Never a Lack of Ideas

This is the second of two posts on the psychology of illusions. Read the first post here . I hate waiting. I'll bet you do, too. My vision of hell involves waiting in a long line that never ends. Smart marketers know people hate to wait, so they create illusions to trick us into thinking that we're not waiting. Theme parks have gotten really good at this. These days, every major new ride created at a theme park includes things to see and do right in the line. Example: Touring Hogwarts When Universal Studios Islands of Adventure opened its Wizarding World of Harry Potter park in 2010, my wife, sister, and I were among the first to visit. We happily waited in line for nearly two hours to ride the main attraction: Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey. Why were we happy to wait in line? Because it took us on an awesome tour through Hogwarts. In each room we waited, magical things happened to us. The Sorting Hat sang us a song. Harry, Hermione, and Ron cast spells i...

Illusions are everywhere in marketing. I'm not talking about the kind of illusions David Copperfield performs nightly. I'm talking about the things organizations do to make customers think something is true when it's not. Because my wife and I are going to see Penn and Teller perform in Las Vegas soon, I thought I'd expose some of the most popular illusions in marketing and then identify what we can learn from them. Let's go... Example: Poop in the Pool A friend of mine recently told me this story from his time as a lifeguard at his neighborhood pool: Whenever someone pooped in the pool, we cleared the area and then fished it out of the water. Then, we were trained to grab an empty two liter bottle we had on hand, go into the bathroom, fill it with water, and dump it in the area in which the poop was found. We'd wait a few minutes, and then open the pool back up. Yikes! My friend went on to say that the pool was already treated heavily with chemicals...