Matt Ryder traces how Edward Bernays taught marketers to steer behavior through emotion, not logic. The "Pass the Courvoisier" song was engineered to spike sales for the cognac brand, and it worked. Your choices feel like yours because you don't see the machinery underneath.
One of the most influential human beings that's ever lived, and you probably have no idea who he is. While most advertisers took time to focus on products, Bernays focused on something much more powerful. He was far more into the human psychology element of all of this. He believed that most decisions were not made through logic, and that they were made through emotion, identity, status, fear, belonging, and social pressure. He thought that if you could understand what people wanted to feel, then you could influence what they did. Cavassier is a large Hennessy, and they had so much of this stuff backing up because nobody would. Buy it. The CMO of Diageo at the time was trying to figure out a way to sell Courvoisier, and he happened to be at the same place as a very, very prominent producer at the time. He said, I reckon I can sell that, and they did a handshake deal. About 2 months later, Pass the Courvoisier came out. It was very influential, it was catchy, and Courvoisier flew off the fucking shelves like you wouldn't believe. And it was all because of this song, and that song was engineered to be a marketing campaign.
