Tuesday 31 January 2012
31st Jan, back up
Paul Brandreth
BA (Hons.) Graphic Design
Word Count
Date of completion
“What range of techniques do advertisers use to manipulate consumers to buy into products they don’t necessarily need through an offer of a more fulfilled life, and why?”
“During the current econimical climate (reccesion 2012), would consumers rather buy into a brand for the purpose and functionality shown within its adverts, or would consumers still buy into brands using hyper reality techniques to offer a more fulfilled life?”
Contents
Introduction……………………………………………………………………….…03
Analyse adverts using Hyper-reality…………………………………………….…..04
Case Study: Hyper-reality or funtion……………………………………….……….08
Needs Must…………………………………………………………………………..12
Conclusion……………………………………………………………………….…..15
Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………17
Appendix……………………………………………………………………………..18
Images………………………………………………………………………………..19
Introduction
This dissertation is to find out if the offer of a more fulfilled life is still a successful medium to sell products to audiences, which are advertised for more luxuries not necessities. The quote above from Jeremy Bullmore argues the decisions the marketing team decides to market certain products as hyper-reality and not facing up to the product in it’s purpose/ context to reality, “Of all the time-honoured accusations levelled at advertising, it’s refusal to reflect a true picture of the real world is one of the most familiar. It is, we are told, a failure to face up to reality.” Bullmore (1996: 54) . From looking at advertisements it is clear that hyper-reality is used to target all ages/ backgrounds as offering a more fulfilled lifestyle rather than showing the reality of the product. This dissertation will focus on the principles of advertising for 18- 25 year old males and females to find out is the strategy of marketing brands and products as hyper-reality more successful rather than reality of the purpose of the product. I will focus the dissertation on the 18-25 year olds audience within Britain because I fall into this age category and can relate to part of my design practice.
The dissertation will argue wether or not a modern audience (2011) would rather buy into the offer of a more fulfilled lifestyle, such as adverts offering to sell a product using hyper-reality, an artificial simiulation used within advertising without any real reality. Guy Debord a French theorist of hyper reality stated (Debor: 1997) “A media and conumer society organized around the production and consumption of images, commodities, and staged events.” The term “stage events” Debord mentions is the techniques used to offer of a more fulfilled lifestyle within advertising that covers up reality with staged reality. The argument is, within this current econimical climate (recession) would the consumer rather buy the product for the practical purposes rather than buying into the product or brand through false hyper-reality within it’s advertsing.
The areas the dissertation will to investigate is how do marketing teams use hyper-reality to sell brands and products offering a more fulfilled life/lifestyle within advertising. Also to find out if the target audience would rather buy the product as an offer of a more fulfilled life or the product for being advertised for the context of everyday living.
Chapter 1: An analytical breakdown of two adverts from the same brand aimed at a male/ female audience to understand the power of offering a more fulfilled life using hyper reality.
Hyper-reality is more often found to be used for the use of brands offering their products as more luxiouris rather than everyday products such as neccesities. Hyper-reality has been such a powerful technique used within fashion marketing, espicially for the high street brands who stage events of reality to offer a product to the consumer. One of the main techniques of hyper-reality is the idea of being sexually desirable. John Berger stated (1972: 144), “Publicity increasingly uses sexuality is never free in itself; it is a symbol for something presumed to be larger than it; the good life in which you can buy whatever you want. To be able to buy is the same thing as being sexually desirable… Usually it is the implicit message, if you are able to buy this product you will be loveable. If you cannot buy it, you will be less lovable.” The reward of feeling more loveable if consumers were to buy into the brands products is a poweful staged reality, this first chapter will analyse the strengths of the techniques used to offer hyper-reality in advertisng to understand why consumers would want to buy into this staged lifestyle.
The best starting point to this dissertation is to analytically summarise two magazine adverts aimed at the 18 – 25 years of age audience to find out what techniques the adverts use to offer a more fulfilled life. Looking through articles and magazines to find a set of adverts aimed at male and female audiences, high street fashion brands (luxuries), offer the promise of a more fulfilled life more than adverts advertising cheaper fashion brands such as George - Asda which still offers the same functionality but not the same lifestyle through hyper-reality. This will be a fair investigation because the choosen brand markets two similar products, one towards a male audience and the other at a female audience. The two adverts found were marketing Gucci fragrances (figure.1. – male & figure.2.- female targeted audiences). They were found within the same magazine which makes it a fair test due to the date they were designed and published (2011), so the same techniques and culture would be similar to each other rather than analysing a male advert from the 70’s to a female advert from 2011 which would use different culture and language within the adverts.
The first advert aimed at the male audience (figure.1.) uses a direct gaze of the male, where he looks out of frame directly to the male audience viewing the magazine. The male advert also has another gaze of the female who uses an intra-diegetic gaze where her focus is looking up to the male. An intra-diegetic gaze is where a character gazes upon another character in the text or gazes upon an object within a text. Quoted from Berger (1972: 47),” Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at” which defiantly applies to this advert, as the male audience would instantly look towards the female and read her body language, this would give the audience the idea of how much power this male has within the advert. Thinking back to the initial question of “the offer of a more fulfilled life”, the brand is trying to sell the product as a certain character/ personality regarding the idea if you wore this product, this is the lifestyle you could purchase. Although the males direct gaze is strong, the appearance and body language of the female’s intra-diegetic gaze is just important to gain the male’s attention, which supports the quote from Berger (1972: 47),“women watch themselves being looked at”. This consequently offers the women audience the promise of a more fulfilled lifestyle of being loved by a male without being sold a product.
However within the other advert aimed at a female audience (figure.2), the gazes used are a lot different from the male targeted advert. The roles of the male and female have been switched. This time the female gazes directly towards the audience and the male uses the inter-dietetic gaze. Although these gazes of the male and female have been switched for different audiences, Berger’s (1972: 47) statement, ”Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at”, still applies to the female advert (fig.2). The female audience again would look into the direct gaze of the female because of the strong eye contact looking towards the viewer, and the males would also look towards the female because of her seductive body and facial composition. Although the purposes of both adverts are to sell the fragrances, they both use powerful imagery that stands out to be more of a focus of the brand lifestyle rather than the product itself. The statement by Berger applies to these adverts as the spectator relates to the staged situation of the role models and becomes part of the advertisment which leads to buy into the brand because of the hyper-reality used to offer a more “loveable” life.
The series of gazes are very similar, because both gazes being used in each advert are switched for the different gender audience but what is different between the gazes are the different body languages used within the roles of the male and female. The female intra-dietetic gaze in the male target audience advert, looks up towards the male, but in the female advert the male intra-dietetic gaze doesn’t look at the female because of his eyes being shut, so the use of the eyes is an important sign to the audience to communicate the message of the power and the gazes being used to sell Gucci.
Within both of the Gucci adverts, the female gaze offers a strong visual representation of fetishistic and voyeuristic pleasure. "In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness" Toland (1997: 226). Both in the male and female-targeted adverts, the female gaze of her eye positioning and body language suggest a sexual connotation due to her composition and actions in the advert. The male gaze supports the idea of fetishistic and voyeuristic pleasure but his gaze and body language isn’t as strong as the females. This supports Toland’s statement that the woman offers a strong role woman displayed for visual and erotic impact but also supports the idea from Berger (1972: 47) that ”Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at”. The males gaze is important to sell the fragences of Gucci, his gaze become a commodity to sell a product through the thought of being someone else. In the male advert the male audience would look into the males eyes and think about the females body positioning looking into his eyes as if the viewer has now become part of the advert where the female is seductively looking into his eyes. The females (fig.2) gaze becomes a commodity to women to be in her position with a male next to them, feeling loved. Laura Mulvey, a theorist about the different roles and techniques used within film and advertisements stated, “I was interested in the relationship between the image of the woman on the screen and the “masculinisation” of the spectator position, regardless of the actual sex (or possible deviance) of any real live movie-goer. In built patterns of pleasure and identification impose masculinity as a point of view; a point of view which is also manifest in the general use of masculinity third person.” (1989: 29) Both adverts are visually strong with the purpose to sell a more fulfilled life. Both have used the concept of creating the interaction through the third person to relate to the actions of the male and female used within the adverts. Mulvey’s quote indicates that the woman sells the product to a masculine audience but it also applies to a female audience who look at her sharing similar aspirations of the perfect life.
The angles of the photo shoot are important to capture what the brand wants to communicate to their audience. The idea offering a more fulfilled life has to show some form of reality so that the advert can relate to the audience and interact with the advert as the third person. “Publicity increasingly uses sexuality is never free in itself; it is a symbol for something presumed to be larger than it; the good life in which you can buy whatever you want. To be able to buy is the same thing as being sexually desirable… Usually it is the implicit message, if you are able to buy this product you will be loveable. If you cannot buy it, you will be less lovable.” Berger (1972/ 144) The competition for advertisers using techniques to sell brands for a more fulfilled loveable lifestyle has created such competition to push the boundaries to become more extreme within the adverts using hyper-reality to relate to the audience, but as Berger (1972/ 144) stated that, “If you cannot buy it, you will be less lovable.” This applies to both figure 1 & 2 that if you buy into this brand (Gucci), you will feel more loved than if you didn’t buy into the brand you would feel less loved due to becoming part of the adverts as a third person spectator. This competition for brands offering hyper-reality then increases because the target audience wouldnt be able to afford to buy into all fashion brands offering more fulfilled life as the cost would be to much, so this then becomes a selection process for the brands offering a more fulfilled life they want to buy into.
These connotations regarding visual voyeuristic and fetishistic pleasure support the idea of being in the males/ female’s position within the advert to sell the product Gucci, as an offer to a more fulfilled life, through buying the product. The use of the gaze and image within the two adverts are important elements to sell the brand as a commodity to it’s target market of 18-25 year olds. The male advertisements uses the males gazes as if he was the audience/ the male viewing the advert, and applies the thought used with voyeuristic and fetishistic scopophilia from the female model, to sell the product using the sex sells motto. Scopophilia is a sexual desire for looking at photographs or objects that suggest erotic signs. This idea that sex is a powerful medium to sell brands is supported by Tess Alps, a theorist into American advertising who states (Alps: 2005) “so sex certainly sells media products, and it can work for others, where permitted”However in the male advertisement the woman’s actions, behavior and glamour connect to a female audience “who gaze at other women” to want to be this woman in the advert. The female advert (fig.2) the techniques of voyeuristic and fetishistic scopophilia actions from the female model grabs the attention of the males attention the look towards the female but also the female audience would look at the female for the glamour and voyeuristic, fetishistic actions to be in her position and her hyper-reality.
As long as the adverts are aimed firstly for a masculine audience it seems this competition would increase the boundaries to push the voyeuristic and fetishistic scopophilia techniques of the female gaze to sell the brand as a lifestyle to the audience as the third person.
