Transcript Advertising 2007: Comm 3006

Advertising 2008: Comm 3006
Week 4 lecture –
consumerism and consumer
culture
Introduction:
- Having begun to look at ad texts themselves, we
now need to ‘stand back’ and look at the culture in
which these ads circulate. You can’t have one without
the other!
- Ours is a consumer culture. Consumerism pervades
almost everything we do, every act of ‘identity
construction’ we participate in, and every
interpersonal relationship we conduct. We don’t think
about how historically strange consumerism is
because we live and breathe it ‘24/7’
What is consumerism?
Consumerism as a moral doctrine - consumerism could be considered as our
‘moral responsibility’ to shop. This shopping, the doctrine goes, confers choice,
freedom, autonomy and ultimately happiness on the individual
Consumerism as the ‘ideology of conspicuous consumption’ - this ideology
suggests that consumerism is less about ‘stuff’ for ourselves, and more about
how what we buy confers identity and social status compared to other social
groups. Consumption is about signalling social status and group membership
Consumerism as economic ideology - an incredibly powerful ‘logic’ post WW2.
This argument has it that consumerism is necessary to stimulate economic
production. If people ever felt content with what they had this would lower
production and ‘economic growth’. Consumer culture must continually
stimulate new desires in populations whose basic needs are already met
Consumerism as political ideology - has largely replaced the idea that politics
should be about the state providing for its people. Now all the main political
parties tell us that a successful political state is one where people’s needs are
satisfied by ‘individual choice’ in the marketplace. George Bush said this after
9/11 - that it was every American’s patriotic duty to shop more than ever.
Consumerism as a social movement - this can mean two things, firstly, consumer
activism of all kinds (i.e. ‘Choice’ magazine), and secondly the development,
principally through the green movement, of various anti-consumer activisms
(like anti GM food - we will talk more about these later)
What is consumerism?
Broadly, a consumer society will have these features:
The ‘balance’ or ‘guiding force’ of society has moved from production
to consumption. We hear less about blue collar factories these days
(which are employing less and less workers as production is automated
and exported overseas) and more about the ‘palaces’ of consumption the shopping malls (which employ more and more people). Consumer
societies are post-industrial societies in this respect
The family moves from a unit of production to a unit of consumption,
and beyond that, the family breaks down and more appeals to consume
become centred on the individual
Because consumption must always increase, consumer societies
commodify more and more aspects of life (spaces and rituals, including
the imagination itself), and make them a matter of exchange value
(money). More things become valued chiefly for what they are ‘worth’
money-wise - this ‘logic’ applies even to families and religions
In consumer societies debt is not a sin, but is encouraged
What is consumerism?
When most consumption goes beyond ‘basic needs’, ‘persuasive
rhetoric’ - marketing and advertising - becomes an ever larger
component of consumer economies. This rhetoric must appeal less to
use, or utility values and more to sign values such as brand values:
‘Use or utility value’ - what a product was made to ‘do’, its basic
functionality (a chair is for sitting on)
‘Exchange value’ - in an industrial society the worker is ‘alienated’
from the product of their labour - they no longer make the chair and so
some artificial standard must be introduced to determine the relative
value of things - this is money. People work for money to buy the chair
‘Sign value’ - what a product or service comes to ‘represent’ in society
as a social meaning maker. Any value that is separate and ‘added to’ its
use value. In the case of the chair, we might buy it because we can sit
on it, but there will be other factors too - we might like its style
[aesthetic value], or the logo [brand value], or we might like the
images and dreams evoked by the advertising campaign.
To maintain the façade of ‘more consumption=more happiness’
consumer society must make us feel like ‘gods’ - ‘sovereign consumers’
So - how do advertisers indulge the ‘all
powerful’ consumer?
