Advertising, Consumer Cultures & Desireilearned.weebly.com/uploads/2/6/2/5/2625833/week_8.pdf · • Product names that have meaning attached to them through naming, packaging, advertising

Advertising, Consumer Cultures & Desire

Group Work

Group 1: Consumer Societies

Group 2: Envy, Desire & Belonging

Group 3: Commodity Culture & Commodity Fetishism

Group 4: Brands & Their Meanings

Group 5: The Marketing of Coolness

Group 6: Anti-Ads & Culture Jamming

CONSUMER SOCIETIESGroup 1

What is Capitalism Exactly?

• An economic system where the means of production are privately owned and generate private profit.

• Private ownership in Capitalism implies the right to own and control capital goods (raw materials, machines, factories…) and land (e.g. natural resources), two means of production . The third means to production is labour (physical & mental).

• In a Capitalist system, government control is limited to varying degrees: to managing property law (Free market Capitalism), minimally intervening in price formation, providing social security and labour rights (Social Capitalism), or is corporatized (State Capitalism).

Overproduction of goods

Consumer Choice

Production of Desire for

goods

Capitalism Relies on

The Creation of Consumer Societies

Modernity: Industrial

Revolution & Mass Production

Mobility & Large Urban

Concentrations

Discretionary Income & Leisure

Time

With the rise of Modern Capitalist society comes Consumer Societies.

Characteristics of Consumer Societies

• The individual is confronted with and surrounded by a vast assortment of goods.

• There is a constant demand for new products or new marketing/packaging.

• There are great physical and social distances between the manufacture and purchase/use of goods.

• Concepts of Self, Identity & even Nationalism are derived from purchasing & use of commodities.

• The belief that consumer products will offer self-fulfillment & will fill emotional needs.

• Window shopping in cathedrals of commerce becomes a hobby and ads are posted for mobile vision.

A Consumer’s Republic• When consumerism is associated with citizenship; when being

a good citizen is associated with being a good consumer.

• Where the highest social values are equated with promises of Consumerism.

• Where Consumerism is linked to the achievement of ideals such as freedom, democracy & equality.

• Think of some examples of how Canadian citizens may feel the pressure to consume many unnecessary goods regularly in order to be a good Canadian?

Margaret Bourke-White, African-American flood victims lined up at Red Cross

relief station (1937)

Margaret Bourke-White, Through a Windshield, the 40-mile Baltimore-Washington

Stretch is One Long Clutter of Ugly Signs (1938)

The Flâneur

• A Flâneur is a bourgeois man who strolls the streets of large cities in an anonymous fashion, observing and experiencing the modern urban landscape, shop windows and commodity intoxicated consumers. His primary activity is looking: he is a detached observer.

• Flâneurie has a parallel development in contemporary tourism & also in street photography.

ENVY, DESIRE & BELONGINGGroup 2

What is Capital?

In a Capitalist society value is awarded through forms of knowledge as much as it is through material wealth.

• Economic capital: material wealth & access to material goods.

• Cultural capital: cultural knowledge that can give you social advantages. Can be seen in connoisseurship & rare taste.

• Social capital: whom you know, your social networks & the opportunities they provide you.

• Symbolic capital: prestige, celebrity, honors.

We consume signs & semiotic meaning• Ads sell us commodity signs as opposed to products. Ads use

connotative signifieds to address consumers instead of simply selling the denotative meaning of the product. The meaning is often implied in the brand.

• Ads sell belonging by incorporating family, community, generation, nation, special groups or classes of people into their imagery & connotative meaning.

• Ads establish codes of difference to distinguish products. They establish norms (“unmarked”) by showing what is different (“marked”). This can be done through race, gender or social difference.

• Ads sell through social awareness. Recently ads appeal to younger, more socially aware consumers.

The moment we are separated from our mothers, our separation causes us to search for the wholeness we once had in the womb. So, we are driven by desire that comes from this sense of lack.

Jacques Lacan

This sense of lack causes us to constantly strive to fill that void through relationships, activities or in many cases consumerism.

Ads are always situated in the future, as the present is lacking in some way. Ads often recreate our fantasies & ideals, yet the sense of lack will always remain.

Jacques Lacan

COMMODITY CULTURE & COMMODITY FETISHISM

Group 3

Consumer/Commodity Culture

• Where commodities (things that are bought & sold) are central to cultural meaning.

• A culture where individuals construct their identities or sense of self through purchasing and using commodities. They create their “commodity selves”.

• Ads use this notion to appeal to consumers by selling them ways of constructing and conveying their individuality.

• Pseudoindividuality is this false sense of individuality that is sold to many people by the culture industry.

Exchange value is the cost (abstract monetary value) of a particular commodity, while use value is the particular use of a commodity in a particular society.Capitalism emphasizes exchange value over use value.

Karl Marx

One product of Consumer Society & Capitalism is the Commodity Fetish.Mass-produced goods go through a process of mystification: they are emptied of the meaning of their production (context & labor) & filled with new meanings that give it a new symbolic power as a fetish object. Karl Marx

Mystification & Global Capitalism

• Mystification, a process of emptying commodities of the meaning of their production & context, fills them with new ideological meaning.

• The erasure of the meaning of production that is seen in commodity fetishism allows for the devaluation of labor.

