“Advertising is the art of convincing people to spend money they don’t have for something they don’t need” – Will Rogers This statement by Will Rogers states two very important things; advertising is there to change your mind and that it can change your mind. If it couldn’t advertisements wouldn’t exist in the first place. Organized advertising for products was introduced in the 19th century when two companies found themselves selling the same product. Instead of trying to make the best product they realized they could sell the idea of a better product and that their product was the key to having a modern household and modern is essentially what people wanted. Most people don’t believe that they are truly affected by advertising, but many studies have proven that even subconsciously advertisements do affect your decisions. In studies at the University of California, researchers found that when being shown ads the part of the brain that makes decisions and emotions was greatly stimulated. Advertising can stimulate the mind in many ways, for instance it can make a person think one product is better than another, ads can convince you to buy what you do not need, it can consciously or subconsciously stimulate the brain, and there is the factor saying that you will be cooler if you have this product. Advertising and all its attractions can effectively change the way consumers feel about the products they buy. Advertisements try to make the consumer think that one product is better than any other of the similar products. This happens in many different ways; ads create a feeling that if you buy “x” you will get “y” (Sundem 1). What people don’t realize is that “y” is almost never what “x” actually does. It gives the consumer a posit... ... middle of paper ... ... art of advertising tries to persuade a consumer to have an emotional connection with a product. Some advertisements try to convince the consumer that their product is better than the rest; others try to show that you can’t live without their product. Affective conditioning and creating the idea that their product makes your life better are two of many ways used to do this. Another way is to make the consumer believe that the product can make their life better. Scientific studies have shown that the brain reacts to emotional stimuli and has positive associations with old memories. Advertising has many different faces, whether affective conditioning brings the consumer to like the product more, or that a “cool factor” convinces the consumer the to buy the product. It frequently leads to the consumer buying the product; if advertising didn’t work it would not exist.
While posing as a comical relief to life’s monotony, ads actually evoke a subconscious reaction to human interaction, promising something we all desire, love. Through this evoked emotion, the unknown and unpredictable human relationship is replaced by a guaranteed acceptance, by having stuff.
Advertisements are one of many things that Americans cannot get away from. Every American sees an average of 3,000 advertisements a day; whether it’s on the television, radio, while surfing the internet, or while driving around town. Advertisements try to get consumers to buy their products by getting their attention. Most advertisements don’t have anything to do with the product itself. Every company has a different way of getting the public’s attention, but every advertisement has the same goal - to sell the product. Every advertisement tries to appeal to the audience by using ethos, pathos, and logos, while also focusing on who their audience is and the purpose of the ad. An example of this is a Charmin commercial where there is a bear who gets excited when he gets to use the toilet paper because it is so soft.
Postman states, advertisements were created to “appeal to understanding, and not to passion” (60). It is also stated that producers would make the assumption “that potential buyers were illiterate, rational, and analytical.”(58) Though Neil Postman makes it apparent that advertisers are not always truthful about what they say. Advertisers also tried to appeal to the masses by coming up with catchy slogans to lure people in.
Have you ever seen an advertisement for a product and could immediately relate to the subject or the product in that advertisement? Companies that sell products are always trying to find new and interesting ways to get buyers and get people’s attention. It has become a part of our society today to always have products being shown to them. As claimed in Elizabeth Thoman’s essay Rise of the Image Culture: Re-Imagining the American Dream, “…advertising offered instructions on how to dress, how to behave, how to appear to others in order to gain approval and avoid rejection”. This statement is true because most of the time buyers are persuaded by ads for certain products.
In the end, I find that Robert Scholes is correct in his conclusion that commercials hold a certain power, with which they can alter our decisions whether or not to buy a product. Through visual fascination, we are offered images we could never have on our own; through narrativity, we are told what to think and how to think it; and finally through cultural relativity we connect with the rest of the world. When these three forces are combined by advertising, our brains cannot help themselves, we allow ourselves to become brainwashed by corporate America. This is why Robert Scholes feels that Reading a Video Text should be taught in school.