Chapter 2– Case study: Language within adverts vs. images used within adverts
After the first chapter critical analyzing two adverts for the same brand aimed at a male and female audience of 18-25 years old through the use of imagery, this chapter concentrate on text and language being used within adverts to support and sell a product. During researching into advertisements for fashion and fragrance brands, the language used in adverts is used persuade audiences into buying products they don’t necessarily need through the promise of a more fulfilled life. Copywriter from design firm Beautyfulmeme (Leeds) (Appendix 1) stated that, “within our design team it consists of a copywriter (being himself) and a designer who produced adverts and branding based around the use of language and text, because if we use images there is a lot of noise and distractions within a photograph or image, rather than looking at language and the personality of typography.” The point that Beatifulmeme states that image has too many distractions within advertising restricts the design team to just use text and language to communicate the product which would make a good investigation into how powerful type by itself is.
Chapter two is to investigate the use of text and language being used in two adverts selling similar products but from two different brands, this would use two different brands selling the similar product but through different marketing techniques and offering different personalities and character through their branding. It is important that both adverts are aimed at 18-25 year olds but one brand offering the product to an everyday audience and the other offering to sell the product through the promise of a more fulfilled life.
To make the investigation as fair as possible the two adverts chosen are selling for the same gender audience, aimed at 18-25 but both brands trying to sell a similar product. Two adverts selling fashion ware such as jeans or perfumes to a female audience would have been good to use for this investigation into the language used as these offer to sell brands as both, a more fulfilled life/ lifestyle and also selling products for what the product actually is produced for. Instead the chosen two brands are selling hair products one being Loreal and the other Toni & Guy. The Loreal advert uses the language, (fig.6) “Hold it, Glam it, Don’t party without it.” (This being the advert suggesting a more fulfilled lifestyle due to the idea of this hair product is used for nights out, or going to parties). The other brand Toni & Guy used a mathematical equation concept of replacing the algebra with words describing the product,” (Suede Tassels – Fancy a cuppa) & (Sea Salt texturing spray - finger twirling)” (fig.5), this suggesting to sell the product as an everyday product rather than offering an everyday lifestyle, this referring to the use of everyday language such as “fancy a cuppa”.
The language used within the two adverts use different techniques. The loreal Advert (fig.6) uses short sharp buzzwords such as, “Hold”, “Glam” & “Don’t” which are all actions that can relate to the audience. The repetition of the word “it” suggests the brand is referring to the hair spray and creates a really short memorable slogan. The idea of “Glam” referring to glamour and “Party” suggests the slogan is aimed at a more exclusive, professional audience. Toni & Guy (fig.5) use the content of their algebra slogan to replace numbers with an equation with the language of a more everyday purpose such as “Fancy a Cuppa” and a natural product with the words “Sea Salt” which creates a more organic feel for the brand.
To make this investigation fair the chosen texts from the adverts were wrote on the same piece of paper using the same colour font to take away any influences of font choice, and to ask the target audience of 18-25 females which hair product would they most likely buy into only looking at the two phrases and not the image to support them in the advert or the brand name (figure.). I hope to find out what the target audience of 18-25 females would rather buy, the everyday hair product or the hair product trying to sell the product as a lifestyle just from the restrictions of language used and question Beautifulmeme (appendix 1) how important the use of copy text is within adverts and trying to sell brands through his stated method.
Twenty females aged between 18 – 25, years of age were asked on Saturday (7th January, 2012) afternoon on The Headrow Road, Leeds city centre (geographical location) to find out which hair spray product they would rather buy. Sixteen out of twenty females said they would prefer to buy the Toni & Guy hair product,” (Suede Tassels – Fancy a cuppa) & (Sea Salt texturing spray - finger twirling)” and the remaining four females said they would buy the Loreal hair product “Hold it, Glam it, Don’t party without it.” Ideal lifestyle- loreal party glamour rather everyday use. Bullmore (1996: 54): “Of all the time-honoured accusations levelled at advertising, it’s refusal to reflect a true picture of the real world is one of the most familiar. It is, we are told, a failure to face up to reality.” As Bullmore stated to face up to reality, this investigation of the use of language show the statistics that offer a more fulfilled life (Loreal advert) has shown less of it’s target audience would rather buy into the product due to the language use than Toni & Guy’s advertising the product on an everyday use. The brand Toni & Guy relates to their audience as the suggestion of everyday living, which from the investigation argues that the use of a more fulfilled lifestyle within language gains a smaller section of it’s target audience compared to offering the product as an everyday use. This then questions the investigation of the dissertation whether or not people would rather buy into hyper-reality or more practical adverts offering the product as an everyday use.
As part as the same investigation to see how important the elements are within selling brand products as a more fulfilled life, I showed the same participants the two adverts as images and marked out the text and brand logos to see which hair product they would then buy by just looking at the images of the two adverts to question Beautifulmeme’s stance that text is more effective than image within advertising. Eleven from the twenty said they would buy the Toni & Guy hair product and the remaining nine said they would buy the Loreal hair product.From the statistics is seems that for a brand offering a more fulfilled life the image is more important to use rather than the language, and for the purpose of advertsisng as the product being sold for it’s everyday purpose the text is just as important as the image. These findings are quite interesting to question why people would choose the everyday product. “Publicity increasingly uses sexuality is never free in itself; it is a symbol for something presumed to be larger than it; the good life in which you can buy whatever you want. To be able to buy is the same thing as being sexually desirable… Usually it is the implicit message, If you are able to buy this product you will be loveable. If you cannot buy it, you will be less lovable.” Berger (1972/ 144) The image however of the Loreal advert offers the more fulfilled life, buy choosing the model Cheryl Cole as a familiar celebrity who tends to live a luxurious lifestyle and is a public role model to many of it’s 18-25 years old target audience which adds value to the brand, rather than the a less known public figure model used within the Toni & Guy figure who represents the brand as an everyday person, and the statistics of the text and image investigations support this.
The statistics of the image showing the different personalities and characteristics of the brand compared to the language used disagrees with (Appendix 1) statement of, “within our design team it consists of a copywriter and a designer who produced adverts and branding based around the use of language and text, because if we use images there is a lot of noise and distractions within a photograph or image, rather than looking at language and the personality of typography.” The power of the image within fashion and beauty advertisements seems that the offer of a more fulfilled lifestyle is more powerful than the use of text. If this is true it seems to reflect why it was difficult to find slogans and language next to fashion advertisements and why a lot of adverts mainly use the image as the main communication of the brand product rather than language to offer a more fulfilled life or as an everyday use.
However as the increase of the audiences vote from the language figures compared to the image investigation proved that the offer of a more fulfilled life for the Loreal advert proved that the audience would rather buy into the product if they could see the offer of a more fulfilled life as an image which uses techniques which Bullmore stated that (1996: 54): “Of all the time-honoured accusations levelled at advertising, it’s refusal to reflect a true picture of the real world is one of the most familiar. It is, we are told, a failure to face up to reality.” Proves that the audience would rather buy into product more with the image to show a more fulfilled life compared to Beautifulmeme’s (Appendix 1) statement that, “images there is a lot of noise and distractions within a photograph or image, rather than looking at language and the personality of typography”, which works better for brands advertising for its product the be advertised for the products everyday purpose.
The costings for each advert would vary as Loreal uses a celebrity instead of Toni & Guys professional model for the adverts but both brands have chosen these decisions to communicate their brand to different market audiences. For both of the image and language investigations, the target audience of 18-25 females choose Toni & Guy both times to buy into the hair product rather than the more fulfilled Loreal advert. From this investigation, it seems that within selling hair products females aged 18-25 are more likely to buy into the brand offering the brand as an everyday use. This argues against the dissertation question, whether or not a more fulfilled lifestyle is a good marketing technique compared to an offer as the brand as an everyday use product. This investigation was only for hair products so for other products or brands the use of a more fulfilled lifestyle may increase or decrease depending on the subject. The majority of the votes went in the favour of Toni & Guy advert agrees with Bullmore “It is, we are told, a failure to face up to reality. “and the reality of the audience can see themselves as the using the more everyday attainable hairstyle shown in Toni & Guy’s advert rather than the more luxurious, more sculptured hairstyle used for the Loreal advert.
Chapter 3: Needs Must
Fashion brands and advertisers create these personalities and characters to show hyper-reality and offer their brands as a more fulfilled life, but from a consumers perspective why would they want to buy into hyper-reality and not just buy a product for the practical everyday purpose of the product.
Don Slater, a therorist on consumer desicions within advertsing, talks about the different social groups formed around different cultural backgrounds, different values and priorities stated that (1997 :57) “Consequential issues about how social resources are allocated between different social groups and to debates between social groups about values, priorities and power.” This idea of creating hierachies between values and priorties composes different social groups and individuals to lead to different needs. Different social groups have different needs. Needs are branded for targeted for specific individual/ groups. The variations of groups varies the needs more for necessities and luxuories. From identifying specific audiences advertisers can then choose the personality of the brand and deliver the commuincation of the advert to specific medias for the audience. As from the research into fashion advertisng the offer of a more fulfilled life appears in most adverts which from Slater’s statement (1997 :57) .“Consequential issues about how social resources are allocated between different social groups and to debates between social groups about values, priorities and power” it means that these adverts are aimed to a specific social group who value their needs for fashion more than other social groups. Another veiw about the catergorization of the consumer comes from Costantino (1998 :22) who states “in order to market clothing in volume, groups of consumers with similar needs and wants have to be identified and supplied with similar products”. Both statements, Costantino and Slater agree that catergorization takes place within social groups and fashion designers will then standardize garments to fit the needs of identified groups
Costantino (1998 :24) also states that, “at any one time, location, occupation, economic circumstances and social class” varies within the catergorization. “Clothing reflects our professional status and also indicates that we belong to a particular occupational group”. (1998 :25) Within the current resession, the jobs within manual and technical skilled jobs would have changed which would be a factor to certain brands who have had to think of new stratergies to target their desired markets or move into other sectors of the market. The target market is an essential for brands to identify who they want to target. An interesting paragraph from Costantino (1998 :27) discusses the different division of income classes. It seems that the more luxurious brands within fashion are the more likely it to offer the more fulfilled life. “Fashionable clothing thus became something of a status symbol rather than the expression of good taste, and consequently many consumers demonstrated their financial success by buying and wearing expensive clothing” Costantino (1998 :27). This point from Costantino that people buy into the brand because of the status symbol doesn’t need to be backed by anyone’s financial status, because if it was only a few items compared to a wardrobe it wounldt cost as much. It depends what brand is classed as a “status symbol” Costantino talks about. If it is the more luxurious fashion brands such as Gucci from chapter one, then the audience is for young professionals and the bussiness market it would disagree with the “financial success” of anyone because the adverts were found within Men’s Health magazine and Red magazine which is aimed at a range of different working classes. Costantino mentions that fashion becomes a “status symbol rather than the expression of good taste” which makes sense due to different adverts, as advertising the product as a status symbol – more fulfilled life rather than the expression of good taste – advertising the product for practicality and taste. This then creates social categories one for status symbol and the other for good taste.
