Marketing Tactics Geared Toward Women: What They Are, How They Work, and What We Can Do
Our brains LOVE stories, don’t they?
Since the beginning of time, humans have been sharing stories with the hope of passing along their knowledge and experiences to others. And oftentimes, these personal anecdotes are much easier to remember and waaaaay more interesting to retell than statistics and facts.
However, another person’s compelling story can tend to hijack our emotions and cloud our own level-headed judgement. And we may forget that this personal anecdote is a single data point that might be true for one person but may not apply to everyone.
Let me give you a few examples:
“My grandpa smoked his whole life, and he lived to be 95. I think doctors are exaggerating the risk of smoking.”
“My kids aren’t vaccinated, and they’re perfectly healthy. Vaccinations are just a money-grab.”
“My sister has been using testosterone pellets, and she’s never felt better. Pellets are the way to go for hormone treatment.”
Each of these is an example of anecdotal fallacy which is defined as “relying on personal experiences or individual cases as evidence for a general claim while overlooking the larger and more reliable data.”
The truth is a single story does not negate the need for empirical evidence and comprehensive scientific research with provable and reproducible statistical outcomes. And this is only one example of the way marketing skews our perception of health, hoping to sell us another product.
Here are a few more marketing strategies to watch out for:
False Cause Fallacy: This marketing tool incorrectly implies that a correlation between two things or events must mean a causal relationship exists without presenting solid data or statistical evidence of such causation.
Cherry Picking Fallacy: This manipulation of data selectively presents incomplete evidence to confirm a particular position while ignoring contradicting info that may give a more complete picture.
Appeal to Nature Fallacy: This fallacy implies a product is ‘good’ because it is natural or ‘bad’ because it is synthetic when really what is more important is whether a particular product has been tested for safety and efficacy in humans.
Appeal to Irrelevant Authority Fallacy: This marketing tool plays on people’s feeling of respect or familiarity toward a famous person without proper support that the claim is true.
Hasty Generalization Fallacy: This logical fallacy occurs when someone reaches a conclusion about a large group of people based on insufficient evidence leading to stereotyping, misinformation, and unsubstantiated conclusions.
Correlation vs. Causation Fallacy: This manipulation of data occurs when marketing implies a cause-and-effect relationship between two things solely based on the fact that they often co-occur when in reality correlation does NOT guarantee causation.
These marketing tools are logical errors that lead to inconsistent reasoning, but let’s not allow marketing to cloud our judgement. I encourage digging into what the studies have to say about whatever product is being marketed.
And then for each study asking: Why was the study done? What is the specific question the study is attempting to answer? Who conducted the study? Do they have the appropriate training and expertise? Who funded the research? Was it sponsored by a third party or is there a vested interest in the results? How was the data collected? Can the sample size and makeup of the study population correctly be applied to the general public? Does the research actually measure what it claims? Did it measure the question? Or were there gigantic leaps from the results into associations? Do the study results make sense? And do other experts in the field agree with the methods and findings?
Be leery of any supplements with a doctor or scientist’s face plastered to the front or any “study” with links to buy a line of products or “pay-out-of-pocket” treatments at the end. There is bound to be bias there.
Let’s learn to be savvy consumers. Let’s stay grounded in evidence and reason. Let’s seek out reliable sources of information (backed by multiple evidence-based studies, statistics, and a broader range of experiences).