Health and wellness manipulation: 10 ways behavior-savvy companies sell their products

Credit: Stephanie Miller
Credit: Stephanie Miller

In an effort to cut through the noise and capture your limited attention, marketing companies often invoke the logical fallacy—an informal error of logic—in their sales pitch to exploit ingrained biases and convert potential customers into sales.

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In this month’s column, I’ve condensed [Carl] Sagan’s list of twenty informal logical fallacies to the ten that appear most often in health and wellness marketing, with examples. In doing so, I pull together many of the arguments and themes addressed in previous issues.

1. The Appeal to Popularity

One of the oldest fallacies to serve the commercial machine, it assumes an assertion to be true, or at least valid, because many people agree with it…. Would it be sensible to buy an activity tracker, some running sneakers, or a protein supplement purely based on the number of units that had been sold, or would doing so conflate popularity with efficacy?

5. Observational Selection.

This fallacy was described by philosopher Francis Bacon as “counting the hits and forgetting the misses.” Fad diets, such as Atkins or Keto, are quick to draw attention to online weight loss success stories and the glossy “before and after” images they engender. But twelve–twenty-four–month follow-up studies generally show fad diets to be ineffective for long-term weight management.

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