ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the many factors that severely constrain and often frustrate the power of individual advertisers to influence people. It examines how difficult it is for advertisers to make these psychological mechanisms work and how their unbridled use in any wholesale manipulation has been virtually impossible. One of the most important limitations on any advertiser's power to influence people is the activity of its competitors. Competitors' advertising, more often than not, severely blunts an individual advertiser's efforts. Advertising, in communicating first the product and then the affordable price, accelerates the diffusion of the innovation into the mass market. The vast majority of advertising attempts to get people to buy one brand instead of another and not new products per se. Research into the ability of brand advertising to create demand for the category as a whole is sparse. Advertising is usually the weaker influence compared to what people already know or have in their minds.
