If you were in a store this week or on Amazon, and made a purchase, you also made a decision guided by innumerable influences. Whether you knew it or not, your decision and purchase was influenced by the product's packaging, its location on the shelf, the brand's reputation, and the price, not to mention many more subtle and subversive tactics such as images that scroll by in your social media feed and the brand of soda on the dinner table in your favorite sit com. Influencing consumer habits is big business. In the United States - the largest advertising country in the world - advertising dollars topped $207B in 2017. We like to think that we make reasonable, rational, independent decisions about our buying - and about most anything in our lives - but the truth is that we are all influenced to some degree by the world around us. And we all influence others, as well. We each and everyone have the power, opportunity and ability to influence the people and the world around us...
