Social Communication in Advertising

Consumption in the Mediated Marketplace

William Leiss, Stephen Kline, Sut Jhally, Jackie Botterill, Kyle Asquith

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351602907
• Edición: 4
• Categoría: Social Sciences
• Categoría: Media Studies

Newly updated for the digital era, this classic textbook provides a comprehensive historical study of advertising and its function within contemporary society by tracing advertising's influence throughout different media and cultural periods, from early magazines through to social media. With several new chapters on the rise of the Internet, mobile, and social media, this fourth edition offers new insights into the role of Google, Facebook, Snapchat, and YouTube as both media and advertising companies, as well as examining the role of brand culture in the 21st century.

1 Introduction

This book examines the role of advertising and promotional communication in the expansionary phase of the market economy, from the early twentieth century to the present. There are a number of obvious reasons for doing so. Advertising is after all a major sector in the global economy—part of the broader system of production, distribution, and consumption in the global marketplace. Global advertising spending is projected to hit over $600 billion in 2018, and will keep growing at a rate of 7 percent per year (Liu 2016, 3). In the United States, advertising expenditures, across all media, average out to over $600 spent on each population member, per year—this ranks above any other nation in the world, and the global ratio of ad spending to population averages out to approximately $80 per person.

The willingness of corporations to speak to consumers directly in media subsidized the development of our information and entertainment infrastructures—from newspapers and billboards to social media. Promotional communication permeates and blends with our cultural environment, punctuating our television watching, seamlessly weaving into our internet and social media browsing, and saturating our magazines, movies, and video games. In short, advertising has become an accepted part of everyday life. The symbolic attributes of goods, as well as the characters, situations, imagery, and jokes of advertising discourse, are now fully integrated into our cultural repertoire. Children sing jingles while playing. Dinner party guests talk about their favorite (or most reviled) ads. Internet users watch, share, and discuss their favorite advertisements. Some spectacularly successful advertising campaigns have become legendary artistic statements: for example, the 1984 Macintosh Computer that “premiered” on the Super Bowl or the various commercials and branded content “mini-films” that Wes Anderson has directed in the 2000s. It is their prominent discussion of consumption that leads some commentators such as James Twitchell (1996) to compare advertising to a religion for its honest celebration of consumer goods as the key to contemporary American life-ways.

We agree with Twitchell that no other discursive practice in modern society better exemplifies the tensions underlying the expansionary phase of market society. Since the 1950s, these tensions have provoked a growing debate about the role that advertising plays in the marketplace. Celebrated by the enthusiasts of marketing as the informational tool that empowers the consumer and critiqued by mass culture gurus for turning consumers into dupes, the advertising agency seemed to embody all that was both good and bad in the changing relationships between producers and consumers. Some styled it a mirror, reflecting back to us our deep-seated material visions of well-being. Others felt it was a persuasive force articulating new consumption patterns that impacted the ongoing social, economic, and cultural practices of the consumer society. Advertising thus became the lightning rod for critics who accused it of all manner of evil, from accelerating environmental destruction to breeding a generation of super-sized children.

More than a century ago in North America and Western Europe, the forms of privileged discourse that touched the lives of ordinary persons were church sermons, political oratory, and the words and precepts of family elders. These discourses informed our relationships to goods, to each other, and to our social world. Such influences remain with us, but their prominence in the affairs of everyday life and their rhetorical force and moral authority have diminished considerably as the marketplace has expanded and as the mass media has grown in prominence.

Over the course of the preceding century, the marketplace itself has become a significant medium of social communication. The space left over in personal life has been filled largely by what we call the mass media’s discourses through and about objects. We intend this seemingly awkward phrase to convey the following basic idea: Communications among persons, in which individuals send “signals” to others about their attitudes, expectations, sense of identity, values, intentions, and aesthetic expression, are strongly associated with, and expressed through, patterns of ownership, preference, display, and use of things. We also intend this phrase to convey something more specific—namely, that a significant portion of our daily public talk, thought, and action within the expanded market setting is about consumer goods and what they can do for us or should mean to us.

Our own analysis starts by acknowledging that within all human cultures, the relationship between persons and nature is fundamental to our survival. We extract, refashion, and consume natural materials in the form of goods to meet our needs. But we also find that in transforming nature into goods, we are fabricating important channels of social communication. Goods-in-use mark honor, prestige, and rank; bind us in affection, love, and friendship; designate moments of celebration; denote safety and trust; bind us in communities; and serve as a catalyst for fantasy and reflection. Clothing, tools, bowls, beads, and many other things invoke myth and tell stories through their display and use (both everyday and ceremonial), and as a part of the broader system of social transactions within the family, the community, and the market. Whether in the ceremonial sharing of food within the community, in the bartering over value at the fair, or in the ritualized gift-giving at marriages, objects are enchanted with a profound range of meanings because they are embedded within the warp and weft of social relations we call “material cultures.”

