Amoral Marketing

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Derren Brown

Finally, got around to watch Derren Brown’s Something Wicked This Way Comes video. Filmed at Hammersmith in 2005, he performed his mentalism ‘tricks’ which were centered around one premise - that you can subconsciously plant ideas into people’s minds through your words.

I have always wondered about the effectiveness of the persuasion tactic of “covert suggestion”, having first stumbled upon it when someone sent me some materials by Ross Jeffries called “Speed Seduction”.

While I found certain techniques to be useful (for example, anchoring), I have doubted the usage of some verbal ‘trickery’ which plants ideas in the target’s minds.

One of the more famous Ross Jeffries ’speed seduction’ lines have been “Standing on the bridge, I looked at the river below me“. The operative phrase here is “below me”, which suggests the idea of oral sex in the mind of the target.

I have known people who claimed massive success with women using this ‘technology’. A particular technique, called the October Man Sequence surfaced a couple of years back and caused a minor stir in the “seduction” community. Ross Jeffries himself said that using this technique was akin to “bringing a nuclear bomb to a gunfight“.

The question of ethics come into play when you use tricks like these to influence your target to unknowingly make certain decisions which are in your favour.

Now, morals aside, mentalism techniques such as these could well be the next ‘frontier’ as far as marketing is concerned.