Why We Want What We Want |
Many of our strongest desires feel entirely personal until we discover they were planted by someone else.
Advertisers teach us how messages stick. Parents can use the same principles to teach wisdom.
Kids who practice discernment early are better prepared for a world designed to capture attention.
“I feel like Chicken Tonight… like Chicken Tonight.”
“I feel like Chicken Tonight… like Chicken Tonight.”
In a 1994 episode of "The Simpsons," the family gathers around a birthday cake, trying to sing together. Grandpa prompts Bart and Lisa to start a song. Lisa asks whether this family knows anything other than commercials. Apparently not. Instead of folk songs, camp songs, hymns, or family memories, what rises first is an advertising jingle for a chicken pasta sauce. They flap their arms like chickens and belt it out.
The joke works because it is the laugh of recognition. We've all been there: A group of people who cannot remember where they left their keys can somehow recite a marketing hook from 30 years ago. Commercial language has found a home inside our collective memory. Long before algorithmic feeds, advertisers understood that repeated language enters consciousness and stays there.
Advertisers have traded on this for a century, ever since the first radio jingle, a barbershop quartet singing “Have you tried Wheaties?” on Christmas Eve 1926. The Oscar Mayer bologna song, Meow Mix in ‘74, even that operatic J.G. Wentworth “877-CASH-NOW”: Rhythm and repetition embed themselves whether we want them to or not. Language fused with music sinks in and takes root. The earworm is not a bug. It’s the business model.
Do parents fully grasp the power of compressed repeated language in the home? Have counter-jingles been planted? Family sayings? Short poetic phrases about values, attention, judgment? Or have those lessons been delivered mostly through long explanations that are forgotten almost as quickly as they are........