Why “control” is controlling the business?
By: Madhav Joshi
Tags: Music, Advertising, Human Behavior, Television

We are living in a world which is primarily driven by information and technology. But the underlying theme for every technology is the sense of control over human and believe it or not but humans actually liked it. This is why every fortune 500 company or the biggest invention of the past 40 years is based on “control”.

We as a human-like to be controlled. The irony is that humans think that they rule the world but actually humans are in under constant control of things they invented. consider the example of Spotify. The application which provides music streaming. The main USP of Spotify is the astounding algorithm they have, The moment you install Spotify it will ask you about the first language and after it will ask you to select some of your favorite artists. After that, the algorithm works and it will fetch some playlists called “Daily mix” and it will have songs based on your taste, your likes, and your favorite artists. apart from that, they will give you a brand new playlist every 7 or 15 days, which has completely new songs but it based on your taste only. Now the main thing, “The control”. Why Spotify is way ahead of every other player in the market and hard to reach is that by deliberately or naively they are playing the psychological sub-conscious of the human mind. Why people like Spotify? because Spotify controls what they want to listen and people like that period.

further read on spotify daily mix algorithm : https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/27/spotify-daily-mix/

Consider another example, probably the biggest invention in the past century after internet, TELEVISION. Television or TV is also based on the same rules. Just give it a thought, in a world of youtube and Netflix, TV still has it’s relevance. Don’t get carried away on the perception that TV is dying because of the internet. The TV is actually dying because of another reason, the lack of good content. Remember this, in any industry: “Content is the king”. And Tv is not ahead just because it doesn’t have the best content in today’s world. But mind my words, the TV will never become extinct. firstly because of the control, it has over the humans and secondly because it is the ground for advertisements. Just imagine how you watch TV, it gives you the freedom to everything you want to watch by different channels and at the same time the control is in their hands. You can’t skip to the main part, you can’t shut the ads, you can’t fast forward things either. And that’s why people actually like TV more than anything else. same thing with radio as well.

Even the advertising industry is based on the same belief, Consider the ad of coke. Whether you believe it or not, sub-consciously it has the upper hand by establishing a belief-system which controls your mind. You see coke, you feel happiness. You see Marlboro, you feel manhood. You see Nike, you feel “just do it!”. You feelings are controlled by these ads.

So, what to learn from all these? The foremost and basic thing that if you want to start something that includes people then you must know how to control them sub-consciously otherwise it would be a scenario of dictatorship and consider these people will rebel if they feel so.