The quirk in our mental processes that was revealed by the success of the Marlboro advertising campaign was soon noted and copied by other marketers.  In industry after industry, astute cognitive competitors learned to bypass logical and critical evaluation by shifting their main messages to imagery, then repeating the images until these become "true."

Thus, most beer commercials have long since stopped making any mention of how the beer tastes;  preferring to tell us that their brand is part of hearty all-American fun, or that it represents sophistication, or that it has an appropriately skeptical Generation-X attitude.

Likewise, brokerage firms convey an impression of solid reliability and fiduciary probity by proclaiming their adherence to traditional values about making money "the old-fashioned way—we earn it," without ever saying a word about their actual services or performance histories.

In many cases, the product itself requires no more than a passing mention, serving mainly to anchor a set of agreeable perceptions.

A prime example is cotton, "the fabric of our lives."