We believe that the modern consumer culture shares with earlier economic relations this fundamental characteristic: Material objects produced for consumption in the marketplace not only satisfy needs, but also serve as markers and communicators for interpersonal distinctions and self-expression. These symbolic markers are the mediating communicational elements that connect people and the consumer goods they use to satisfy their wants. In a market economy, too, goods are communicators—symbolic markers that embed consumption practices in daily social interactions and exchange.

What chiefly distinguishes our contemporary society from earlier ones is not only the sheer volume of goods and services available to consumers in a market economy, but also the sheer intensity of the promotional effort whereby marketers seek to link consumer needs to the characteristics of the products they sell. Economically speaking, the expansion of the marketplace has seen a profound growth in the production and distribution of material culture, that is, the totality of goods and associated services circulating in a modern industrial economy. On the symbolic level, we have seen a parallel expansion of the associated discourses about commodities and their modes of production and consumption.

As we survey the development of the contemporary market economy, we are impressed not only with the enormous expansion of our material culture starting in the twentieth century, but also with the changing meanings that surround the expanding world of goods and the ways these goods are used by consumers in everyday life. We argue, therefore, that advertising’s role within the relations of production and consumption forged in the mediated marketplace should be seen not only as economic, but as cultural as well.

Our main point is a simple one: Advertising is not just a business expenditure undertaken in the hope of moving some merchandise, but is rather an integral part of modern culture. Its creations appropriate and transform a vast range of symbols and ideas; its unsurpassed communicative powers recycle cultural models and references back through the networks of social interactions. This venture is unified by the discourse through and about objects, which bonds together images of persons, products, and well-being.

This book sets out to historically trace the changing discourses through and about things within the expanding mediated marketplace. Our analysis of the market’s expanding role in material culture does not assume a bifurcated world in which economy and culture are inherently opposed—quite the opposite. It insists that although the accounts of the market economy provided by business (mostly concerned with commodity exchanges for money) and by sociology (mostly concerned with the meanings of goods and their social use) often differ, both are necessary for the understanding of the role played by advertising in the changing discourses through and about goods. This is because in a mediated marketplace, goods are the point of contact between commodity relations and the broader channels of social communication. This is also why we think advertising’s discourse through and about objects is a useful interpretive key for tracing aspects of our consumer culture.

The marketplace has become a preeminent institution in the consumer society because it is the point of access to material culture and the expanding discursive space in which the meanings of social consumption are transacted and negotiated. People in contemporary society also come together in “taste cultures,” “lifestyle groupings,” “demographic cohorts,” or “ethnic communities,” which represent distinctive consumption patterns. Such subsidiary social formations can be both temporary and quite informal in nature but are tracked by businesses through marketing research and are targeted by all sorts of promotional communications, building a feedback loop between producers and consumers into the social communication of the marketplace. As the marketing practices became more adroit at assessing this social dimension of consumption, so too advertising became a “privileged” form of social communication—meaning that we accord what it says a place of special prominence in our lives.

We refer to the markets’ social communication about consumption as privileged in two senses. First, in our market-industrial societies, economic affairs and marketplace transactions occupy a preponderant place in public life. For example, much of our political debate deals with managing the national and international market economy as a means of maintaining uninterrupted growth in our material culture. The talk about our economy’s fortunes has come to overawe everything else and, indeed, forces most other concerns to be expressed in its terms and language. A hockey game becomes “an entertainment product on the ice,” and delivering the goods to consumers becomes the “bottom line” for both corporate and state enterprises. Second, at the individual level, the discourse through and about objects sidles up to us everywhere, beckoning, teasing, haranguing, instructing, cajoling, and informing our daily interactions with each other in most settings. Even if we go off on weekend wilderness quests, we do so in a team wearing branded jackets and armed with solar-powered stoves.

As national consumer products flooded shops, so did the social communication in and through goods. In the expanding consumer marketplace, goods became “doubly articulated”—first, in terms of the meanings and uses imputed to them by consumers in their daily lives; second, by the promotional discourses of corporations that advertised them in the marketplace. The historical growth of the marketplace is experienced in and through the expanding social communication about consumption generally.

Advertising as Persuasion in the Marketplace

Vance Packard (1959) started his enormously popular The Hidden Persuaders by explaining that it was about the way many of us were being influenced and manipulated—far more than we realized—in the patterns of our everyday lives. Large-scale efforts were being made, he claimed, often with impressive success, to channel our unthinking habits, our purchasing decisions, and our thought processes by the use of insights gleaned from psychiatry and the social sciences. Typically, these efforts took place beneath our level of awareness (Packard 1959, 11).

Citing the use of motivational research (using focus groups of audiences to discover the basis of behavior, particularly consumer behavior) by growing numbers of advertisers, Packard attempted to show that consumers were becoming creatures of conditioned reflex rather than of rational thought. Most important, he alleged, this manipulation took place at a subconscious level. Packard’s criticism was not leveled at all advertising but only that which was underhanded and covert; indeed, for most advertising, Packard had nothing but praise, referring to many advertisements as “tasteful, honest works of artistry.” His main theme, however, concerned the obnoxious character of what he regarded as devious forms of advertising.