Advertising has became a race, a race of passing information to customers in order to change their buying decisions. Because of that, it is difficult to keep the content of an advertisement true to the fact. Facts or benefits of a product are often exaggerated in modern advertisements. Brands create these new images of the product to expand the role of their actual service.
We see advertisements all around us. They are on television, in magazines, on the Internet, and plastered up on large billboards everywhere. Ads are nothing new. Many individuals have noticed them all of their lives and have just come to accept them. Advertisers use many subliminal techniques to get the advertisements to work on consumers. Many people don’t realize how effective ads really are. One example is an advertisement for High Definition Television from Samsung. It appears in an issue of Entertainment Weekly, a very popular magazine concerning movies, music, books, and other various media. The magazine would appeal to almost anyone, from a fifteen-year-old movie addict to a sixty-five-year-old soap opera lover. Therefore the ad for the Samsung television will interest a wide array of people. This ad contains many attracting features and uses its words cunningly in order to make its product sound much more exciting and much better than any television would ever be.
For one, advertisments will make you feel emotions and positive things about their product. Basically tricking you into purchasing a product that you may not necessarily need. It can’t force someone to purchase something but ...
Advertising generally tries to sell the things that consumers want even if they should not wish for them. Adverting things that consumers do not yearn for is not effective use of the advertiser’s money. A majority of what advertisers sell consists of customer items like food, clothing, cars and services-- things that people desire to have. On the other hand it is believed by some advertising experts that the greatest influence in advertising happens in choosing a brand at the point of sale.
In today’s difficult economy who can afford to spend their hard-earned money carelessly? Americans want good quality and low prices, and businesses that advertise their product make saving money possible. Advertising was created for one reason, so businesses could make known their product (Black, Hashimzade, and Myles). Some consumers may argue that advertising is not informative, but that it is manipulative because some advertisements make false claims. Fortunately, there are regulations and consumer rights that promote truth in advertising. Consumers must embrace their rights to keep advertising the way it is meant to be. Advertising is meant to be informative and not manipulative, and consumers play a great role in promoting truth in advertising.
Advertising techniques have changed and along with it, the impact they have on each individual’s mind. While there are some similarities between the different kinds of advertisements we see today, there are also many differences. Advertising has also become more unethical than it was in, let’s say, the 50s. Not all advertisements are brainless; there are a few that are even creative and fun and just pull the target audience in by entertaining them while selling them a product.
People buy things not necessarily because they need things, but because they want things. One reason why people may buy things they do not need is because of advertisements. Advertising seduces people into buying things that they don't need because they always make the product seem way better than it actua...
For instance, the method of using product placement and celebrity endorsement is common, and in spite of this, advertisements tend to be more memorable, namely due to popularity. According to the traditional hierarchy-of-effects models of advertising state that advertising exposure leads to cognitions, such as memory about the advertisement, the brand; which in turn leads to attitudes, i.e. Product liking and attitude toward purchase which in the end leads to behaviors, like buying the advertised product (Mendelson & Bolls, 2002). As teenagers are in the stage of exploring their identities, advertisements are attributed to developing intellectual, philosophical, and creative abilities. Chiefly, advertisements provide a source of learning and conditioning that generates concepts of importance to the demographic generation.
To sum up, advertising is one of the important ways to help the marketers as well as consumers. It is good for the companies as they can attract more consumers and as a result increase the profit of the company. It also has many benefits for the consumers as they can raise their knowledge and awareness and accordingly improve their lifestyle. Conversely, it may have negative effects on consumer behavior by creating unhealthy behavior such as alcohol consumption and lowering self-confidence through beauty advertisements. According to what has been written above, obviously, advertisements may have both positive and negative effects on consumer behavior.
Commercials works through the human emotions and vanity and it appeals toward the psychologically domain turning into a temptation for weak mind people. For instance, if a person is at home watching T.V., very comfortable and suddenly, a commercial promoting any kind of food and drink comes up, that person will be hungry and thirsty in a couple of minutes. The advertising influenced his mind, provoking an involuntary reaction to do what the commercial induced him to do.