative ones (fear, oppression, crime, violence). But both have to appeal to the emotions already at play in their target audience. And this requires knowing what believable superstitions target audiences hold dear.

To illustrate, let’s examine both Karl Marx and Charles Revson.

Feudalism began fading in the 1600s and officially died in 1790 … along with a few monarchs who still embraced it. Karl Marx was born in 1818, a mere 28 years later. Marx was raised on the lingering and highly myopic notions about the old feudal order. So were many of his early and ardent readers. Marx’s incorrect hunches about capitalism were molded by events where the peasant classes were at the mercy of violent controls, which made Marx immune to the more enlightened view of capitalism as a complex set of complementary individual actions (you know, that whole moral philosophy described by another fellow named Smith).

Marx tapped into the latent populist believable superstitions concerning economics to brand capitalism as evil (remember, propagandists massage negative emotions). The intersection of the believable superstition (“they are keeping us down”) and the emotion (anger, fear, resentment) sold communism to key players and the small price of 100,000,000 people killed (and that doesn’t include war dead).

Charles Revson was a 20^th century American, and thus immune to communism. He founded the Revlon cosmetic company and got really, really, really rich (unlike any of the peasant classes in the Soviet Union). His most enduring quote is “In the factory we make cosmetics. In the store we sell hope.”

Revson tapped into the perpetual notion that beauty and all the Prince Charmings beauty attracts is available to any woman with a few bucks and a couple of hours in front of the mirror. In short, he attached his products to a believable superstition (I’m pretty, I can be prettier, pretty matters … a lot) with base emotions (I want to be loved/ravaged and have my choice of men).

But imagine how little traction Marx or Revson would have gotten if either component – a readily available and largely based believable superstition, and an emotional anchor for each – were missing. Visualize Marx preaching to the proletariat to “Strike down the Bourgeoisie!” if the former were friends of the latter, or if nobody felt particularly oppressed that day. Likewise, imagine Revson pitching mascara to women if men mainly appreciated women for their minds (yes, that last one was in the realm of science fiction, but we can hypothesize).

The key point is that both factors are necessary, the believable superstition and the emotional anchor.

The Shifting Facts/Knowledge Subsets

Beliefs are built upon tiny sets of facts or knowledge, leading to many possible permutations. Pitching to just one means you pitch to too narrow of an audience.

Here is a case point: The Center for the Study of Global Christianity estimates that there are more than 45,000 Christian denominations worldwide. And each has either minor or major variations on religious tenants. Even the Republican Party has at minimum seven major factions.

Let’s illustrate why this is a pain-in-the-arse for marketers and propagandists.

In this first table, we show that in isolation, you can have major different perspectives in a set of facts (or knowledge). But facts are rarely this linear, and thus belief systems are rarely this concise.

Reality is more like this next table, where any person, tribe, political party, sect or set of drinking buddies congeal around a unique set of input and ideas. Much of political squabbling starts with core ideological differences that are predicated on a narrow collection of facts or perspectives.

But some of these facts and perspectives cross boundaries and are shared. For example sake, nearly everyone agrees that feeding children is good. Conservatives, “progressives”, libertarians, communists, and the endangered species “free thinker” all agree. But each is wed to their political perspective and believe people in the other five groups are willing to let children starve because their political “solution” is repugnant to their own belief system.

This is why propagandists attempt to find core beliefs that spread across many groups who lack belief system animosity, and marketers seek value propositions that spread across many groups with cash. This allows focused campaigns.

When either marketers or propagandists stretch perspectives too broadly, the backlash is predictable because it confronts the belief systems of one or more groups.

The VP of Bud Light, at the time the #1 beer brand in the USA, wanted to expand their market by migrating their brand beyond its “frat boy” base. She hired a transexual to endorse their beer.

The frat boys were not endeared. Bud Light dropped to 3^rd place.

In the chart above, assume Bud’s current customers were in Perspective 1 and the trans community are in Perspective 4. There is no common set of facts or knowledge linking them vis-à-vis culture or beer.

This is why marketers and propagandists keep their messaging high-level and extremely focused on core groups. If a person has attached themselves to one or more believable superstitions, upon which they have erected a rubric that defines their universe, pitching them anything that directly opposes those beliefs is rejected. The greater the degree of non-alignment of foundational facts and knowledge, the more vocal or violent the response.