Go to work on an egg
Advertising is one of the few industries that has done well out of the
recession. In 2001 British companies spent £10 billion on
advertisements, compared to a figure of under £6 billion for 1997. To
illustrate the extent of this expenditure, consider the fact that
Beecham's spend more on advertising and promotion for Ribena than on
the blackcurrants from which it is made. And Procter & Gamble, the
biggest advertisers, spent over £5 billion world-wide on marketing in
2000. Not a penny of all these vast sums serves any socially useful
purpose. Rather, the thousands of ads we are all subjected to each day
are designed to maintain and improve profits.
It might be argued that advertisements exist primarily to inform
consumers of new products and give them worthwhile information.
However, the overwhelming majority of ads are on behalf of established
product lines, and are intended as a reminder to existing customers to
keep on buying and not to switch brands. The companies which spend most
on advertising in Britain are Unilever, Procter & Gamble, Nestlé,
Kellogg's and Mars, all of whom occupy leading positions in the market
for food and various household items. Cornflakes, to take one example,
are promoted not because there is anything new to say about them (apart
from trying to persuade us to eat them at times other than breakfast),
but because "brand loyalty" needs to be kept up.
One of the main aims of such high advertising expenditure on leading
brands is that it makes it prohibitively expensive for competitors to
enter the market with a rival product. As a consequence, many brand
leaders have been around for decades, Kellogg's Crunchie dates from
1929, and Fruit Gums from 1893—an interesting sidelight on capitalism's
supposed emphasis on innovation. It is partly because of the high
advertising costs associated with product launches that over 90 percent
of new products are failures. New lines, it should be said, are rarely
started in order to meet unsatisfied consumer needs, but for reasons of
competition, to do down another company and prevent them establishing
too much command of a market:
"The multiple-brand advertisers launch products because of competition
and market conditions, not because consumers' needs are not being
satisfied . . . Marketers in most major product sectors have their eye
more firmly on what the consumers are doing" (Sean Brierley: ‘The
Advertising Handbook’).
Many companies operate in what are known as saturated markets: for
instance, it is difficult to increase the total amount of soap that
people buy, so all that advertising can do to increase sales is to
influence people to switch brands. Small wonder that writers on
marketing speak of competition between companies in terms of warfare.
The ratio of advertising to sales differs enormously from brand to
brand, the highest ratios being for indigestion remedies, double
glazing and toys. Advertisements aimed at children are especially
traumatic for parents, who may have to try to explain why the
longed-for toy is simply beyond their means.
It is a truism among advertising gurus that consumer behaviour is
irrational, that people stick to buying a particular brand even if they
cannot identify it in "blind" tests, or that their buying habits can
change for trivial reasons. In fact, such behaviour simply reflects the
fact that so many of the competing products are virtually
indistinguishable, that the fabled choice created by capitalism is a
myth. It is to tap such supposed irrationality and consumers' alleged
underlying motivations that so many advertisement trade on images,
rather than any actual properties of what is being advertised.
Think for instance, of the ads for Marlboro cigarettes: the scenes of
"Marlboro country", with its open spaces and dramatic vistas, never
mention the cigarettes themselves. The Gold Blend coffee ads suggest a
lifestyle for those who drink the stuff, and are successful in
promoting media interest in their "plot" line, which means even more
free publicity for the coffee. I remember TV ads for Barclays and
Toyota poke fun at the poor and elderly in a particularly cynical way.
The fantasy world depicted in advertisements is a long way from the
sordid realities of everyday life under capitalism.
Advertising agencies develop sophisticated techniques of influencing
consumer behaviour, though they are forced to admit that it is
impossible to predict just how people will react to particular
campaigns, and that advertising on its own can have comparatively
little effect. Vance Packard's “The Hidden Persuaders” (first published
in 1957) gives an informative account of motivation research, one
particular approach to influencing purchasers. Things have become more
complex since then, and advertisers go to a lot of trouble to ensure
that an ad does not put off some customers while attracting others. Sex
is of course a popular basis for adverts, especially for holiday
companies (witness Club 18-30's suggestive ads for "package holidays"),
but, like all advertising motifs, it needs to be used with care.
An outstanding recent example of the nonsense of advertising and its
hype is provided by the launch of a new can for Pepsi-Cola. The drink
itself is unchanged, but $500 million were spent on a campaign centred
on a new colour for the can! Blue is designed to distinguish Pepsi from
the brand leader, Coca-Cola, and from supermarkets' own-brand colas,
which have begun to chip away at the Pepsi/Coke duopoly. However, the
aim is again to stimulate wider press coverage in addition to the
paid-for advertising: in words of one Pepsi executive, "The cola wars
are good for the business, they keep up interest in the product." The
biggest example of manipulation surrounding a product launch must go to
Windows 95, the "new" computer operating system from Microsoft which
was launched to a fanfare of media excitement and technical scorn few
years ago.
According to the Code of Advertising Practice, ads should be "legal,
decent, honest and truthful". But a really honest ad might say
something along the following liens: "This product is fifth-rate, it'll
fall apart after a month or two, it's minimally different from a dozen
other products on the market, and to get you to buy it we'll try to
convince you that people who use it are attractive, popular and
successful." Next time you are confronted with an advertisement, just
think about the lies, hypocrisy and waste that lie behind it.
Jan
http://communities.msn.com/realworldsocialism
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