VIDEO: These Are the Ways in Which Advertisers Trick You Every Single Day

You don’t even know when you are being played and made to buy things that you don’t want and don’t need just because the advertisers know how to sell them to you.

They have made countless studies and now understand everything that makes you buy things and they will try anything to make you keep buying.

According to time.com, today’s marketing strategies aren’t dreamed up in smoky rooms full of Mad Men.

The tools companies employ to get you to buy their stuff have grown ever more sophisticated, with marketers even using neural measurements to design product packaging and appeal to your deepest desires (to be covered in Cheetos dust, apparently).

Consumer experience these days is not simply designed; it’s engineered.

Research determines the ads you see, the scents and sounds you encounter in stores, even the way a salesperson might casually touch your arm.

It’s not all high-tech brain science, but here are some of the tricks companies use to entice you to spend more.

They make you nostalgic. Don Draper was on to something with his sentimental pitch for a Kodak campaign.

But the abundance of families, puppies, and childhood ephemera in the ads you see every day is more than a simple ploy to tug on your heartstrings.

Recent research shows nostalgia makes people value money less and feel willing to pay more for purchases.

They sic rude salespeople on you. At high-end stores like Gucci, customers are actually more inclined to buy expensive products after a salesperson has acted snottily to them, a new study found.

This effect—which doesn’t work with mass-market brands, only luxury—seems to have something to do with the desire to be part of an in crowd.

To paraphrase Groucho Marx, you’re more likely to want to belong to a club that doesn’t want you as a member.

They use smaller packaging to get you to buy bigger. You’d think that it would be easier to buy and drink less soda and beer if you stick to the cute new mini-cans that seem to be all the rage these days.

But research shows buying multi-packs of those small sizes can actually lead people to consume more overall.

They get you lost and confused. It’s not an accident that grocery stores are often laid out unintuitively.

Losing focus makes people spend more on impulse purchases, says expert Martin Lindstrom, who has conducted studies on marketing strategies.

Getting interrupted during shopping also makes you less price-sensitive, according to research co-authored by marketing professor Wendy Liu at UC San Diego.

That’s because when you return to look at products after a distraction, you have a false sense of having already vetted them, she says.

They mimic your gestures—and get women to touch you. A woman’s touch—but not a man’s—makes people of either sex looser with their money, so when that saleswoman touches your shoulder, you may unwittingly end up spending more. Additionally, research shows that if a salesperson of either sex imitates your gesticulations, you are more likely to buy what he or she is selling.