• It also allows consumers to remain ignorant of working conditions.

• This can be seen in the new Global Capitalism where the outsourcing of labor by many large companies is becoming standard.

• Producers are distanced from consumers socially & geographically.

Mystification Ruptured & Empowered Consumers

• Consumer awareness and activism has brought about some change in the market by rupturing the process of mystification.

• Consider examples of Fair Trade chocolate and Nike working standards. By situating workers in their ads, American Apparel has used social awareness as an ad strategy.

• Artists have used ads and their imagery to comment on consumerism and popular culture from both critical and subjective/personal positions.

• Pop Art has shown us that consumerist imagery can be socially significant to understanding cotemporary culture.

BRANDS & THEIR MEANINGSGroup 4

Brands• Product names that have meaning attached to them through

naming, packaging, advertising & marketing. Logos and visual style/motifs are crucial to branding.

• Brands distinguish the qualities of a company & its products from other similar products offered by competitors.

• Brands encompass all the symbolic elements of a company’s goods & services. Sometimes the company becomes the brand as opposed to the product.

• We recognize a brand (brand awareness) even if we don’t own or intend to own its product.

Brands gone awry

• Brands that are legally protected are Trademarked.

• Some trademarks are used generically to the detriment of the original brand. Eg. Xerox, Kleenex.

• When trademarks become part of public culture it is called genericide. Rights of the name are lost by the owner of the mark.

• While brands need popularity & ubiquity in a global market, they need to retain their distinct identity.

Hank Willis Thomas,

Smokin Joe Ain’t J’amama

(1978-2006)

Hank Willis Thomas, from the Branded

series (2008)

Hank Willis Thomas, Priceless (2004)

THE MARKETING OF COOLNESSGroup 5

Creative Revolution in Ads

• The 1960s saw great social change:

Emphasis on youth culture

Consumers are increasingly mobile

Popularity of television

• This allowed admen to appeal to a new audience by way of entertainment, intrigue, humor & parody.

• They appropriated youth culture to boost sales. By marking commodities as hip & cool, the counterculture could become a new market.

Unique & Distinct

Difficult to reproduce

Uninfluenced by the Marketplace

Counterculture

Cool

Brands that sell signifiers of coolness sell the

idea of youth as a posture.

This forces the counterculture to change visual

styles & codes in order to avoid appropriation.

Cool hunters continually adjust their strategy to

stay innovative, mirroring the planned

obsolescence of mass-produced commodities.

The Paradox in Selling Cool

• Selling products through values that appear to reject consumer culture;

• Attaching youth culture to brands that are marketed to a variety of age groups;

• Selling brands through ads that pretend not to be ads;

• Embracing consumerism socially as a means of expressing that we’re above consumerist values;

• Selling coolness which is difficult to reproduce.

Contemporary Ad Strategies

• Ads interpellate consumers who are distracted, knowing and savvy about the ad world and its tactics by:

-Emphasizing parody & pastiche

-Interpellating a knowing consumer with postmodern talk

-Through Metacommunication

-By selling social awareness , eg. Green Marketing.

-Through Guerilla (“stealth”) Strategies

-Through Viral Marketing Strategies

-By creating online consumer communities

-Through Product placement

ANTI-ADS & CULTURE JAMMINGGroup 6

Culture Jamming• Interventions into everyday life to counter the passivity &

alienation of modern life & spectacle by jamming the messages of consumer culture.

• Many artists use the form & codes of ads for political critique. They reroute messages to create new meanings.

• Examples of culture jamming include:

The Situationists détournement

Billboard Liberation Front (BLF)

Adbusters

Viral Licensing & Copy left

“The spectacle is the bad dream of enchained modern society,

which ultimately expresses only its desire to sleep. The spectacle

is the guardian of this sleep.”

“Man, separated from his own production, produces ever more powerfully all the details of his

world, and thus finds himself ever more separated from his world.”

Guy Debourd (1931-1994, France)

Situationist Détournements

The Situationists, an avant garde movement of the 1960s, aimed to awaken society from the illusion of the spectacle by:

Criticizing capitalist exploitation & abasement of human life;

Promoting alternative life experiences beyond the producer-consumer relationship. This can be seen in Psychogeography: “…a whole toy box full of playful, inventive strategies for exploring cities...just about anything that takes pedestrians off their predictable paths and jolts them into a new awareness of the urban landscape.“

Constructing situations with the union of play, personal freedom and critical thinking.

Situationist Détournements

• There are two types of détournements:

Minor détournements : where elements that are of no real importance (eg. Newpaper clipping or a random object) is changed by simply changing its context.

Deceptive détournements: when already significant works or objects (eg. a great artwork) is given new meaning from placed in a new context.

• Ad companies are known to recuperate détourned works by incorporating them back into mainstream media.

Mater Profana (Defiguration), Asger Jorn

(1960)

Asger Jorn 'defigured' existing

cultural objects as an irreverent

political act. He expresses his

dissatisfaction with established

authority by détourning original

works: directly altering them to

oppose the original meaning.

The Avant Garde Doesn’t Give Up

(Defiguration), Asger Jorn (1962)

Détournement

The original painting on the left “ Innocent X” by Velasquez

The détourned image “Study after Velasquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X”

on the right by Francis Bacon

A détournement of logos