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The Men Who Made Us Spend

Jacques Peretti

Mike Radford

Dermot Caulfield

David Alter

The Men Who Made Us Spend: Episode 2

Documentaries

Factual: Money

Factual: Consumer

Factual: History

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Episode 2

BBC Two - The Men Who Made Us Spend, Episode 2

Jacques Peretti reveals how fear is used by marketers to drive consumer spending.

Jacques Peretti investigates consumerism. He looks at how fear helps to drive consumer spending on everything from SUVs to health products.

In the second of this three-part series, Jacques Peretti reveals how fear remains one of the most powerful factors behind our spending.
 
Visiting a neuroscience lab, Jacques hears from a consumer psychologist about how our brains are much more responsive to negative than to positive stimuli. He also meets some experts who have turned this knowledge into an art form, helping manufacturers make billions from our anxieties and insecurities.
 
At the remote chateau of French anthropologist Clotaire Rapaille, Jacques learns how our sense of fear drives us in ways many of us do not understand - and how Rapaille's insights have helped companies sell us everything from SUVs to cigarettes.
 
At the Beverley Hills pad of multimillionaire marketer Rohan Oza, he hears how Oza's connections to celebrities helped propel Vitaminwater into the soft drink stratosphere, despite the fact that the product's health claims have been called into question.
 
Jacques also confronts the men who say they are combating our most deep-seated fear - age and decline. In Las Vegas, he mingles with the doctors and businessmen attending a global conference aimed at selling us ways to stay young and healthy, challenging them to justify their claims for the anti-ageing business that has made them rich.

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Why do we buy what we buy? Jacques Peretti investigates.

Why do we buy what we buy? Jacques Peretti investigates consumerism and the people who try and shape the public's appetites

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