Advertising and Consumer Society

Advertising and Consumer Society
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Advertising and Consumer Society
Traditionally, advertising served to provide objective facts about products and services offered by organizations across the different sectors of the economy. The key functions performed by advertising included highlighting or describing the features of new products and their use, alerting potential customers to the availability of the products and services, and the locations from where to purchase them CITATION Sol09 \l 1033 (Solomon, 2009). Advertising also sought to show consumers what to look for in their respective shopping destinations, assist them in choosing over the competing alternatives, and provide price information and the available promotional activities CITATION Sol09 \l 1033 (Solomon, 2009). The outlined functions reduced the amount of time spent by consumers looking for preferred products and protected them from losing value by selecting low-quality products. The successful execution of the outlined functions in advertising an organization's products or brand benefitted the organization equally through increased sales from the expanded customer base coupled with high consumer retention rates. It suffices, therefore, that traditional advertising served mutually beneficial functions for both the organization and the consumer society.
However, the increasing competition across the diverse economic sectors coupled with advanced telecommunication technologies witnessed from the 20th century to the current era led to a scramble to maximize return on investment through advertising. The early 20th century witnessed a renaissance of advertising strategies tailor-made for providing organizations with maximum return on investment. The advertising strategies employed by organizations since the 1920s deviated from the traditional approach of conveying objective facts about their goods and services to using integrated approaches to influence the attitudes and behaviors of the target audience. Advertising has since transformed from being a mere informative tool used by organizations to promote their products into a powerful engine that shapes society's perspectives and opinions across the social, political, and economic domains. This influence on the consumer society's cultural orientation makes for a contentious issue, attracting criticism and appraisal in almost equal measure. Proponents of advertising argue for its economic impact on society and the abovementioned benefits to both the consumers and business organizations, with strong opposition shaping up the negative implications of advertising on the consumer society and leading to calls for advertising to be abolished. David Ogilvy explores the parallel views on advertising and whether or not it should be abolished in an interesting chapter of his book, Confessions of an Advertising Man CITATION Ogi63 \l 1033 (Ogilvy, 1963). Ogilvy provides an articulate breakdown of different advertising elements, such as the functions and existing loopholes in the lucrative industry that shifts its merits to the business organizations financing the advertisement at the expense of consumers CITATION Ogi63 \l 1033 (Ogilvy, 1963). Ogilvy arrives at a neutral conclusion claiming that advertising should not be abolished but should be regulated or reformed CITATION Ogi63 \l 1033 (Ogilvy, 1963). Ogilvy's standpoint sets the premise of this paper by seconding the need for regulating the advertising industry, whose overall economic impact outweighs the existing loopholes exploited by key players in multinational corporations and other business entities in different sectors of the economy in the United States and around the world. Provided herein is a comprehensive analysis and evaluation of some of the aspects of advertising and their correlation to consumer society towards supporting the claim that there is a need for reforms or regulations instead of abolishing the robust economic industry.
Advertising and Culture
Advertisements play a significant role in shaping people's opinions, beliefs, and practices across the social, political, and economic domains. Advertising executes the new role by deviating from its traditional objective principle of informing and using complex strategies in its messaging to influence the attitudes and behaviors of the target audience. Sir Winston Churchill once pointed out that advertising nourishes the consuming power of men by setting up goals of better homes, better clothing, and better food CITATION Ogi63 \l 1033 (Ogilvy, 1963). Such goals propel individual effort toward reaching the outlined goals, with an overall effect of increased productivity. In essence, advertising created an industrial society whose cultural orientation was a function of beliefs and practices that focused on satisfying the needs and demands created through advertisements from different business organizations. Advertising creates an industrial or commercial society that depends on commercial products and services to satisfy consumer needs and creates a culture of mass production and mass consumptionCITATION Fra97 \l 1033 (Frank, 1997).
