Advertising 2008: Comm 3006

1. Advertising 2008: Comm 3006 Week 4 lecture – consumerism and consumer culture

2. 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’

3. 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)

4. What is consumerism? Broadly, a consumer society will have these features: • The ‘balance’ or ‘guiding force’ of society has moved from productionto 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 commodifymore 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

5. 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 valuesand more to sign valuessuch 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’

6. 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

7. 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

8. 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!

9. 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’

10. 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 phyto-complex that helps to counteract skin micro-creasing” - Loreal