> How do you explain cults?
People have strong drive to belong to an in-group. There are multiple experiments that assigning random markers to random people and making them participate in certain activities lead to "group cohesion" effects and people start assigning deep meaning to those markers, despite them being completely random. Cult is just when people take it to the extreme - likely because they didn't find satisfaction for their in-grouping drive elsewhere.
> How do you explain the effects of advertising?
Which specifically effects? It's mostly brand recognition, aka availability heuristics - if you have brand A, B and C and you heard before that A is good, you're more likely to choose A than unknown B and C - and just plain informing people things like brand A exist. And a touch of in-grouping ("if you drink Coca-Cola, you are in a group of cool people"). And a tad of signaling ("if we have money to but expensive ad spot on TV, we must be a successful company that can afford to create good product, would not disappear tomorrow and values its reputation so we would not cheat you").
> How do you explain the uniform levels of discipline achieved by basic training
They are not that uniform, but again in-grouping plus other guys will be literally shooting at you (though research shows a lot of this shooting is much less targeted than previously thought).
> How do you explain phone scammers? How do you explain the success of the public relations industry?
That's plain persuasion, with various ethical fences either present or absent.
> Everyone of these consists of people being programmed or brainwashed in one way or another.
Again, if by "programmed" you mean "persuaded in something, in which they most likely inclined to believe from the beginning due to selection and grouping effects" then sure. People can be persuaded to buy a shampoo especially if they wanted to buy one already, and people can be deceived especially if they're already out to look for something the deceiver seemingly offers, and people can be blind to arguments especially if those arguments challenge their prejudices.
The only thing different here is tobacco smoking - that's physical addiction, it is a different mechanism.
> If you're interested in reading about this, there is a book by a psychologist named Robert Cialdini, called Influence, the Psychology of Persuasion.
Yeah I know about Cialdini. It has a lot of nice tricks, but it's not magic. It's much less magic then it's made out to be. And yes, reframing and anchoring is one of the tricks. If you watch Trump carefully, you can see all these tricks employed, he does it all the time. He didn't invent it of course - expensive stores have been putting items with outrageous prices on prominent display for ages, to make regular item prices seem lower in comparison. It does confuse some heuristics for people. But anybody is capable of approaching the prices - or Trump - rationally and see the actual price. There's no "programming" to prevent it - if one makes minimal effort, one can always do it.