Chapter 7 – Ads, consumer capitalism and the crisis of inequality

Project

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Project 3: publicity material.

This project gives you the opportunity to write some publicity (an ad or a brochure) for an organisation to which you belong, or with which you have contact. For example, a religious organisation, a student society, a club, your friend’s business, your father’s shop, or a school you have connections with, etc. This might be publicity advertising an upcoming event, a general recruitment ad for an organisation, or for goods and services.

A. Decide what aspects of psychology you are going to appeal to in your advertisement:

  • desire and greed;
  • power to solve problems;
  • acquiring personal qualities;
  • choosing an identity;
  • desire to be exclusive, distinguished;
  • lifestyle change.

B. Using the material in this chapter and from earlier parts of the coursebook, think carefully about:

  • visual aspects of the text that might grab the reader’s attention, or foster involvement: viewing angles, gaze, fonts, colours, white space, and how you can use pictures to make implications (Chapters 1, 2 and 3);
  • whether you need to make the product or organisation seem powerful (Chapter 2);
  • interpersonal aspects of the text, the desired degree of contact and how you will achieve this (Chapter 3);
  • how to get affect into your text, through choice of adjectives, upgraded vocabulary, or rhythmic (syntactic) repetition (Chapter 3);
  • the use of presupposition to avoid making claims that might not stand up, or to introduce knowledge everyone has (Chapter 4), or to position your reader (Chapter 5);
  • whether to use metaphors and puns deriving from double schemas (Chapter 4);
  • who the ideal reader is that you are targeting, and what speech acts you might use on them (Chapter 5).

C. After a preliminary draft and discussion with other members of the client organisation, compose your first draft. This should include a commentary on the linguistic and visual features of the text and the psychological strategies you are employing.

Quiz

Further Reading

Further reading for Chapter 7

  1. The crises for democracy and capitalism have recently been extensively explored by Bauman and Bordoni. A shorter account of the crisis of debt and how it has shifted between state public and private sectors can be found in Part One of Living on Borrowed Time. It is not only left-wing anti-capitalist sociologists like Bauman who identify the crisis: the suggestion that the present economic system based on the growth of consumer capitalist economies is likely to lead to a crisis of civilisation is evidenced in Ahmed’s report of a study by NASA.

  2. Judith Williamson’s book Decoding Advertisements is an excellent account, using semiotics, the theory of signs and their meanings, of how advertisements are composed and understood both visually and verbally. It takes a Marxist perspective on advertising as a feature of capitalism. Guy Cook’s The Discourse of Advertising is a more linguistic and less ideological exploration, which makes fruitful comparisons between the texture and discourse of ads and of literary texts. Particularly interesting are the sections on how music and words combine with visuals in TV ads, the intertextuality of one ad parodying another, the different voices of ads, and the structuring of vocabulary to reinforce stereotypes.

    • Cook, G. (2001). The Discourse of Advertising (2nd edn). London: Routledge.
    • Williamson, J. (1978). Decoding advertisements: Ideology and meaning in advertising. London: Boyars.

  3. Fairclough gives an interesting analysis of the relationship between ads and lifestyle in Language and Power, pp. 165-175.

    • Fairclough, N. (2001). Language and power (2nd ed.). Harlow: Longman.

  4. The importance of the effects of consumer culture are both dealt with in Lester Faigley’s Fragments of Rationality where he discusses the post-modern subject and where he quotes from Baudrillard’s America, another controversial text.

    • Baudrillard, J. (2010). America. New York: Verso.
    • Faigley, L. (1992). Fragments of rationality: Postmodernity and the subject of composition. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.
  5. No doubt our ideological perspective on consumerism and advertising has been influenced by Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders and Erich Fromm’s To Have or to Be – this latter explores the warped psychology of consumerism and is a great antidote to the poisonous brainwashing undercurrents of advertising.
    • Packard, V. (1957). The Hidden Persuaders. New York: McKay.
    • Fromm, E. (2013). To have or to be? New York: Bloomsbury.
  6. The two links from Youtube are examples of how stereotypes function in ads. Both ads explore gender stereotypes which carry particular assumptions about women.
  7. This Coca-Cola ‘Reasons to Believe’ ad promotes its product by appealing to the human emotions of hope and love. The video tries to exploit humanitarian and progressive ideologies advocating environmentalism, literacy, open borders, care of children and anti-militarism, to promote its image and further capitalistic consumerism. It is particularly hypocritical considering the harm Coca-Cola has inflicted on the environment and water supplies (see the link to www.rt.com).