week 8 - Advertising, consumers Culture & Desire

Envy Desire & Belonging

The language of transformation they sell the promise that their lives will change if they buy a product. They use figures of glamour that consumers can envy and wish to emulate.

Attachment of the value of art to a product can give it a connotation of prestige, tradition or authenticity &culture value.

Example. Grey goose vodka advertising ads such as these construct consumers as having cultural knowledge – cultural capital. French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu identified different forms of capital in addition to economic capital, social capital, symbolic capital &cultural capital.

Social capital = whom you know, your social network, +the opportunities they provide you.

Symbolic capital = prestige celebrities.

Cultural capital = the forms of cultural knowledge that give you social advantages. It can come in the form of rare taste, connoisseur & competence in deciphering cultural relation & artefacts.

Commodity Culture

Commodity Fetishism – Commodities are emptied of the meaning of their production (the context in which they were produced)

-Marx – social theorist 19^th century, the first to write about capitalism as a social structural element sometimes “use value” is outweighed by ‘exchange value’ (the more expensive the better)

Gruen transfer

Selling 4 Wheel drives

Selling them as cars,

Giving the consumer the idea that if they buy this car they will go off road and that if they buy this car they will get to go to these gorgeous place and have these great adventures.

Cause related marketing, Suzuki saying they will donate money to save black rhinos when it is only really $100 per car, trying to distance itself from it’s competitors.

Using voices to communicate masculinity.

Toyota oh what a feeling still usd as symbol of driver satisfaction, they still sneak it in.

Decode the ad

-Who is the ‘commodity self’ of the 4wd

-Consider connotations of voice over.

The commodity self for these 4wd ads are mothers/wife’s, the 4wd is sold as a car, they try to make them look more like cars and in ads try to portray them in a way in which they look more like a car.

They also try to sell the 4wd’s as a masculinity symbol, using a masculine and manly voice over and showing the car doing outrages things and very masculine and manly.