They assign them various ‘consumer
identities’ where the shopper is ‘hailed’
or appealed to as:
Explorers
Identity seekers
Seducers / hedonists
Thrill seekers
Artists
Experts
Victims
Citizens
Leaders
Activists
‘Authentic rebels’ (the ‘rebel’ mode
of address becomes increasingly
common – you’re not like all the
rest, you’re special)
They can also imagine different ‘ways
of shopping’, where the consumer
is considered to shop:
As a ‘rational’ household manager
As a bargain hunter
As a fashion victim
For ethical / political reasons (green
/ organic shopping)
As an expert / aficionado
Compulsively
Carelessly
Adventurously – ‘extreme’
consumption
Rebelliously
Entire ‘themed’ shopping environments
can be constructed with these
‘shopping personae’ in mind
In conclusion:
Consumerism supplies not just ‘stuff’, but meanings and values - rules for
living. A certain amount of consumption is necessary to fulfil basic needs,
but our economies would change drastically if they weren’t supported by
‘non essential’ consumption. Lots of people also like consuming, not just
the physical products but the act of shopping itself and the reading of
the creative, complex non-product texts that go with them (the ads!)
The economic risks to consumerism for ad-makers include:
consumers getting jaded, cynical and bored by the claims of consumer culture
Economic recession and a credit squeeze (no money to borrow)
The actions of anti consumer activists
But there are also more ‘systemic’ downsides to consumption societies:
Increased rate of unhappiness and depression in spite of increased wealth
Ecological unsustainability (we cant keep making and buying more forever)
Greater division between haves and have nots – and in a media society the have
nots can see what the haves have, which breeds resentment
In conclusion:
 It could be argued that consumerism is well on the way to becoming a
complete belief system with shopping centres as the new ‘cathedrals’
and advertising as the new religious texts
 The logic of consumerism seeks to commodify - place an exchange or
money value - on all aspects of human creativity and sociality, and
especially on self-realisation and happiness itself. More important that
the success of individual ads is the total effect of ‘360◦ promotionality’
 So pervasive is this ‘logic’ that even anti-consumer groups now
‘market’ themselves using promotional rhetoric!
 Keeping consumers interested is however hard work. Much recent
creative advertising rises to the challenge by appropriating dissent to
make ‘stuff cool’ for the ‘rebel consumer’ – the ‘true individual’
 A much bigger challenge to mass advertising is network society – mobile
phone culture, Ebay, Facebook, Myspace and YouTube. We’ll talk more
about this later!
Understanding and decoding advertising
discourse - part 3, word choice:
Allied to the sound of the word in your head are the new words, or new word
combinations (neologisms), that advertisers create deliberately to implant novel
elements in the audience’s heads. Often they can even be nonsense words – but
these nonsense words i.e “Beanzmeanzheinz”, can become part of the cultural
vernacular. Watch out for taglines or jingles that deliberately don’t make
grammatical sense but which stick in the head (the ‘crazy frog’ song?!).
Look out for wordplay that uses:
polysemy a play on a word that might have more than one meaning
homonyms words with different meanings that are spelt the same
Descriptive adverbs - drives SMOOTHLY, cleans BRIGHLTY, and
adjectives NEW, FRESH, SPECIAL
simile when the qualities of one thing are compared to those of
something else ‘runs like a cheetah’
metaphor an expression that doesn’t say something is LIKE something else,
it suggests it IS something else ‘Nescafe your cup of inspiration’
euphemisms - often used if the ad deals with potentially sensitive or
distasteful subjects. Tampon commercials and funeral home
commercials commonly use them ‘feminine protection’
Understanding and decoding advertising
discourse - part 3, word choice:
All this leads to hyperbole - that is to say the deliberate exaggeration
of promotional claims way beyond reason, just to get our attention.
We can discuss the legality or ethics of claims like:
“No-Age: Say No to Aging” - Christian Dior
“Who says you cant restore what time takes away” – Nutrimentics
Often this hyperbole is situated in a justifying bed of technical jargon.
The jargon itself may be pseudo-scientific, and most of the time we are
not meant to understand the meanings of the jargon. However for some
products (techno devices, cars, medicines, some cosmetic products) the
use of these terms carries the cultural prestige of science and rationality
that can help persuade us even if the claims are actually outrageous:
“Surgery can Wait! Wrinkle-Decrease with BOSWELOX, a unique phytocomplex that helps to counteract skin micro-creasing” - Loreal