How to Win Stuff and Influence Yourself

You might scoff at the so-called “Law of Attraction,” but advertisers use its principles very effectively — to attract you.

Believers in this law generally subscribe to four tenets — positivity, specificity, visualization, and affirmations:

1. Positivity attracts the desired object, and negativity repels it.
2. The more specific you are about what you want, the better.
3. You need to clearly and intensely visualize what you want.
4. Affirmations help you sustain the energy needed to attract the desired thing.

Sound dumb? Well the same basic idea is used — very effectively — by the advertising industry. Only in that case, the object is you. A successful ad campaign uses:

And is New Age spirituality — or at least the kind that’s focused on material gain — really so different from advertising? Both are concerned with “manifesting” benefits, whether for brands or individuals. And the subconscious is the key to both.

From desiring to acquiring: the role of the subconscious

The subconscious stores and processes a lot of information, but because it is subconscious, we don’t always realize this. One thing that the subconscious is especially good at is recognizing patterns. It helps us notice what’s out there and where we might find it.

Advertisers take advantage of both frequency illusion and confirmation bias to turn targets into buyers with ads that employ positivity, visualization, specificity, and affirmation. Let’s say you see an ad for a vacuum. The ad describes all the qualities your current vacuum is lacking: it’s light, quiet, and fits in tight places. By creating a positive atmosphere and setting a scene that shows how effective this vacuum has been for other people, advertisers make you visualize its value in your own life. Through repeated exposure to the advertisement, your positive impression of this vacuum is constantly reaffirmed. It looks like this is the vacuum for you. When you finally notice it in the store, buying it seems fated.

The New Age law of attraction can work in a similar fashion, but instead of an external trigger, like a commercial or billboard, the process starts within. By taking a moment to set an intention and visualize it, attraction practitioners are basically creating mental advertisements for the things they want.

Let’s say you’re trying to attract a vacation into your life. You frequently imagine yourself on that vacation, complete with details: sand in your toes, sun on your skin. Your subconscious is now primed to notice anything related to your imaginary vacation. For the next week, you walk around and notice every vacation-related word, product, and image. You see a really sweet deal for a tropical getaway at a travel agency near work, and voilà! You’ve manifested your vacation.

In this case, it’s pretty clear that you weren’t magnetically attracting your getaway. You were just paying more attention to the opportunities around you because the mental advertisement you were running on a loop inside your skull. But from your perspective it might have really felt like the universe was throwing those things your way for a reason.

As to whether the whole practice of attraction is silly or shallow, well, maybe it is, but what’s the harm in using it on yourself for your own benefit? After all, advertisers are using it on you.

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