perception

Perception is The New Reality.

If a marketer or a politician says something in a clear, persuasive way, and they say it enough times, then it becomes reality.

Like those Visa commercials. Where everybody swipes their Visa Card and things go quickly until - horrors! - somebody dares to pay with cash. All the action stops and people look aghast at somebody dumb or uncool enough to use anything other than a Visa card.

Now anbody who has ever stood in line at a store knows that paying with cash is often much much faster than using a credit card. Unless you happen to live in one of those Visa commercials, there is the agonzingly annoying process of "remember my code, process the transaction, get approval, print out the slip, sign the slip". Forking over a twenty and getting $6.23 in change is just faster.

But if you see that commercial enough times (and you can't avoid it), eventually you begin to believe. Your perception of Visa versus cash is challenged in a clever, effective way and suddenly now the perception (Visa is faster!) has become the reality. So why not give in and bring Visa the next time you go shopping!

Percpeption in politics is an equally ugly and horribly effective game. By the time Cheney, Karl Rove, Fox News and dozens of other right wing media pundits got done, most of us were convinced Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11 and we should attack him and not worry about Bin Laden. The result - we went into Iraq, forgot about Bin Laden, who now lives happily in Pakistan, plotting future atrocities against America.

So much so, that years later, despite evidence to the contrary, one out of three Americans still believe we were right to go after Saddam and every Republican candidate feels we were right to go to Iraq and we should stay there for at least another twenty years! One in three Americans are a lot of people to believe something so fervently!

What this hub will do is talk about perception versus reality, hopefully in an informative and entertaining way.