Andy Park (appendix 2) creative director of Coolpink, Leeds was interevied to find out his views about adding lifestyle to a brand to sell a product. The first question asked was are there any brands you have worked for that have asked not to add lifestyle to the product and have marketed the product for the functionality of the everyday use of the brand? Park (appendix 2) stated “Smeg company, asked for just the product as they dont do lifestyles. Their point was if the product is drop dead gorgeous, why would you need to add an extra value to the brand?” It is pretty much similar to Apple, if the product can do the advertising why would want to add lifestyle to the product, although Apple advertise with hands to show the functionality of the product, they don’t show characters or peoples faces within the advertisiements offering a morefulfilled lifestyle. It seems that Apple are at the end of the scale by producing adverts that show the product in its context and the futher away from apple adverts the more lifestyle is added to the brand. What be interesting is if Apple did add lifestyle to their brand and see whether or not they were succesful than showing the product as its functionality.
Park (appendix 2) then stated that “the reason for why fragrance brands add lifestyle to the product is because they are familiar with the lifestyle of the brand and make social connections with the models in the adverts”. This supports Bergers (1972: 47) theory ,”Men look at women” as the third person and relate to the models used within the adverts. Comparing Apple’s advertising to the fashion industries advertsing, they both are advertising for two different purposes, one being a machine and the other for a human to ware. The idea for using just a product on it’s own is mainly due to the fact it is a machine which the functionality of everyday use becomes the focus of the advert, but within fashion advertising the product has to relate and communicate to the audience as it is made for human’s to ware, this then needs a model to ware the product to show the product in context, and by using a model this creates decisions for which model to use within the advert and what social group is the product aimed towards.
“Despite the populist turn in analyses of consumer culture some of the questions raised by the critical theorists such as “how to discriminate between culture values”. “how we should live.”, it can be argued have not actually been supersede, but have merely been put aside” (Featherstone 1991/ viii)
“We come to most of our decisions in this country as a result of what has been called “the principle of competitive persuasion”. Bullmore (1996: 12)
However, due to the resseion and the decrease within jobs, are consumers still happy to spend money into brands offering hyper-reality, and if so what are the techniques used to stage reality tp still offer
Conclusions
Bibliography
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Appendix 1
Commuincation within advertsing, November 2011, Leeds College of Art. Beautifulmeme
“Within our design team it consists of a copywriter and a designer who produced adverts and branding based around the use of language and text, because if we use images there is a lot of noise and distractions within a photograph or image, rather than looking at language and the personality of typography.”
Appendix 2
Language for advertising, January 2012, Leeds College of Art, Andy Parks
Why is it important for fragrence brands to add a lifestyle to thier product so that audiences realte and buy into the product?
“the reason for why fragrance brands add lifestyle to the product is because they are familiar with the lifestyle of the brand and make social connections with the models in the adverts”.
Are there any brands you have worked for that have asked not to add lifestyle to the product and have marketed the product for the functionality of the everyday use of the brand?
“Smeg company, asked for just the product as they don’t do lifestyles. Their point was if the product is drop dead gorgous, why would you need to add an extra value to the brand?”
Images
Figure 1.
Figure 2.
Figure 3. Beuatiful meme
Figure 4.
Figure 5. Figure.6
Figure. 7
BA (Hons.) Graphic Design
Word Count
Date of completion
“What range of techniques do advertisers use to manipulate consumers to buy into products they don’t necessarily need through an offer of a more fulfilled life, and why?”
“During the current econimical climate (reccesion 2012), would consumers rather buy into a brand for the purpose and functionality shown within its adverts, or would consumers still buy into brands using hyper reality techniques to offer a more fulfilled life?”
Contents
Introduction……………………………………………………………………….…03
Analyse adverts using Hyper-reality…………………………………………….…..04
Case Study: Hyper-reality or funtion……………………………………….……….08
Needs Must…………………………………………………………………………..12
Conclusion……………………………………………………………………….…..15
Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………17
Appendix……………………………………………………………………………..18
Images………………………………………………………………………………..19
Introduction
This dissertation is to find out if the offer of a more fulfilled life is still a successful medium to sell products to audiences, which are advertised for more luxuries not necessities. The quote above from Jeremy Bullmore argues the decisions the marketing team decides to market certain products as hyper-reality and not facing up to the product in it’s purpose/ context to reality, “Of all the time-honoured accusations levelled at advertising, it’s refusal to reflect a true picture of the real world is one of the most familiar. It is, we are told, a failure to face up to reality.” Bullmore (1996: 54) . From looking at advertisements it is clear that hyper-reality is used to target all ages/ backgrounds as offering a more fulfilled lifestyle rather than showing the reality of the product. This dissertation will focus on the principles of advertising for 18- 25 year old males and females to find out is the strategy of marketing brands and products as hyper-reality more successful rather than reality of the purpose of the product. I will focus the dissertation on the 18-25 year olds audience within Britain because I fall into this age category and can relate to part of my design practice.
The dissertation will argue wether or not a modern audience (2011) would rather buy into the offer of a more fulfilled lifestyle, such as adverts offering to sell a product using hyper-reality, an artificial simiulation used within advertising without any real reality. Guy Debord a French theorist of hyper reality stated (Debor: 1997) “A media and conumer society organized around the production and consumption of images, commodities, and staged events.” The term “stage events” Debord mentions is the techniques used to offer of a more fulfilled lifestyle within advertising that covers up reality with staged reality. The argument is, within this current econimical climate (recession) would the consumer rather buy the product for the practical purposes rather than buying into the product or brand through false hyper-reality within it’s advertsing.
The areas the dissertation will to investigate is how do marketing teams use hyper-reality to sell brands and products offering a more fulfilled life/lifestyle within advertising. Also to find out if the target audience would rather buy the product as an offer of a more fulfilled life or the product for being advertised for the context of everyday living.
Chapter 1: An analytical breakdown of two adverts from the same brand aimed at a male/ female audience to understand the power of offering a more fulfilled life using hyper reality.
Hyper-reality is more often found to be used for the use of brands offering their products as more luxiouris rather than everyday products such as neccesities. Hyper-reality has been such a powerful technique used within fashion marketing, espicially for the high street brands who stage events of reality to offer a product to the consumer. One of the main techniques of hyper-reality is the idea of being sexually desirable. John Berger stated (1972: 144), “Publicity increasingly uses sexuality is never free in itself; it is a symbol for something presumed to be larger than it; the good life in which you can buy whatever you want. To be able to buy is the same thing as being sexually desirable… Usually it is the implicit message, if you are able to buy this product you will be loveable. If you cannot buy it, you will be less lovable.” The reward of feeling more loveable if consumers were to buy into the brands products is a poweful staged reality, this first chapter will analyse the strengths of the techniques used to offer hyper-reality in advertisng to understand why consumers would want to buy into this staged lifestyle.
The best starting point to this dissertation is to analytically summarise two magazine adverts aimed at the 18 – 25 years of age audience to find out what techniques the adverts use to offer a more fulfilled life. Looking through articles and magazines to find a set of adverts aimed at male and female audiences, high street fashion brands (luxuries), offer the promise of a more fulfilled life more than adverts advertising cheaper fashion brands such as George - Asda which still offers the same functionality but not the same lifestyle through hyper-reality. This will be a fair investigation because the choosen brand markets two similar products, one towards a male audience and the other at a female audience. The two adverts found were marketing Gucci fragrances (figure.1. – male & figure.2.- female targeted audiences). They were found within the same magazine which makes it a fair test due to the date they were designed and published (2011), so the same techniques and culture would be similar to each other rather than analysing a male advert from the 70’s to a female advert from 2011 which would use different culture and language within the adverts.
The first advert aimed at the male audience (figure.1.) uses a direct gaze of the male, where he looks out of frame directly to the male audience viewing the magazine. The male advert also has another gaze of the female who uses an intra-diegetic gaze where her focus is looking up to the male. An intra-diegetic gaze is where a character gazes upon another character in the text or gazes upon an object within a text. Quoted from Berger (1972: 47),” Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at” which defiantly applies to this advert, as the male audience would instantly look towards the female and read her body language, this would give the audience the idea of how much power this male has within the advert. Thinking back to the initial question of “the offer of a more fulfilled life”, the brand is trying to sell the product as a certain character/ personality regarding the idea if you wore this product, this is the lifestyle you could purchase. Although the males direct gaze is strong, the appearance and body language of the female’s intra-diegetic gaze is just important to gain the male’s attention, which supports the quote from Berger (1972: 47),“women watch themselves being looked at”. This consequently offers the women audience the promise of a more fulfilled lifestyle of being loved by a male without being sold a product.
However within the other advert aimed at a female audience (figure.2), the gazes used are a lot different from the male targeted advert. The roles of the male and female have been switched. This time the female gazes directly towards the audience and the male uses the inter-dietetic gaze. Although these gazes of the male and female have been switched for different audiences, Berger’s (1972: 47) statement, ”Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at”, still applies to the female advert (fig.2). The female audience again would look into the direct gaze of the female because of the strong eye contact looking towards the viewer, and the males would also look towards the female because of her seductive body and facial composition. Although the purposes of both adverts are to sell the fragrances, they both use powerful imagery that stands out to be more of a focus of the brand lifestyle rather than the product itself. The statement by Berger applies to these adverts as the spectator relates to the staged situation of the role models and becomes part of the advertisment which leads to buy into the brand because of the hyper-reality used to offer a more “loveable” life.
The series of gazes are very similar, because both gazes being used in each advert are switched for the different gender audience but what is different between the gazes are the different body languages used within the roles of the male and female. The female intra-dietetic gaze in the male target audience advert, looks up towards the male, but in the female advert the male intra-dietetic gaze doesn’t look at the female because of his eyes being shut, so the use of the eyes is an important sign to the audience to communicate the message of the power and the gazes being used to sell Gucci.
Within both of the Gucci adverts, the female gaze offers a strong visual representation of fetishistic and voyeuristic pleasure. "In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness" Toland (1997: 226). Both in the male and female-targeted adverts, the female gaze of her eye positioning and body language suggest a sexual connotation due to her composition and actions in the advert. The male gaze supports the idea of fetishistic and voyeuristic pleasure but his gaze and body language isn’t as strong as the females. This supports Toland’s statement that the woman offers a strong role woman displayed for visual and erotic impact but also supports the idea from Berger (1972: 47) that ”Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at”. The males gaze is important to sell the fragences of Gucci, his gaze become a commodity to sell a product through the thought of being someone else. In the male advert the male audience would look into the males eyes and think about the females body positioning looking into his eyes as if the viewer has now become part of the advert where the female is seductively looking into his eyes. The females (fig.2) gaze becomes a commodity to women to be in her position with a male next to them, feeling loved. Laura Mulvey, a theorist about the different roles and techniques used within film and advertisements stated, “I was interested in the relationship between the image of the woman on the screen and the “masculinisation” of the spectator position, regardless of the actual sex (or possible deviance) of any real live movie-goer. In built patterns of pleasure and identification impose masculinity as a point of view; a point of view which is also manifest in the general use of masculinity third person.” (1989: 29) Both adverts are visually strong with the purpose to sell a more fulfilled life. Both have used the concept of creating the interaction through the third person to relate to the actions of the male and female used within the adverts. Mulvey’s quote indicates that the woman sells the product to a masculine audience but it also applies to a female audience who look at her sharing similar aspirations of the perfect life.