Wilson Bryan Key’s (1972, 1976) discussions of the alleged technique of subliminal perception in advertising reinforced Packard’s dark vision of the manipulative and hidden impacts of advertising. Key was concerned not so much with the use of motivational research and non-rational techniques of persuasion, but with ascertaining whether techniques impossible to perceive at the conscious level of awareness were concealed within the construction of the advertising message itself and whether they could influence behavior. For example, Key claimed to find the word “sex” baked into the surface of Ritz crackers and deeply symbolic sexual imagery used in the depiction of ice cubes in alcohol advertising.

This “secret technology,” he asserted, “modifies behavior invisibly, channels basic value systems and manages human motives in the interest of special power structures… . Subliminal stimuli assault the psyches of everyone in North America throughout each day of their lives” (Key 1976, 2). Neither Packard nor Key, it should be noted, was ever able to point to actual instances in which such alleged manipulative techniques induced consumers to do anything that they would not otherwise have freely chosen to do. But at least Packard could point to actual programs for motivational research; no other commentator, either within the advertising industry or outside it, has ever corroborated Key’s assertions about advertising practices, nor is there any evidence that motivational effects result from subliminal stimuli. The popularity of these attacks appears to rest on the general impression they create that advertising is a powerful and omnipresent apparatus with better knowledge of consumers than they have of themselves, and that this knowledge is used to manipulate them into buying goods they do not need.

Business spokespersons often admit that in the past, advertising was deceptive and was used to solve problems of under-consumption in an economy that had become newly capable of producing consumer goods in great profusion. In his book Marketing: Concepts and Strategy, Martin Bell conceded that national advertising of the 1920s and 1930s did indeed seek to escalate consumer demand: “The high-powered, skillful manipulator of consumer opinion, using personal salesmanship and aggressive advertising, took charge in many American businesses. His was the specialized task of selling the goods that had been mass produced and mass distributed. He found that almost anything could be sold with enough expense and effort” (1966, 7).

But during the 1930s, social criticism of this aggressive approach also increased. In response, the marketing industry, recognizing the limits of aggressive persuasion, framed a new orientation based on two key strategies: intensive market research and the effective design of new products. This replaced the practice of merely churning out whatever goods manufacturers thought would be useful to people, and then looking for ways to flog them. The new strategy was given a name: the marketing concept. “The marketing concept starts with the firm’s target customers and their needs and wants; it plans a co-ordinated set of products and programs to serve their needs and wants; and it derives profits through creating customer satisfaction” (Kotler and Turner 1981, 31). Marketers and advertisers became the apostles of a liberal conception of the marketplace, discovering (not creating) consumer needs, designing products to meet them, and using advertisements to communicate the availability and desirability of products.

Proponents of the marketing concept believe that contemporary marketing and advertising are the very lifeblood of our complex, market-oriented economy. Marketing techniques are used to make goods more meaningful and thus overcome some of the disadvantages of the specialization of labor, through which most persons become unfamiliar with the characteristics of mass-produced goods. The marketing system should be seen as a provisioning technology and cultural resource that confronts the enormous task of matching tens of millions of consuming units with tens of thousands of producing units. Its strategies are based on the premise that the consumer, as ultimate decision maker, is a rational problem solver who takes full advantage of this communication technology.

The marketing concept involves the integration of the “four Ps”: product (shaping and designing products to meet consumer needs); price (pricing appropriately to generate sales); promotion (promoting sales through advertising, store displays, and selling strategy); and place (placing products in appropriate retail outlets). In this view, advertising is a small part of a broader business project—the component of the “marketing concept” that links a corporation’s survival to the way it helps people to match their needs with products, thus making a valuable contribution to the efficiency and freedom of our expanding market economy.

Implicit in the marketing concept is the assumption that the most efficient way for the market to function is to allow consumers to direct producers, rather than the reverse. Under classic liberal theory, the market behavior of consumers is based upon deliberate and calculated action. Rational consumers faced with many products will purchase only those they truly require to satisfy their wants; rational producers of goods (in the face of competition from other marketers) will produce only what consumers want. Thus, the self-interested actions of buyers and sellers together within the free, competitive market will ensure the most efficient functioning of the system. Bell (1966) has outlined how the consumer behaves according to the rational approach. The satisfaction of a want involves four stages: the recognition of a want, the search for means to satisfy the want, the evaluation of competing alternatives, and a decision. Advertising plays its part in the search and evaluation stages.

Advertising figured prominently in our public discussions of the market economy as it became a favored business practice—the leading pillar of modern marketing practice (price, product, distribution, and promotion). Public controversies intensified as corporations invested in advertising to influence consumer opinion...