Advertising, Society, and Consumer Culture

Roxanne Hovland, Joyce M. Wolburg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780765615466
• eBook ISBN: 9781317477525
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Designed as a core textbook for courses in Advertising and Society, "Advertising, Society, and Consumer Culture" develops an integrated perspective that gives students a framework for understanding past, present, and future issues in advertising communications. Chapter contents cover the entire range of social, political, cultural, regulatory, and economic issues that surround advertising and its role in modern society. The many social issues addressed include advertising and gender stereotyping, advertising to vulnerable audiences, and the distribution of wealth in consumer society. "Advertising, Society, and Consumer Culture" intertwines the development of the consumer culture with its coverage of the historical, political, regulatory, and ethical issues of advertising. It includes clear, comprehensive tables that chronicle historical developments and key legal cases. The text is readable for undergraduates but provides enough depth to serve as a graduate-level text. Including extensive notes and a bibliography, it can be adopted independently, or alongside its companion volume, "Readings in Advertising, Society, and Consumer Culture".

1

Advertising as an Institution of Consumer Culture

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Everybody Rides. So say the ads for a local used-car dealership. Good credit? Bad credit? Slow credit? No credit? Whatever your income, no matter who you are, everybody rides. This is the American Dream. And perhaps nothing expresses the American cultural ideology better than advertising. Although it’s by no means the only institution emblematic of our consumer culture, it is certainly one of the most visible.

Institutions Defined

Advertising is simultaneously many things: a tax deduction, a business tool, a source of information, a source of both persuasion and entertainment. And it’s everywhere. But the emphasis here is on advertising as an institution. So rather than looking at advertisement, we’ll look more broadly at advertising. The justification for this perspective is inherent in the following description of institutions: “Any simple thing we observe—a coin, a timetable, a canceled check, a baseball score, a phonograph record—has little significance in itself; the meaning it imparts comes from the ideas, values, and habits established about it. [These institutions that surround human activity] constitute standards of conformity from which an individual may depart only at his peril” (Hamilton 1932, 84).

Johan Stein spells out the powerful and dynamic nature of institutions in the following passage:

An institution is a socially constructed belief system about the way things are and the way things should be that organizes human thought and action … Institutions are intersubjectively shared by a collective of individuals either consciously or unconsciously … [They are] principles that govern the creation of meaning and the pattern of actions at various social levels. In relation to other social structures, institutions are the structuration principles. As John Dewey and others have insisted, it is also necessary to view institutions as evolving phenomena. This implies that institutions are both the media and the outcomes of the actions they induce. (1997, 730)

Institutions are, thus, organizing constructs that tend to induce conformity but are always changing. They bring order out of chaos but must continually evolve in order to do so effectively. Moreover, the influence of an institution may range well beyond its original nature. As Samuel Bowles points out, so-called economic institutions are likely to extend beyond simply allocating goods and services to influence the development of “values, tastes, and personalities” (1998, 75).

Institutions have several common characteristics. As advertising historian Vincent Norris asserts, at a minimum, they are ubiquitous—that is, they seem to be everywhere at the same time. In order to function as institutions, they must predominate within the society in which they were formed. More importantly, however, they perform two important purposes: They order human relationships into roles; and they regulate the distribution of a society’s essential resources to the advantage of some and the disadvantage of others. These three characteristics—(1) ubiquity, (2) the ordering of roles, and (3) the regulation of resources—frame our discussion of institutions (Norris 1980).

Nonadvertising Institutions

Ubiquity

The institution of marriage provides a ready illustration of all three properties outlined by Norris. In twentieth-century Western society, marriage is unquestionably ubiquitous. Though the U.S. Census continues to document alternative living arrangements and family structures, legally recognized marriage between heterosexuals is still the social and numerical norm. Merriam-Webster’s definition makes clear the other two institutional functions of marriage: “the institution whereby men and women are joined in a special kind of social and legal [i.e., economic] dependence for the purpose of founding and maintaining a family” (1998, 713).