The angles of the photo shoot are important to capture what the brand wants to communicate to their audience. The idea offering a more fulfilled life has to show some form of reality so that the advert can relate to the audience and interact with the advert as the third person. “Publicity increasingly uses sexuality is never free in itself; it is a symbol for something presumed to be larger than it; the good life in which you can buy whatever you want. To be able to buy is the same thing as being sexually desirable… Usually it is the implicit message, if you are able to buy this product you will be loveable. If you cannot buy it, you will be less lovable.” Berger (1972/ 144) The competition for advertisers using techniques to sell brands for a more fulfilled loveable lifestyle has created such competition to push the boundaries to become more extreme within the adverts using hyper-reality to relate to the audience, but as Berger (1972/ 144) stated that, “If you cannot buy it, you will be less lovable.” This applies to both figure 1 & 2 that if you buy into this brand (Gucci), you will feel more loved than if you didn’t buy into the brand you would feel less loved due to becoming part of the adverts as a third person spectator. This competition for brands offering hyper-reality then increases because the target audience wouldnt be able to afford to buy into all fashion brands offering more fulfilled life as the cost would be to much, so this then becomes a selection process for the brands offering a more fulfilled life they want to buy into.
These connotations regarding visual voyeuristic and fetishistic pleasure support the idea of being in the males/ female’s position within the advert to sell the product Gucci, as an offer to a more fulfilled life, through buying the product. The use of the gaze and image within the two adverts are important elements to sell the brand as a commodity to it’s target market of 18-25 year olds. The male advertisements uses the males gazes as if he was the audience/ the male viewing the advert, and applies the thought used with voyeuristic and fetishistic scopophilia from the female model, to sell the product using the sex sells motto. Scopophilia is a sexual desire for looking at photographs or objects that suggest erotic signs. This idea that sex is a powerful medium to sell brands is supported by Tess Alps, a theorist into American advertising who states (Alps: 2005) “so sex certainly sells media products, and it can work for others, where permitted”However in the male advertisement the woman’s actions, behavior and glamour connect to a female audience “who gaze at other women” to want to be this woman in the advert. The female advert (fig.2) the techniques of voyeuristic and fetishistic scopophilia actions from the female model grabs the attention of the males attention the look towards the female but also the female audience would look at the female for the glamour and voyeuristic, fetishistic actions to be in her position and her hyper-reality.
As long as the adverts are aimed firstly for a masculine audience it seems this competition would increase the boundaries to push the voyeuristic and fetishistic scopophilia techniques of the female gaze to sell the brand as a lifestyle to the audience as the third person.
Chapter 2– Case study: Language within adverts vs. images used within adverts
After the first chapter critical analyzing two adverts for the same brand aimed at a male and female audience of 18-25 years old through the use of imagery, this chapter concentrate on text and language being used within adverts to support and sell a product. During researching into advertisements for fashion and fragrance brands, the language used in adverts is used persuade audiences into buying products they don’t necessarily need through the promise of a more fulfilled life. Copywriter from design firm Beautyfulmeme (Leeds) (Appendix 1) stated that, “within our design team it consists of a copywriter (being himself) and a designer who produced adverts and branding based around the use of language and text, because if we use images there is a lot of noise and distractions within a photograph or image, rather than looking at language and the personality of typography.” The point that Beatifulmeme states that image has too many distractions within advertising restricts the design team to just use text and language to communicate the product which would make a good investigation into how powerful type by itself is.
Chapter two is to investigate the use of text and language being used in two adverts selling similar products but from two different brands, this would use two different brands selling the similar product but through different marketing techniques and offering different personalities and character through their branding. It is important that both adverts are aimed at 18-25 year olds but one brand offering the product to an everyday audience and the other offering to sell the product through the promise of a more fulfilled life.
To make the investigation as fair as possible the two adverts chosen are selling for the same gender audience, aimed at 18-25 but both brands trying to sell a similar product. Two adverts selling fashion ware such as jeans or perfumes to a female audience would have been good to use for this investigation into the language used as these offer to sell brands as both, a more fulfilled life/ lifestyle and also selling products for what the product actually is produced for. Instead the chosen two brands are selling hair products one being Loreal and the other Toni & Guy. The Loreal advert uses the language, (fig.6) “Hold it, Glam it, Don’t party without it.” (This being the advert suggesting a more fulfilled lifestyle due to the idea of this hair product is used for nights out, or going to parties). The other brand Toni & Guy used a mathematical equation concept of replacing the algebra with words describing the product,” (Suede Tassels – Fancy a cuppa) & (Sea Salt texturing spray - finger twirling)” (fig.5), this suggesting to sell the product as an everyday product rather than offering an everyday lifestyle, this referring to the use of everyday language such as “fancy a cuppa”.
The language used within the two adverts use different techniques. The loreal Advert (fig.6) uses short sharp buzzwords such as, “Hold”, “Glam” & “Don’t” which are all actions that can relate to the audience. The repetition of the word “it” suggests the brand is referring to the hair spray and creates a really short memorable slogan. The idea of “Glam” referring to glamour and “Party” suggests the slogan is aimed at a more exclusive, professional audience. Toni & Guy (fig.5) use the content of their algebra slogan to replace numbers with an equation with the language of a more everyday purpose such as “Fancy a Cuppa” and a natural product with the words “Sea Salt” which creates a more organic feel for the brand.
To make this investigation fair the chosen texts from the adverts were wrote on the same piece of paper using the same colour font to take away any influences of font choice, and to ask the target audience of 18-25 females which hair product would they most likely buy into only looking at the two phrases and not the image to support them in the advert or the brand name (figure.). I hope to find out what the target audience of 18-25 females would rather buy, the everyday hair product or the hair product trying to sell the product as a lifestyle just from the restrictions of language used and question Beautifulmeme (appendix 1) how important the use of copy text is within adverts and trying to sell brands through his stated method.
Twenty females aged between 18 – 25, years of age were asked on Saturday (7th January, 2012) afternoon on The Headrow Road, Leeds city centre (geographical location) to find out which hair spray product they would rather buy. Sixteen out of twenty females said they would prefer to buy the Toni & Guy hair product,” (Suede Tassels – Fancy a cuppa) & (Sea Salt texturing spray - finger twirling)” and the remaining four females said they would buy the Loreal hair product “Hold it, Glam it, Don’t party without it.” Ideal lifestyle- loreal party glamour rather everyday use. Bullmore (1996: 54): “Of all the time-honoured accusations levelled at advertising, it’s refusal to reflect a true picture of the real world is one of the most familiar. It is, we are told, a failure to face up to reality.” As Bullmore stated to face up to reality, this investigation of the use of language show the statistics that offer a more fulfilled life (Loreal advert) has shown less of it’s target audience would rather buy into the product due to the language use than Toni & Guy’s advertising the product on an everyday use. The brand Toni & Guy relates to their audience as the suggestion of everyday living, which from the investigation argues that the use of a more fulfilled lifestyle within language gains a smaller section of it’s target audience compared to offering the product as an everyday use. This then questions the investigation of the dissertation whether or not people would rather buy into hyper-reality or more practical adverts offering the product as an everyday use.
As part as the same investigation to see how important the elements are within selling brand products as a more fulfilled life, I showed the same participants the two adverts as images and marked out the text and brand logos to see which hair product they would then buy by just looking at the images of the two adverts to question Beautifulmeme’s stance that text is more effective than image within advertising. Eleven from the twenty said they would buy the Toni & Guy hair product and the remaining nine said they would buy the Loreal hair product.From the statistics is seems that for a brand offering a more fulfilled life the image is more important to use rather than the language, and for the purpose of advertsisng as the product being sold for it’s everyday purpose the text is just as important as the image. These findings are quite interesting to question why people would choose the everyday product. “Publicity increasingly uses sexuality is never free in itself; it is a symbol for something presumed to be larger than it; the good life in which you can buy whatever you want. To be able to buy is the same thing as being sexually desirable… Usually it is the implicit message, If you are able to buy this product you will be loveable. If you cannot buy it, you will be less lovable.” Berger (1972/ 144) The image however of the Loreal advert offers the more fulfilled life, buy choosing the model Cheryl Cole as a familiar celebrity who tends to live a luxurious lifestyle and is a public role model to many of it’s 18-25 years old target audience which adds value to the brand, rather than the a less known public figure model used within the Toni & Guy figure who represents the brand as an everyday person, and the statistics of the text and image investigations support this.
The statistics of the image showing the different personalities and characteristics of the brand compared to the language used disagrees with (Appendix 1) statement of, “within our design team it consists of a copywriter and a designer who produced adverts and branding based around the use of language and text, because if we use images there is a lot of noise and distractions within a photograph or image, rather than looking at language and the personality of typography.” The power of the image within fashion and beauty advertisements seems that the offer of a more fulfilled lifestyle is more powerful than the use of text. If this is true it seems to reflect why it was difficult to find slogans and language next to fashion advertisements and why a lot of adverts mainly use the image as the main communication of the brand product rather than language to offer a more fulfilled life or as an everyday use.
However as the increase of the audiences vote from the language figures compared to the image investigation proved that the offer of a more fulfilled life for the Loreal advert proved that the audience would rather buy into the product if they could see the offer of a more fulfilled life as an image which uses techniques which Bullmore stated that (1996: 54): “Of all the time-honoured accusations levelled at advertising, it’s refusal to reflect a true picture of the real world is one of the most familiar. It is, we are told, a failure to face up to reality.” Proves that the audience would rather buy into product more with the image to show a more fulfilled life compared to Beautifulmeme’s (Appendix 1) statement that, “images there is a lot of noise and distractions within a photograph or image, rather than looking at language and the personality of typography”, which works better for brands advertising for its product the be advertised for the products everyday purpose.
The costings for each advert would vary as Loreal uses a celebrity instead of Toni & Guys professional model for the adverts but both brands have chosen these decisions to communicate their brand to different market audiences. For both of the image and language investigations, the target audience of 18-25 females choose Toni & Guy both times to buy into the hair product rather than the more fulfilled Loreal advert. From this investigation, it seems that within selling hair products females aged 18-25 are more likely to buy into the brand offering the brand as an everyday use. This argues against the dissertation question, whether or not a more fulfilled lifestyle is a good marketing technique compared to an offer as the brand as an everyday use product. This investigation was only for hair products so for other products or brands the use of a more fulfilled lifestyle may increase or decrease depending on the subject. The majority of the votes went in the favour of Toni & Guy advert agrees with Bullmore “It is, we are told, a failure to face up to reality. “and the reality of the audience can see themselves as the using the more everyday attainable hairstyle shown in Toni & Guy’s advert rather than the more luxurious, more sculptured hairstyle used for the Loreal advert.
Chapter 3: Needs Must
Fashion brands and advertisers create these personalities and characters to show hyper-reality and offer their brands as a more fulfilled life, but from a consumers perspective why would they want to buy into hyper-reality and not just buy a product for the practical everyday purpose of the product.
