A celebrity leaps off a cliff in a commercial, lands, and cracks open a soft drink. The two events have absolutely nothing to do with each other. And yet, somehow, the image lodges, and not long afterward, a genuine craving for that specific drink shows up, felt as entirely personal, entirely one's own.
Here's roughly what happened. Images get continuously absorbed from the surrounding environment, things admired, tastes enjoyed, people seen as impressive, and all of it gets stored. That storage is memory. At some point, a specific image gets resolved into an actual desire, the moment a person decides, even quietly, that they want to acquire it.
Advertising works by exploiting exactly this mechanism. It plants an attractive image deliberately, engineered to be memorable, and that planted image becomes an aspiration. Later, the aspiration gets experienced as a personal desire, arising, apparently, from nowhere in particular, when in fact it was placed there quite deliberately by someone else entirely, someone with a very specific interest in the outcome.
This matters because the desire doesn't feel borrowed. It feels completely one's own, urgent, personal, worth spending money to satisfy. The actual origin, someone else's carefully constructed image, gets erased somewhere in the process, leaving only the feeling of wanting behind.
None of this requires assuming people are foolish. It simply requires noticing how memory and desire actually interact, absorbing images constantly, converting some of them into wants, without ever pausing to ask where a particular image originally came from.
A useful habit, whenever a sudden, urgent want shows up for something not strictly needed, is to trace it backward for a moment. Where was this image first seen. Whose interest did it originally serve. The want might still be genuine after that question gets asked. But asking it at all turns an automatic reaction into an actual choice, which is a meaningfully different thing.