It’s that time of year when every blog and website about psychology starts giving you the top 10 tips for setting your New Years Resolutions and how to stick to them.

Well I’m going to do something different. Once you’ve set your outcomes, broken them down into short term goals and made a plan of action I want you to think about all the things you are going to start removing from your life.

For example, I sometimes visit a website that provides news and reviews of films, even though I haven’t been to the cinema in years and have never rented a DVD. For some reason I’m spending precious minutes of my life reading about movies I’ll never watch.

So from now on I vow to stop visiting that website.

The idea is that if I start removing all those useless activities from my life I’ll start spending more time doing the things I really want and need to do.

Now the trick of course is to make sure I don’t fill up the time I’ve won with other useless pursuits. I guess some of you watch television so you should consider cutting down on that (or stopping altogether, as I have). For me the main danger is aimless surfing on the internet. Although a bit of random surfing can be useful I think the best thing for me would be to put a time limit on it and enforce the time table I’ve set for my other interests.

The idea is that if I start removing all those useless activities from my life I’ll start spending more time doing the things I really want to do.

The first part of the documentary Frontline Persuaders explains how an airline is looking to start a new branch of it’s business to compete against other low-fair airlines.

They show how they have built up a profile of their ideal customer in order to get an idea of how to best market their airline. They probably built up this profile using market research data and information about spending habits from supermarkets, shops and banks.

As one of the commentators points out, it seems that a lot of advertising is becoming more and more focused on grabbing our attention in any conceivable way just to get through the noise of all the other advertising out there. I’m sure we all remember some really interesting, shocking or funny ads, but can’t remember what they were supposed to be selling. Marketers will say that it’s more about gaining repeated exposure with consumers, but that’s something that’s hard to measure.

Contrast that kind of advertising with traditional sales letters, where you can measure the success rate of different kinds of copy and adjust it to get the best results.

PBS has a really good 90 minute documentary on their site about how advertisers, marketers, think tanks and politicians are using the latest ideas in psychology and memetics to persuade you to buy their products or vote for their political party.

Frontline Persuaders

I’ll write an analysis of some of the concepts and ideas presented in the documentary at some point.