Don Slater, a therorist on consumer desicions within advertsing, talks about the different social groups formed around different cultural backgrounds, different values and priorities stated that (1997 :57) “Consequential issues about how social resources are allocated between different social groups and to debates between social groups about values, priorities and power.” This idea of creating hierachies between values and priorties composes different social groups and individuals to lead to different needs. Different social groups have different needs. Needs are branded for targeted for specific individual/ groups. The variations of groups varies the needs more for necessities and luxuories. From identifying specific audiences advertisers can then choose the personality of the brand and deliver the commuincation of the advert to specific medias for the audience. As from the research into fashion advertisng the offer of a more fulfilled life appears in most adverts which from Slater’s statement (1997 :57) .“Consequential issues about how social resources are allocated between different social groups and to debates between social groups about values, priorities and power” it means that these adverts are aimed to a specific social group who value their needs for fashion more than other social groups. Another veiw about the catergorization of the consumer comes from Costantino (1998 :22) who states “in order to market clothing in volume, groups of consumers with similar needs and wants have to be identified and supplied with similar products”. Both statements, Costantino and Slater agree that catergorization takes place within social groups and fashion designers will then standardize garments to fit the needs of identified groups
Costantino (1998 :24) also states that, “at any one time, location, occupation, economic circumstances and social class” varies within the catergorization. “Clothing reflects our professional status and also indicates that we belong to a particular occupational group”. (1998 :25) Within the current resession, the jobs within manual and technical skilled jobs would have changed which would be a factor to certain brands who have had to think of new stratergies to target their desired markets or move into other sectors of the market. The target market is an essential for brands to identify who they want to target. An interesting paragraph from Costantino (1998 :27) discusses the different division of income classes. It seems that the more luxurious brands within fashion are the more likely it to offer the more fulfilled life. “Fashionable clothing thus became something of a status symbol rather than the expression of good taste, and consequently many consumers demonstrated their financial success by buying and wearing expensive clothing” Costantino (1998 :27). This point from Costantino that people buy into the brand because of the status symbol doesn’t need to be backed by anyone’s financial status, because if it was only a few items compared to a wardrobe it wounldt cost as much. It depends what brand is classed as a “status symbol” Costantino talks about. If it is the more luxurious fashion brands such as Gucci from chapter one, then the audience is for young professionals and the bussiness market it would disagree with the “financial success” of anyone because the adverts were found within Men’s Health magazine and Red magazine which is aimed at a range of different working classes. Costantino mentions that fashion becomes a “status symbol rather than the expression of good taste” which makes sense due to different adverts, as advertising the product as a status symbol – more fulfilled life rather than the expression of good taste – advertising the product for practicality and taste. This then creates social categories one for status symbol and the other for good taste.
Andy Park (appendix 2) creative director of Coolpink, Leeds was interevied to find out his views about adding lifestyle to a brand to sell a product. The first question asked was are there any brands you have worked for that have asked not to add lifestyle to the product and have marketed the product for the functionality of the everyday use of the brand? Park (appendix 2) stated “Smeg company, asked for just the product as they dont do lifestyles. Their point was if the product is drop dead gorgeous, why would you need to add an extra value to the brand?” It is pretty much similar to Apple, if the product can do the advertising why would want to add lifestyle to the product, although Apple advertise with hands to show the functionality of the product, they don’t show characters or peoples faces within the advertisiements offering a morefulfilled lifestyle. It seems that Apple are at the end of the scale by producing adverts that show the product in its context and the futher away from apple adverts the more lifestyle is added to the brand. What be interesting is if Apple did add lifestyle to their brand and see whether or not they were succesful than showing the product as its functionality.
Park (appendix 2) then stated that “the reason for why fragrance brands add lifestyle to the product is because they are familiar with the lifestyle of the brand and make social connections with the models in the adverts”. This supports Bergers (1972: 47) theory ,”Men look at women” as the third person and relate to the models used within the adverts. Comparing Apple’s advertising to the fashion industries advertsing, they both are advertising for two different purposes, one being a machine and the other for a human to ware. The idea for using just a product on it’s own is mainly due to the fact it is a machine which the functionality of everyday use becomes the focus of the advert, but within fashion advertising the product has to relate and communicate to the audience as it is made for human’s to ware, this then needs a model to ware the product to show the product in context, and by using a model this creates decisions for which model to use within the advert and what social group is the product aimed towards.
“Despite the populist turn in analyses of consumer culture some of the questions raised by the critical theorists such as “how to discriminate between culture values”. “how we should live.”, it can be argued have not actually been supersede, but have merely been put aside” (Featherstone 1991/ viii)
“We come to most of our decisions in this country as a result of what has been called “the principle of competitive persuasion”. Bullmore (1996: 12)
However, due to the resseion and the decrease within jobs, are consumers still happy to spend money into brands offering hyper-reality, and if so what are the techniques used to stage reality tp still offer
Conclusions
Bibliography
Armstron, S (1997) Advertising on The Internet, London : Konan Page
Turow, J (2009) The Advertising And Consumer Culture Reader, New York: Routledge
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Mulvey, L. (1996) Fetishism and Curiosity, London : British Film Institute
Toland Frith, K. (1997) Undressing The Ad, New York : Peter Lang Publications
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Nava, M (1997) Buy This Book Studies in Advertising And Consumption, Oxon: Routledge
Bullmore, J (1991) More Bull More, Oxfordshire: World Advertising Research Center
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Goddard, A (1998) The Language of Advertising, London: Routeledge
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Kellner, D (2003) Media Spectale, London: Routeledge
Alps, T, 2005, Sex Sells when it’s allowed to, that is [Online Article] London. The Guardian. Available through: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2005/jan/31/mondaymediasection8 [accessed 31/01/2012]
Appendix 1
Commuincation within advertsing, November 2011, Leeds College of Art. Beautifulmeme
“Within our design team it consists of a copywriter and a designer who produced adverts and branding based around the use of language and text, because if we use images there is a lot of noise and distractions within a photograph or image, rather than looking at language and the personality of typography.”
Appendix 2
Language for advertising, January 2012, Leeds College of Art, Andy Parks
Why is it important for fragrence brands to add a lifestyle to thier product so that audiences realte and buy into the product?
“the reason for why fragrance brands add lifestyle to the product is because they are familiar with the lifestyle of the brand and make social connections with the models in the adverts”.
Are there any brands you have worked for that have asked not to add lifestyle to the product and have marketed the product for the functionality of the everyday use of the brand?
“Smeg company, asked for just the product as they don’t do lifestyles. Their point was if the product is drop dead gorgous, why would you need to add an extra value to the brand?”
Images
Figure 1.
Figure 2.
Figure 3. Beuatiful meme
Figure 4.
Figure 5. Figure.6
Figure. 7
Saturday 28 January 2012
Type
Experimenting with type and textures. The card was going to say Happy Birthday but I haven't had time to finish it yet. I think for the business card the colours would need to be consider better if the letters are different fonts.
Identity
Identity for myself, looking at using my favourite typeface, Futura but stretching it deliberately to make the text look tall and thin to represent my as a person. I like the landscape business card but the contact details don't fit on too well. I could put the text on the back and just have the name on the front, but If I do this I won't be able to gloss the name.
Thursday 26 January 2012
Brief 3: P.O.D D&AD
Brief
We want to make it impossible for anyone to ignore Peace Day. We want to make it a day that everyone around the world engages with, so that governments and leaders in conflict zones have no other choice but to implement it. The task is to grow grassroots awareness and active personal engagement with Peace Day, to make this day ubiquitous and as part of our social fabric as Valentine’s Day or Mother’s Day.
Background / Considerations
Ultimately we want global mobilization behind POD’s efforts. But in order to seed a collaborative movement, we need to call on the change-makers among us: those who believe in actions rather than symbols, in the practical rather than the theoretical. Those who enjoy getting their hands
dirty and believe in the power of individual actions to build a greater future.
Be a creative activist. We are looking for a behavior changing campaign that works beyond media and across cultural, political and denominational frontiers. Collaboration is key to Peace Day and should be key to your solution. We want to see ideas that happen and the recognition that the ability to make them happen may not rest entirely in your hands.
Consider carefully how you present your ideas to the judges, the execution of them, and the way that they were realized.
Mandatory Requirements Deliverables
Peace One Day logo
The date: ‘Peace Day – 21 September’
www.peaceoneday.org
Upload a presentation film of your work (max 2 mins). You may also upload supporting images and/or post supporting objects and/or upload a zip folder of supporting interactive work.
Or
Upload images of your work. You may also post supporting objects and/ or upload a zip folder of supporting interactive work.
Studio Deadline Module Deadline
Friday 9 March 2012.
We want to make it impossible for anyone to ignore Peace Day. We want to make it a day that everyone around the world engages with, so that governments and leaders in conflict zones have no other choice but to implement it. The task is to grow grassroots awareness and active personal engagement with Peace Day, to make this day ubiquitous and as part of our social fabric as Valentine’s Day or Mother’s Day.
Background / Considerations
Ultimately we want global mobilization behind POD’s efforts. But in order to seed a collaborative movement, we need to call on the change-makers among us: those who believe in actions rather than symbols, in the practical rather than the theoretical. Those who enjoy getting their hands
dirty and believe in the power of individual actions to build a greater future.
Be a creative activist. We are looking for a behavior changing campaign that works beyond media and across cultural, political and denominational frontiers. Collaboration is key to Peace Day and should be key to your solution. We want to see ideas that happen and the recognition that the ability to make them happen may not rest entirely in your hands.
Consider carefully how you present your ideas to the judges, the execution of them, and the way that they were realized.
Mandatory Requirements Deliverables
Peace One Day logo
The date: ‘Peace Day – 21 September’
www.peaceoneday.org
Upload a presentation film of your work (max 2 mins). You may also upload supporting images and/or post supporting objects and/or upload a zip folder of supporting interactive work.
Or
Upload images of your work. You may also post supporting objects and/ or upload a zip folder of supporting interactive work.
Studio Deadline Module Deadline
Friday 9 March 2012.
Brief 4: Swarovski - YCN
Brief
Swarovski are interested in reaching a new younger audience (20 – 30 year olds) primarily targeting young urban UK females who love their jewellery, like to keep up with the latest trends and fashion, and want to express themselves through their jewellery.
Background / Considerations
The aim of this brief is to take the repositioning of the brand to the next level, concentrating on attracting the next generation of Swarovski fans to our fashion collection. Swarovski is a high end jewelers founded 1895. Swarovski are interested in reaching a new younger audience (20 – 30 year olds) primarily targeting young urban uk females who love their jewellery, like to keep up with the latest trends and fashion, and want to express themselves through their jewellery. You are free to explore all marketing channels, demonstrating the media and environments that you think the target audience will be most receptive to messaging and engagement. You can consider all elements of marketing, Pr, advertising, in-store applications, point of sale, packaging, social media, experiential ideas and everything in between. daniel Swarovski i said: “evolution never ceases. reforms in one area lead to further reforms in other areas. one must, however always be alert to the opportunities”.
