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To the More than 4 Million Owners of this Russian book that I just bought,

Oh how I long to know of the hopes, dreams, and accomplishments associated with the purchase of this fine product!  Nevermind….scratch that! Frankly, I don’t care about you at all. Don’t get me wrong, I have the capacity to care about large batches of humanity (and even the whole pot viewed in its entirety). But the simple statement of “over 4 million sold” stamped on the outside of this product needs some backing behind it. Are these simple publisher-to-store sales? How many of the end-users simply opened the book, mistook the Cyrillic alphabet for hieroglyphics, and then sold it a year later for a dime at a yard sale?

The bandwagon effect in advertising is so ubiquitous that we usually don’t notice simple messages like the one discussed above. But maybe we should allow an extra half a millisecond or so to process these things. Increasing awareness of the many subtle uses of the bandwagon effect would make me quite happy if the following series of events then occurred:

1. The general public would become aware as to when “4 million other people did this” is a useful fact, and when it’s not.

hence

2. Those who use such advertising would only do so when a particular aspect of collective sales is truly relevant for individual customers.

hence

3. The red border on the box of my Russian language material would remained undisturbed by superfluous additions. The aesthetic flow of this border would remain intact and be much more satisfying. Seriously….why don’t we just stick a “hundreds of millions of viewers served” right in the upper-left-hand corner of Malevich’s Black Square!

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