The Benetton advertising campaigns: Intentions, receptions and the legitimacy of raising global issues in advertising

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• Publisher: GRIN Verlag
• Year: 2003
• Edition: 0
• eBook ISBN:
  9783638218351
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Business

Seminar paper from the year 2003 in the subject Communications - Public Relations, Advertising, Marketing, Social Media, grade: B-68, University of Canterbury (Department of Mass Communication and Journalism), course: COMS 406 Advertising and Society, language: English, abstract: Advertising has become the single largest source of visual imagery in our societytoday. No matter where we look, we see advertisements trying to sell us things. Wesee images of youthful, beautiful people enticing us to spend our money on productswe think we need, hoping that by purchasing the product we too may reap the benefitsof owning it. At the beginning of the 1990s however, the Italian clothing companyBenetton changed the face of advertising forever. Instead of showing the company'sproducts in its advertisements, they have chosen to show images related to importantworld issues in a claimed attempt to raise awareness (http://www.courses.psu.edu/art/art122w_jlh18/student/knepper/Intro.htm). Between 1990 and 1994, and thenagain in 2000, Benetton attracted attention because of its especially provocativeadvertising campaigns. Diverse pictures of these campaigns showed situations ofadversity, distress, suffering and death. Oliviero Toscani, the creator of theadvertisements asserts that it is not his function to increase sales of Benetton products.Toscani claims he uses advertising to raise awareness concerning the issues addressedand his intention is "to promote peace, tolerance, multiculturalism and to challengestereotypes" (http://www.xs4all.nl/~conflic1/pbp/7/5_benett.htm). However, despiteclaims by Luciano Benetton and Toscani that profit was never a motive and raisingsocial conscience was their single goal, Benetton advertisements have been widelycriticised and banned worldwide (http://www.courses.psu.edu/art/art122w_jlh18/student/knepper/Benetton.htm). This might have resulted anyhow, not only from theirapproach of attempting to raise awareness of real problems, but from the means withwhich they did it. Everything that diverges from well known, generally acceptednorms appears provocative for the recipient who is used to certain standards.Nevertheless, the different interpretation of its advertising images in diverse culturescaused resistance and problems for the Benetton company. Contrary to otherinternational operating conglomerates that use the same advertising internationally butmodify it in consideration of the cultural context, Benetton advertisements are nottailored regionally. The company uses the same images and campaigns worldwide(http://www.karlsruhe.de/Schulen/Ludwig-Erhard-Schule/Projwer/wer4.htm), anddoes not consider cultural and moral conceptual differences. [...]