Mandatory Requirements Deliverables
Use brand guidelines and the primary colour swatch supplied by Swarovski. Your work should fit within the Swarovski brand identity, and you can find this here – http://ycn.sh/tfzbwr
The deliverables depend on how I resolve the brief and what it
Studio Deadline Module Deadline
Friday 9 March 2012.
Swarovski are interested in reaching a new younger audience (20 – 30 year olds) primarily targeting young urban UK females who love their jewellery, like to keep up with the latest trends and fashion, and want to express themselves through their jewellery.
Background / Considerations
The aim of this brief is to take the repositioning of the brand to the next level, concentrating on attracting the next generation of Swarovski fans to our fashion collection. Swarovski is a high end jewelers founded 1895. Swarovski are interested in reaching a new younger audience (20 – 30 year olds) primarily targeting young urban uk females who love their jewellery, like to keep up with the latest trends and fashion, and want to express themselves through their jewellery. You are free to explore all marketing channels, demonstrating the media and environments that you think the target audience will be most receptive to messaging and engagement. You can consider all elements of marketing, Pr, advertising, in-store applications, point of sale, packaging, social media, experiential ideas and everything in between. daniel Swarovski i said: “evolution never ceases. reforms in one area lead to further reforms in other areas. one must, however always be alert to the opportunities”.
Mandatory Requirements Deliverables
Use brand guidelines and the primary colour swatch supplied by Swarovski. Your work should fit within the Swarovski brand identity, and you can find this here – http://ycn.sh/tfzbwr
The deliverables depend on how I resolve the brief and what it
Studio Deadline Module Deadline
Friday 9 March 2012.
Wednesday 25 January 2012
Dissertation so far
Paul Brandreth
Graphic Design Level 6
What range of techniques do advertisers use to manipulate consumers to buy into products they don’t necessarily need through an offer of a more fulfilled life, and why?
“Of all the time-honoured accusations levelled at advertising, it’s refusal to reflect a true picture of the real world is one of the most familiar. It is, we are told, a failure to face up to reality.” Bullmore (1996: 54)
This dissertation is to find out if the offer of a more fulfilled life is a successful medium to sell products to audiences, which are more luxuries not necessities. The quote above from Jeremy Bullmore argues the decisions the marketing team decides to market certain products as hyper-reality and not facing up to the product in it’s purpose/ context to reality. From looking at advertisements it is clear that hyper-reality is used to target all ages/ backgrounds as offering a more fulfilled lifestyle rather than showing the reality of the product. This dissertation will focus on the principles of advertising for 18- 25 year old males and females to find out is the strategy of marketing brands and products as hyper-reality more successful rather than reality of the purpose of the product. I will focus the dissertation on the 18-25 year olds audience within Britain because I fall into this age category and can relate to part of my design practice.
The areas the dissertation will to investigate is how do marketing teams use hyper-reality to sell brands and products offering a more fulfilled life/lifestyle within advertising. Also to find out if the target audience would rather buy the product as an offer of a more fulfilled life or the product for being advertised for the context of everyday living.
Chapter 1: An analytical breakdown of two adverts from the same brand aimed at a male/ female audience to understand the power of offering a more fulfilled life.
“Publicity increasingly uses sexuality is never free in itself; it is a symbol for something presumed to be larger than it; the good life in which you can buy whatever you want. To be able to buy is the same thing as being sexually desirable… Usually it is the implicit message, if you are able to buy this product you will be loveable. If you cannot buy it, you will be less lovable.” Berger (1972/ 144)
The best starting point to this dissertation is to analytically summarise two magazine adverts aimed at the 18 – 25 years of age audience to find out what techniques the adverts use to offer a more fulfilled life. From looking through articles and magazines to find a set of adverts aimed at male and female audiences, fashion, fragrances and watch brands (luxuries), offer the promise of a more fulfilled life more than adverts advertising everyday necessities such as cereals and mobile phone adverts. To make this investigation fair I have chosen to use the same company marketing two products, one towards a male audience and the other at a female audience. The two adverts found were marketing Gucci fragrances (figure.1. – male & figure.2.- female targeted audiences). They were found within the same magazine which makes it a fair test due to the date they were designed and published (2011), so the same techniques and culture would be similar to each other rather than analysing a male advert from the 70’s to a female advert from 2011 which would use different culture and language within the adverts.
The first advert aimed at the male audience (figure.1.) uses a direct gaze of the male, where he looks out of frame directly to the male audience viewing the magazine. The male advert also has another gaze of the female who uses an intra-dietetic gaze where her focus is looking up to the male. Quoted from Berger (1972: 47),” Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at” which defiantly applies to this advert, as the male audience would instantly look towards the female and read her body language, this would give the audience the idea of how much power this male has within the advert. Thinking back to the initial question of “the offer of a more fulfilled life”, the brand is trying to sell the product as a certain character/ personality regarding the idea if you wore this product, this is the lifestyle you could purchase. Although the males direct gaze is strong, the appearance and body language of the female’s intra-dietetic gaze is just important to gain the males attention, which supports the quote from Berger (1972: 47),“women watch themselves being looked at”. This consequently offers the women audience the promise of a more fulfilled lifestyle of being loved by male without being sold a product.
However within the other advert aimed at a female audience (figure.2), the gazes used are a lot different from the male targeted advert. The roles of the male and female have been switched. This time the female gazes directly towards the audience and the male uses the inter-dietetic gaze. Although these gazes of the male and female have been switched for different audiences, Berger’s (1972: 47) statement, ”Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at”, still applies to the female advert (fig.2). The female audience again would look into the direct gaze of the female because of the strong eye contact looking towards the viewer, and the males would also look towards the female because of her seductive body and facial composition. Although the purposes of both adverts are to sell the fragrances, they both use powerful imagery that stands out to be more of a focus of the brand lifestyle rather than the product itself. The statement by Berger applies to these adverts as the adverts offer the lifestyle of the male and female roles to become a more fulfilled life when buying into the Gucci brand.
The series of gazes are very similar, because both gazes being used in each advert are switched for the different gender audience but what is different between the gazes are the different body languages used within the roles of the male and female. The female intra-dietetic gaze in the male target audience advert, looks up towards the male, but in the female advert the male intra-dietetic gaze doesn’t look at the female because of his eyes being shut, so the use of the eyes is an important sign to the audience to communicate the message of the power and the gazes being used to sell Gucci.
Within both of the Gucci adverts, the female gaze offers a strong visual representation of fetishistic and voyeuristic pleasure. "In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness" Toland (1997: 226). Both in the male and female-targeted adverts, the female gaze of her eye positioning and body language suggest a sexual connotation due to her composition and actions in the advert. The male gaze supports the idea of fetishistic and voyeuristic pleasure but his gaze and body language isn’t as strong as the females. This supports Toland’s statement that the woman offers a strong role woman displayed for visual and erotic impact but also supports the idea from Berger (1972: 47) that ”Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at”. The males gaze is important to sell the product/ brand of Gucci, his gaze become a commodity to sell a product through the thought of being someone else. In the male advert the male audience would look into the males eyes and think about the females body positioning looking into his eyes as if the viewer has now become part of the advert where the female is seductively looking into his eyes. The females (fig.2) gaze becomes a commodity to women to be in her position with a male next to them, feeling loved. Laura Mulvey stated, “I was interested in the relationship between the image of the woman on the screen and the “masculinisation” of the spectator position, regardless of the actual sex (or possible deviance) of any real live movie-goer. In built patterns of pleasure and identification impose masculinity as a point of view; a point of view which is also manifest in the general use of masculinity third person.” (1989: 29) Both adverts are visually strong with the purpose to sell a more fulfilled life. Both have used the concept of creating the interaction through the third person to relate to the actions of the male and female used within the adverts. Mulvey’s quote indicates that the woman sells the product to a masculine audience but it also applies to a female audience who look at her sharing similar aspirations of the perfect life.
The angles of the photo shoot are important to capture what the brand wants to communicate to their audience. The idea offering a more fulfilled life has to show some form of reality so that the advert can relate to the audience and interact with the advert as the third person. “Publicity increasingly uses sexuality is never free in itself; it is a symbol for something presumed to be larger than it; the good life in which you can buy whatever you want. To be able to buy is the same thing as being sexually desirable… Usually it is the implicit message, if you are able to buy this product you will be loveable. If you cannot buy it, you will be less lovable.” Berger (1972/ 144) The competition for advertisers using techniques to sell brands for a more fulfilled loveable lifestyle has created such competition to push the boundaries to become more extreme within the adverts using hyper-reality to relate to the audience, but as Berger (1972/ 144) stated that, “If you cannot buy it, you will be less lovable.” This then applies to both figure 1 & 2 that if you buy into this brand (Gucci), you will feel more loved than if you didn’t buy into the brand you would feel less loved? This competition for brands offering hyper-reality then increases because the target audience wouldn’t be able to afford to buy into all fashion brands offering more fulfilled life’s as the cost would be to much, so this then becomes a selection process for the brands offering a more fulfilled life they want to buy into.
These connotations regarding visual voyeuristic and fetishistic pleasure support the idea of being in the males/ female’s position within the advert to sell the product Gucci, as an offer to a happier fulfilled life, through buying the product. The use of the gaze and image within the two adverts are important elements to sell the brand as a commodity to it’s target market of 18-25 year olds. The male advertisements uses the males gazes as if he was the audience/ the male viewing the advert, and applies the thought used with voyeuristic and fetishistic scopophilia from the female model, to sell the product using the sex sells motto. However in the male advertisement the woman’s actions, behavior and glamour connect to a female audience “who gaze at other women” to want to be this woman in the advert. The female advert (fig.2) the techniques of voyeuristic and fetishistic scopophilia actions from the female model grabs the attention of the males attention the look towards the female but also the female audience would look at the female for the glamour and voyeuristic, fetishistic actions to be in her position or her hyper-reality more fulfilled life.
As long as the adverts are aimed firstly for a masculine audience it seems this competition would increase the boundaries to push the voyeuristic and fetishistic scopophilia techniques of the female gaze to sell the brand as a lifestyle to the audience as the third person.
Chapter 2– Case study: Language within adverts vs. images used within adverts
After the first chapter critical analyzing two adverts for the same brand aimed at a male and female audience of 18-25 years old through the use of imagery, I have decided to concentrate this next chapter on text and language being used within adverts to support and sell a product. During researching into advertisements for fashion and fragrance brands I have noticed that from the language used in adverts they can persuade audiences into being products they don’t necessarily need through the promise of a more fulfilled life. Copywriter from design firm Beautyfulmeme (Leeds) (Appendix 1) stated that, “within our design team it consists of a copywriter (being himself) and a designer who produced adverts and branding based around the use of language and text, because if we use images there is a lot of noise and distractions within a photograph or image, rather than looking at language and the personality of typography.” The point that Beatifulmeme states that image has too many distractions within advertising restricts the design team to just use text and language to communicate the product which would make a good investigation into how powerful type by itself is.
The first chapter was dedicated to the use of the gaze to sell the Gucci fragrances to offer a more fulfilled life, chapter two is to investigate the use of text and language being used in two adverts selling similar products but from two different brands, this would use two different brands selling the similar product but through different marketing techniques and offering different personalities and character through their branding. It is important that both adverts are aimed at 18-25 year olds but one brand offering the product to an everyday audience and the other offering to sell the product through the promise of a more fulfilled life.