Advertising reflects people's dreams and aspirations for better lives while also relaying the existing challenges to realizing the desired outcomes. It is also a magnification of the basic human desires that can be positively or negatively embraced by individuals, groups, or business organizations, leading to equally diverse cultural implications for the consumer society CITATION Fir13 \l 1033 (Firat, 2013). The pervasive messages in advertising influence people's tastes and preferences for the latest trends in clothing, healthy dietary approaches, and even personal care products. Realizing people's dreams, desires, and aspirations or failure to achieve the same shapes their opinions, attitudes, and behaviors towards various aspects of life being peddled by advertising CITATION Tse89 \l 1033 (Tse, 1989). The development of both positive and negative attitudes and behaviors are essential elements of the cultural identity embraced by individuals and groups across the global society. Thus, advertising plays an integral role in promoting a culture of increased productivity for sustainable growth and development of business organizations while setting goals for personal development and the overall well-being of individuals and groups in society.
The use of advertising to influence positive attitudes and behaviors toward various social issues, such as environmental awareness and concern for climate change, accounts for the transformation of the consumer society's culture of mass consumption to conscientious consumerism CITATION Sol09 \l 1033 (Solomon, 2009). The consumer society is no longer making purchases to satisfy the needs created by advertising. Instead, it prioritizes the overall wellness of individuals, groups, and the environment they live in when making purchasing decisions. People are buying products or brands that promote healthy lifestyles and the preservation of the environment. Business organizations and advertising agencies also embrace the conscientious culture by adopting both production and advertising strategies that align with the increasing environmental awareness and concern for personal health across the consumer society. In essence, conscientious consumerism accounts for the shift in advertising strategies towards the green marketing approach. The green culture makes for an intersection between advertising and consumer society that promotes sustainability for the overall well-being of the global society.
Non-profit and Prosocial Advertising
Advertising can be used for good causes without commercial or political intentions on the target audiences. According to Ogilvy (1963), advertisers derive modest satisfaction from participating in prosocial advertising campaigns meant for spreading vital information toward promoting the overall well-being of society. David Ogilvy alludes to an advertising campaign his advertising agency did in 1959 to increase public awareness of Lincoln Center as an excellent example of some of the good causes of advertising CITATION Ogi63 \l 1033 (Ogilvy, 1963). The advertising campaign sought to increase people's visits to the center by dismissing the existing belief that the facility was meant to serve the elite in society CITATION Ogi63 \l 1033 (Ogilvy, 1963). The advertising recorded positive outcomes with increased visitations to the facility by individuals and groups across the social divide.
Prosocial advertising can also play a significant role in safeguarding and protecting lives. A collaborative effort among Procter & Gamble, Unilever, and Colgate-Palmolive developed an advertising campaign to promote handwashing with soap in Ghana CITATION Duh08 \l 1033 (Duhigg, 2008). The advertising campaign was built around the observation that only 4% of Ghanaians used soap to wash their hands after using the bathroom CITATION Sol09 \l 1033 (Solomon, 2009). Such precedence exposed most Ghanaians to diseases such as diarrhea, thus compromising their quality of life. The campaign launched in the early 2000s, at the request of Dr. Val Curtis, developed TV spots showing mothers and children walking out of bathrooms with a glowing purple pigment on their hands that contaminated anything they touched CITATION Duh08 \l 1033 (Duhigg, 2008). The television advertising spots showed the women and children washing their hands using soap. The handwashing segment of the advertisement took only four seconds of the over 150 seconds of the entire advert CITATION Sol09 \l 1033 (Solomon, 2009). The advertising influenced a feeling of disgust against failure to wash hands with soap after leaving the bathroom and created positive attitudes toward using soap in handwashing across the country. The business organizations came together to finance the prosocial advertising campaign to avert a looming health crisis in the West African country. Handwashing with soap increased by 41% in Ghana, thanks to the organization's prosocial advertising campaign CITATION Sol09 \l 1033 (Solomon, 2009). Advertising provides an excellent platform for developing collaborative efforts among business organizations, individuals, and groups for society's enhancement by achieving set prosocial objectives....