Ordering of Roles

Roles implicit in this institutional model are easily recognized: bride, groom, wife, husband—and with the addition of children—mother, father, daughter, son, sister, brother, adoptive parent, stepparent, stepchild, heir. Socially acceptable behavior is prescribed for each member of the tableau. Fidelity and monogamy are presumed between spouses. Husbands and wives are expected to nurture and care for each other in both good times and bad. For instance, when a person becomes gravely ill, hospital visits are often restricted to the “immediate family,” and perhaps no one is considered more immediate than a spouse.

Regulation of Resources

With marriage come certain legal and financial rights and obligations. This issue leads logically to the power of institutions to influence the distribution of a society’s resources. Our presumptions about the rights and expectations of “immediate family” are at the root of the controversy currently surrounding the rights of nonmarried partners to receive economic benefits (such as health insurance) commonly awarded to spouses. Husbands and wives are believed to be obligated to care for each other, and our social and economic system is designed to facilitate this caring.

Although most American marriages are usually based on romantic love, the economic consequences are still readily evident in situations involving everything from federal tax status to next of kin. The concept of alimony is evidence of the enduring fiduciary responsibility presumed of spouses for each other. To paraphrase an old ad campaign, nothing says love like a prenuptial agreement. Lastly, the economic ramifications of marriage are seen in the fact that wedding-gift expenditures are second only to what Americans spend on Christmas (Otnes and Lowrey 1993). The average amount of money spent on a traditional American wedding is almost $30,000 (Sardone 2008).

The Institution of Advertising

Ubiquity

The institutional characteristics of advertising are equally compelling. The ubiquity of advertising is beyond question. The presence of advertising in our lives is pervasive and unavoidable, and the number of forms it takes continues to expand as media technology and usage evolve. With the advent of multichannel marketing (also known as integrated marketing), microtargeting (highly selective targeting of consumer groups based on tracking and research data), and direct and interactive marketing, advertising and marketing communication is with us everywhere we go and reaches us in increasingly sophisticated ways (Standard & Poor’s Industry Trends 2006). One source estimates that American consumers are each exposed to approximately 3,600 commercial impressions each day (Jhally 1997).

Norris makes an interesting point, however, about the source of all this advertising. Much of the money spent on advertising comes from a relatively small group of very large companies. The top 100 marketers were responsible for over 40 percent of the measured advertising spending in 2007. Expenditures by the ten largest advertising product categories accounted for approximately one-half of all measured ad spending (TNS Media Intelligence 2007). In other words, while advertising is ubiquitous, it is hardly representative of all of the country’s potential advertisers.

Ordering of Roles

Like marriage, advertising orders human behavior into roles: seller, retailer, wholesaler, consumer, target market, copywriter, art director, media planner, Internet service provider, and so forth. Certainly, it helps define behavior of people involved in the advertising process. It also teaches us how to participate in consumer culture. In fact, at a very tender age children begin to express brand preferences (Committee on Communications 2006). In theoretical terms, advertising thus sets an agenda for us as consumers by defining standards and criteria for our consumer behavior.

Advertising also reorders roles of people in the mass media. Because advertising provides the economic support in the United States for most media (Bagdikian 2000), the ability to attract advertising revenue can mean the success or failure of media vehicles including magazines, television programs, and radio stations. Furthermore, the role of magazine publisher has changed from the seller of a product to the gatherer of a target market for advertising, with the exception of publishers of magazines that do not carry advertising (e.g., Consumer Reports). The role of the reader has changed from “sovereign consumer to advertiser bait” (Norris 1980, 8).

Regulation of Resources

The role of advertising in the distribution of society’s wealth is indisputable. Advertising grew out of the need to sell the abundance of goods that could be produced under the capitalist system in the United States. It stimulates the demand for consumer goods so that consumers will buy the goods produced and money will flow from consumers to producers (Jhally 1997). Advertising, in conjunction with branding, also developed as a means for manufacturers to set prices for their products. As Norris (1980) points out, national advertising (advertising for brands of goods rather than for the local store where the goods are sold) created a demand for a brand that allowed its manufacturer to raise the price and force more retailers to sell it. Prior to national advertising, manufacturers and wholesalers were both powerless to set prices; with national advertising, the manufacturer’s role changed from price “taker” to price “maker” (Norris 1980, 8). Norris makes this point to illustrate the influence of advertising over behavior but, in fact, he shows the economic influence of advertising as well.