To make the investigation as fair as possible I wanted to find two adverts selling for the same gender audience, aimed at 18-25 but both brands trying to sell a similar product. Two adverts selling fashion ware such as jeans or perfumes to a female audience would have been good to use for this investigation into the language used as these offer to sell brands as both, a more fulfilled life/ lifestyle and also selling products for what the product actually is produced for. Instead I’ve found two brands selling hair products one being Loreal and the other Toni & Guy. The Loreal advert uses the language, “Hold it, Glam it, Don’t party without it.” (This being the advert suggesting a more fulfilled lifestyle due to the idea of this hair product is used for nights out, or going to parties). The other brand Toni & Guy used a mathematical equation concept of replacing the algebra with words describing the product,” (Suede Tassels – Fancy a cuppa) & (Sea Salt texturing spray - finger twirling)” this suggesting to sell the product as an everyday product rather than offering an everyday lifestyle, this referring to the use of everyday language such as “fancy a cuppa”.
The language used within the two adverts use different techniques. The loreal Advert (fig.7) uses short sharp buzzwords such as, “Hold”, “Glam” & “Don’t” which are all actions that can relate to the audience. The repetition of the word “it” suggests the brand is refereeing to the hair spray and creates a really short memorable slogan. The idea of “Glam” referring to glamour and “Party” suggests the slogan is aimed at a more exclusive, professional audience. Toni & Guy use the content of their algebra slogan to replace numbers with an equation with the language of a more everyday purpose such as “Fancy a Cuppa” and a natural product with the words “Sea Salt” which creates a more organic feel for the brand.
To make this investigation fair I have decided to write these phrases on the same piece of paper using the same colour font to take away any influences of font choice, and to ask the target audience of 18-25 females which hair product would they most likely buy into buy only looking at the two phrases and not the image to support them in the advert or the brand name (figure.3). I hope to find out what the target audience of 18-25 females would rather buy, the everyday hair product or the hair product trying to sell the product as a lifestyle just from the restrictions of language used and question Beautifulmeme (appendix 1) how important the use of copy text is within adverts and trying to sell brands through his stated method.
I asked twenty females aged between 18 – 25 years of age, on a Saturday (7th January, 2012) afternoon on The Headrow Road, Leeds city centre (geographical location) to find out which hair spray product they would rather buy. Sixteen out of twenty females said they would prefer to buy the Toni & Guy hair product,” (Suede Tassels – Fancy a cuppa) & (Sea Salt texturing spray - finger twirling)” and the remaining four females said they would buy the Loreal hair product “Hold it, Glam it, Don’t party without it.” Ideal lifestyle- loreal party glamour rather everyday use. Bullmore (1996: 54): “Of all the time-honoured accusations levelled at advertising, it’s refusal to reflect a true picture of the real world is one of the most familiar. It is, we are told, a failure to face up to reality.” As Bullmore stated to face up to reality, this investigation of the use of language show the statistics that offer a more fulfilled life (Loreal advert) has shown less of it’s target audience would rather buy into the product due to the language use than Toni & Guy’s advertising the product on an everyday use. The brand Toni & Guy relates to their audience as the suggestion of everyday living, which from the investigation argues that the use of a more fulfilled lifestyle within language gains a smaller section of it’s target audience compared to offering the product as an everyday use. This then questions the investigation of the dissertation whether or not people would rather buy into hyper-reality or more practical adverts offering the product as an everyday use.
As part as the same investigation to see how important the elements are within selling brand products as a more fulfilled life, I showed the same participants the two adverts as images and marked out the text and brand logos to see which hair product they would then buy by just looking at the images of the two adverts to question Beautifulmeme’s stance that text is more effective than image within advertising. Eleven from the twenty said they would buy the Toni & Guy hair product and the remaining nine said they would buy the Loreal hair product.From the statistics is seems that for a brand offering a more fulfilled life the image is more important to use rather than the language, and for the purpose of advertsisng as the product being sold for it’s everyday purpose the text is just as important as the image. These findings are quite interesting to question why people would choose the everyday product. “Publicity increasingly uses sexuality is never free in itself; it is a symbol for something presumed to be larger than it; the good life in which you can buy whatever you want. To be able to buy is the same thing as being sexually desirable… Usually it is the implicit message, If you are able to buy this product you will be loveable. If you cannot buy it, you will be less lovable.” Berger (1972/ 144) The image however of the Loreal advert offers the more fulfilled life, buy choosing the model Cheryl Cole as a familiar celebrity who tends to live a luxurious lifestyle and is a public role model to many of it’s 18-25 years old target audience which adds value to the brand, rather than the a less known public figure model used within the Toni & Guy figure who represents the brand as an everyday person, and the statistics of the text and image investigations support this.
The statistics of the image showing the different personalities and characteristics of the brand compared to the language used disagrees with (Appendix 1) statement of, “within our design team it consists of a copywriter and a designer who produced adverts and branding based around the use of language and text, because if we use images there is a lot of noise and distractions within a photograph or image, rather than looking at language and the personality of typography.” The power of the image within fashion and beauty advertisements seems that the offer of a more fulfilled lifestyle is more powerful than the use of text. If this is true it seems to reflect why it was difficult to find slogans and language next to fashion advertisements and why a lot of adverts mainly use the image as the main communication of the brand product rather than language to offer a more fulfilled life or as an everyday use.
However as the increase of the audiences vote from the language figures compared to the image investigation proved that the offer of a more fulfilled life for the Loreal advert proved that the audience would rather buy into the product if they could see the offer of a more fulfilled life as an image which uses techniques which Bullmore stated that (1996: 54): “Of all the time-honoured accusations levelled at advertising, it’s refusal to reflect a true picture of the real world is one of the most familiar. It is, we are told, a failure to face up to reality.” Proves that the audience would rather buy into product more with the image to show a more fulfilled life compared to Beautifulmeme’s (Appendix 1) statement that, “images there is a lot of noise and distractions within a photograph or image, rather than looking at language and the personality of typography”, which works better for brands advertising for its product the be advertised for the products everyday purpose.
The costings for each advert would vary as Loreal uses a celebrity instead of Toni & Guys professional model for the adverts but both brands have chosen these decisions to communicate their brand to different market audiences. For both of the image and language investigations, the target audience of 18-25 females choose Toni & Guy both times to buy into the hair product rather than the more fulfilled Loreal advert. From this investigation, it seems that within selling hair products females aged 18-25 are more likely to buy into the brand offering the brand as an everyday use. This argues against the dissertation question, whether or not a more fulfilled lifestyle is a good marketing technique compared to an offer as the brand as an everyday use product. I am aware that this investigation was only for hair products so for other products or brands the use of a more fulfilled lifestyle may increase or decrease depending on the subject. My verdict for why the majority of the votes went in the favour of Toni & Guy advert agrees with Bullmore “It is, we are told, a failure to face up to reality. “and the reality of the audience can see themselves as the using the more everyday attainable hairstyle shown in Toni & Guy’s advert rather than the more luxurious, more sculptured hairstyle used for the Loreal advert.
Chapter 3: Needs Must
Fashion brands and advertisers create these personality’s and characters to show hyper-reality and offer their brands as a more fulfilled life, but from a consumers perceptive why would they want to buy into hyper-reality and not just buy a product for the practicle everyday purpose of the product.
A statement from Slater (1997 :57) talks about consumer desicions that realy on the different social groups formed around different cultural backgrounds, created different values and priorities.“Consequential issues about how social resources are allocated between different social groups and to debates between social groups about values, priorities and power.” This idea of creating hierachys between values and priorties composes different social groups and individuals to lead to different needs. Different social groups have different needs. Needs are branded for targeted for specific individual/ groups. The variations of groups varies the needs more for necessities and luxuories. From identifying specific audiences advertisers can then choose the personality of the brand and deliver the commuincation of the advert to specific medias for the audience. As from the research into fashion advertisng the offer of a more fulfilled life appears in most adverts which from Slater’s statement (1997 :57) .“Consequential issues about how social resources are allocated between different social groups and to debates between social groups about values, priorities and power” it means that these adverts are aimed to a specific social group who value their needs for fashion more than other social groups. Another veiw about the catergorization of the consumer comes from Costantino (1998 :22) who states “in order to market clothing in volume, groups of consumers with similar needs and wants have to be identified and supplied with similar products”. Both statements, Costantino and Slater agree that catergorization takes place within social groups and fashion designers will then standardize garments to fit the needs of identified groups
Costantino (1998 :24) also states that, “at any one time, location, occupation, economic circumstances and social class” varies within the catergorization. “Clothing reflects our professional status and also indicates that we belong to a particular occupational group”. (1998 :25) Within the current resession, the jobs within manual and technical skilled jobs would have changed which would be a factor to certain brands who have had to think of new stratergys to target their desired markets or move into other sectors of the market. The target makret is an essential for brands to identify who they want to target. An interesting paragraph from Costantino (1998 :27) discusses the different division of income classes. It seems that the more luxuorios brands within fashion are the more likely it to offer the more fulfilled life. “Fashionable clothing thus became something of a status symbol rather than the expression of good taste, and consequently many consumers demonstrated their financial success by buying and wearing expensive clothing” Costantino (1998 :27). This point from Costantino that people buy into the brand because of the status symbol doesn’t need to be backed by anyones financial status, because if it was only a few items compared to a waredrobe it wounld’t cost as much. It depends what brand is classed as a “status symbol” Costantino talks about. If it is the more luxourios fashion brands such as Gucci from chapter one, then the audience is for young professionals and the bussiness market it would disagree with the “financial success” of anyone because the adverts were found within Mens health magazine and Red magazine which is aimed at a range different working classes. Costantino mentions that fashion becomes a “status symbol rather than the expression of good taste” which makes sense due to different adverts, as advertising the product as a status symbol – more fulfilled life rather than the expression of good taste – advertsing the product for practicality and taste. This then creates social catergories one for status symbol and the other for good taste.
From asking Andy Park (appendix 2) are there any brands you have worked for that have asked not to add lifestyle to the product and have marketed the product for the functionality of the everyday use of the brand? Park (appendix 2) stated “Smeg company, asked for just the product as they don’t do lifestyles. Their point was if the product is drop dead gorgous, why would you need to add an extra value to the brand?” It is pretty much similar to Apple, if the product can do the advertising why would want to add lifestyle to the product, although apple advertise with hands to show the functionality of the product, they don’t show characters or peoples faces within the advertisiements offering a morefulfilled lifestyle. It seems that apple are at the end of the scale by producing adverts that show the product in its context and the futher away from apple adverts the more lifestyle is added to the brand. What be interesting is if Apple did add lifestyle to their brand and see whether or not they were succesful than showing the product as its functionality.