Some people doubt the degree to which advertising influences behavior. However, by looking at the amount of money spent on advertising in the United States, we can dispel doubts concerning advertising’s ability to influence the distribution of wealth. Between 1989 and 2005, U.S. advertising and marketing expenditures averaged 2.2 percent of GDP (Standard & Poor 2006). The sheer volume of advertising underscores its power to redirect wealth, not only from one brand to another or from one class of products to another but from one political candidate or cause to another.

Three Worldviews

The reasons for the growth of advertising as an institution can be found in the principles underlying classical liberalism—a political and economic system that rose to prominence in the eighteenth century and forms the foundation for the current political and economic system. Classical liberalism is a worldview that values a self-regulating market system in which all entrants in the market operate freely, harmoniously, and without restriction.

Classical liberalism is not the only political and economic system but one that provided the most “fertile seedbed” in which advertising could emerge and flourish (Rotzoll, Haefner, and Sandage 1986). Two other worldviews that offer sharp contrasts are tradition and authority.

Tradition

Each person in a traditional system has a fixed place in the social hierarchy. The best-known example is medieval society, in which economic tasks were handed down from father to son and mother to daughter. The blacksmith’s son was destined to become a blacksmith himself, and these roles were virtually set at birth. Any separation from the social roles assigned by God, society, and family was unthinkable (Baumeister 1987).

When pondering the traditional society, Rotzoll et al. (1986) conclude that the fixed nature of the hierarchy provides only a minimal use for advertising because no opportunities arise for people to change their destiny or to act upon their own desires. Since people locked in a fixed role are unlikely candidates for most advertising messages, especially ones that promote individualism and self-indulgence, there is little basis for creating desires or encouraging choices in a traditional society.

Authority

While tradition provided structure by way of the past, authoritarian societies offer structure through a political hierarchy. According to Rotzoll et al. (1986), more civilizations have used this system than any other, and variations range from the iron rule of the dictator to the more compassionate leadership of popular revolutionary leaders.

At first glance, authoritarian societies would seem to have little use for advertising; however, it has been used to reinforce action and create change on behalf of the government. For example, when supplies were scarce, the former Soviet Union used advertising to encourage members of society to buy margarine instead of butter in the pursuit of national goals.

Although Rotzoll et al. (1986) conclude that authoritarianism is not the optimal worldview because it limits the degree of individual decisionmaking, they believe that authority provides a firmer foundation than tradition for the utilization of advertising. However, they believe that classical liberalism offers greater utility for advertising and offers four fundamental assumptions about people, government, and competition on which classical liberalism is based.

Classical Liberalism and Its Underlying Principles

The classical liberal worldview presumes that people are egoistic and will naturally pursue their own best interests. All human behavior is presumably based on the benefit foreseen from such behavior. However, rather than a character flaw, this is perceived positively in that the collective self-striving of members of a society will hypothetically elevate the quality of life for the society as a whole (Rotzoll et al. 1986, 16).

People are also presumed to possess the trait of intellectualism. We assume that, given adequate and accurate information, people will make rational decisions. The “economic man” (as he is sometimes called) behaves in a deliberate and calculating manner (1986, 17).

However self-interested and calculating people may be, they are also presumed to be somewhat apathetic. Quietism, according to Rotzoll et al., implies that people need an incentive before they will expend energy. Without some obvious benefit to themselves, people will not take action (1986, 17).

When all members of a society behave rationally and in their own best interest based on perceived incentives, the society functions as a balanced system in which all members are equal. This atomistic nature suggests a society that is self-righting and, co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1. Advertising as an Institution of Consumer Culture
• 2. Evolution of American Society
• 3. Perspectives for Understanding Advertising
• 4. The Behind-the-Scenes Power of Advertising
• 5. Crossing International Borders
• 6. Consumer Protection and Competition
• 7. Doing the Right Thing When We Don’t Know What “Right” Is
• 8. Concluding Comments on Advertising and Consumer Culture
• References
• Index
• About the Authors