Park (appendix 2) then stated that “the reason for why fragrance brands add lifestyle to the product is because they are familiar with the lifestyle of the brand and make social connections with the models in the adverts”. This supports Bergers (1972: 47) theory ,”Men look at women” as the third person and relate to the models used within the adverts. Comparing Apple’s advertising to the fashion industries advertsing, they both are advertising for two different purposes, one being a machine and the other for a human to ware. The idea for using just a product on it’s own is mainly due to the fact it is a machine which the functionality of everyday use becomes the focus of the advert, but within fashion advertising the product has to relate and commuincate to the audience as it is made for human’s to ware, this then needs a model to ware the product to show the product in context, and by using a model this creates decisions for which model to use within the advert and what social group is the product aimed towards.
“Despite the populist turn in analyses of consumer culture some of the questions raised by the critical theorists such as “how to discriminate between cultures values”. “how we should live.”, it can be argued have not actually been supersede but have merely been put aside” (Featherstone 1991/ viii)
“We come to most of our decisions in this country as a result of what has been called “the principle of competitive persuasion”. Bullmore (1996: 12)
Chapter 4: ?
Conclusions
Bibliography
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Turow, J (2009) The Advertising And Consumer Culture Reader, New York: Routledge
Berger, J. (1972) Ways of Seeing, London: Penguin
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Appendix 1
Commuincation within advertsing, November 2011, Leeds College of Art. Beautifulmeme
“Within our design team it consists of a copywriter and a designer who produced adverts and branding based around the use of language and text, because if we use images there is a lot of noise and distractions within a photograph or image, rather than looking at language and the personality of typography.”
Appendix 2
Language for advertising, January 2012, Leeds College of Art, Andy Parks
Why is it important for fragrence brands to add a lifestyle to thier product so that audiences realte and buy into the product?
“the reason for why fragrance brands add lifestyle to the product is because they are familiar with the lifestyle of the brand and make social connections with the models in the adverts”.
Are there any brands you have worked for that have asked not to add lifestyle to the product and have marketed the product for the functionality of the everyday use of the brand?
“Smeg company, asked for just the product as they don’t do lifestyles. Their point was if the product is drop dead gorgous, why would you need to add an extra value to the brand?”
Graphic Design Level 6
What range of techniques do advertisers use to manipulate consumers to buy into products they don’t necessarily need through an offer of a more fulfilled life, and why?
“Of all the time-honoured accusations levelled at advertising, it’s refusal to reflect a true picture of the real world is one of the most familiar. It is, we are told, a failure to face up to reality.” Bullmore (1996: 54)
This dissertation is to find out if the offer of a more fulfilled life is a successful medium to sell products to audiences, which are more luxuries not necessities. The quote above from Jeremy Bullmore argues the decisions the marketing team decides to market certain products as hyper-reality and not facing up to the product in it’s purpose/ context to reality. From looking at advertisements it is clear that hyper-reality is used to target all ages/ backgrounds as offering a more fulfilled lifestyle rather than showing the reality of the product. This dissertation will focus on the principles of advertising for 18- 25 year old males and females to find out is the strategy of marketing brands and products as hyper-reality more successful rather than reality of the purpose of the product. I will focus the dissertation on the 18-25 year olds audience within Britain because I fall into this age category and can relate to part of my design practice.
The areas the dissertation will to investigate is how do marketing teams use hyper-reality to sell brands and products offering a more fulfilled life/lifestyle within advertising. Also to find out if the target audience would rather buy the product as an offer of a more fulfilled life or the product for being advertised for the context of everyday living.
Chapter 1: An analytical breakdown of two adverts from the same brand aimed at a male/ female audience to understand the power of offering a more fulfilled life.
“Publicity increasingly uses sexuality is never free in itself; it is a symbol for something presumed to be larger than it; the good life in which you can buy whatever you want. To be able to buy is the same thing as being sexually desirable… Usually it is the implicit message, if you are able to buy this product you will be loveable. If you cannot buy it, you will be less lovable.” Berger (1972/ 144)
The best starting point to this dissertation is to analytically summarise two magazine adverts aimed at the 18 – 25 years of age audience to find out what techniques the adverts use to offer a more fulfilled life. From looking through articles and magazines to find a set of adverts aimed at male and female audiences, fashion, fragrances and watch brands (luxuries), offer the promise of a more fulfilled life more than adverts advertising everyday necessities such as cereals and mobile phone adverts. To make this investigation fair I have chosen to use the same company marketing two products, one towards a male audience and the other at a female audience. The two adverts found were marketing Gucci fragrances (figure.1. – male & figure.2.- female targeted audiences). They were found within the same magazine which makes it a fair test due to the date they were designed and published (2011), so the same techniques and culture would be similar to each other rather than analysing a male advert from the 70’s to a female advert from 2011 which would use different culture and language within the adverts.
The first advert aimed at the male audience (figure.1.) uses a direct gaze of the male, where he looks out of frame directly to the male audience viewing the magazine. The male advert also has another gaze of the female who uses an intra-dietetic gaze where her focus is looking up to the male. Quoted from Berger (1972: 47),” Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at” which defiantly applies to this advert, as the male audience would instantly look towards the female and read her body language, this would give the audience the idea of how much power this male has within the advert. Thinking back to the initial question of “the offer of a more fulfilled life”, the brand is trying to sell the product as a certain character/ personality regarding the idea if you wore this product, this is the lifestyle you could purchase. Although the males direct gaze is strong, the appearance and body language of the female’s intra-dietetic gaze is just important to gain the males attention, which supports the quote from Berger (1972: 47),“women watch themselves being looked at”. This consequently offers the women audience the promise of a more fulfilled lifestyle of being loved by male without being sold a product.
However within the other advert aimed at a female audience (figure.2), the gazes used are a lot different from the male targeted advert. The roles of the male and female have been switched. This time the female gazes directly towards the audience and the male uses the inter-dietetic gaze. Although these gazes of the male and female have been switched for different audiences, Berger’s (1972: 47) statement, ”Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at”, still applies to the female advert (fig.2). The female audience again would look into the direct gaze of the female because of the strong eye contact looking towards the viewer, and the males would also look towards the female because of her seductive body and facial composition. Although the purposes of both adverts are to sell the fragrances, they both use powerful imagery that stands out to be more of a focus of the brand lifestyle rather than the product itself. The statement by Berger applies to these adverts as the adverts offer the lifestyle of the male and female roles to become a more fulfilled life when buying into the Gucci brand.
The series of gazes are very similar, because both gazes being used in each advert are switched for the different gender audience but what is different between the gazes are the different body languages used within the roles of the male and female. The female intra-dietetic gaze in the male target audience advert, looks up towards the male, but in the female advert the male intra-dietetic gaze doesn’t look at the female because of his eyes being shut, so the use of the eyes is an important sign to the audience to communicate the message of the power and the gazes being used to sell Gucci.
Within both of the Gucci adverts, the female gaze offers a strong visual representation of fetishistic and voyeuristic pleasure. "In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness" Toland (1997: 226). Both in the male and female-targeted adverts, the female gaze of her eye positioning and body language suggest a sexual connotation due to her composition and actions in the advert. The male gaze supports the idea of fetishistic and voyeuristic pleasure but his gaze and body language isn’t as strong as the females. This supports Toland’s statement that the woman offers a strong role woman displayed for visual and erotic impact but also supports the idea from Berger (1972: 47) that ”Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at”. The males gaze is important to sell the product/ brand of Gucci, his gaze become a commodity to sell a product through the thought of being someone else. In the male advert the male audience would look into the males eyes and think about the females body positioning looking into his eyes as if the viewer has now become part of the advert where the female is seductively looking into his eyes. The females (fig.2) gaze becomes a commodity to women to be in her position with a male next to them, feeling loved. Laura Mulvey stated, “I was interested in the relationship between the image of the woman on the screen and the “masculinisation” of the spectator position, regardless of the actual sex (or possible deviance) of any real live movie-goer. In built patterns of pleasure and identification impose masculinity as a point of view; a point of view which is also manifest in the general use of masculinity third person.” (1989: 29) Both adverts are visually strong with the purpose to sell a more fulfilled life. Both have used the concept of creating the interaction through the third person to relate to the actions of the male and female used within the adverts. Mulvey’s quote indicates that the woman sells the product to a masculine audience but it also applies to a female audience who look at her sharing similar aspirations of the perfect life.
The angles of the photo shoot are important to capture what the brand wants to communicate to their audience. The idea offering a more fulfilled life has to show some form of reality so that the advert can relate to the audience and interact with the advert as the third person. “Publicity increasingly uses sexuality is never free in itself; it is a symbol for something presumed to be larger than it; the good life in which you can buy whatever you want. To be able to buy is the same thing as being sexually desirable… Usually it is the implicit message, if you are able to buy this product you will be loveable. If you cannot buy it, you will be less lovable.” Berger (1972/ 144) The competition for advertisers using techniques to sell brands for a more fulfilled loveable lifestyle has created such competition to push the boundaries to become more extreme within the adverts using hyper-reality to relate to the audience, but as Berger (1972/ 144) stated that, “If you cannot buy it, you will be less lovable.” This then applies to both figure 1 & 2 that if you buy into this brand (Gucci), you will feel more loved than if you didn’t buy into the brand you would feel less loved? This competition for brands offering hyper-reality then increases because the target audience wouldn’t be able to afford to buy into all fashion brands offering more fulfilled life’s as the cost would be to much, so this then becomes a selection process for the brands offering a more fulfilled life they want to buy into.
These connotations regarding visual voyeuristic and fetishistic pleasure support the idea of being in the males/ female’s position within the advert to sell the product Gucci, as an offer to a happier fulfilled life, through buying the product. The use of the gaze and image within the two adverts are important elements to sell the brand as a commodity to it’s target market of 18-25 year olds. The male advertisements uses the males gazes as if he was the audience/ the male viewing the advert, and applies the thought used with voyeuristic and fetishistic scopophilia from the female model, to sell the product using the sex sells motto. However in the male advertisement the woman’s actions, behavior and glamour connect to a female audience “who gaze at other women” to want to be this woman in the advert. The female advert (fig.2) the techniques of voyeuristic and fetishistic scopophilia actions from the female model grabs the attention of the males attention the look towards the female but also the female audience would look at the female for the glamour and voyeuristic, fetishistic actions to be in her position or her hyper-reality more fulfilled life.
As long as the adverts are aimed firstly for a masculine audience it seems this competition would increase the boundaries to push the voyeuristic and fetishistic scopophilia techniques of the female gaze to sell the brand as a lifestyle to the audience as the third person.
Chapter 2– Case study: Language within adverts vs. images used within adverts
After the first chapter critical analyzing two adverts for the same brand aimed at a male and female audience of 18-25 years old through the use of imagery, I have decided to concentrate this next chapter on text and language being used within adverts to support and sell a product. During researching into advertisements for fashion and fragrance brands I have noticed that from the language used in adverts they can persuade audiences into being products they don’t necessarily need through the promise of a more fulfilled life. Copywriter from design firm Beautyfulmeme (Leeds) (Appendix 1) stated that, “within our design team it consists of a copywriter (being himself) and a designer who produced adverts and branding based around the use of language and text, because if we use images there is a lot of noise and distractions within a photograph or image, rather than looking at language and the personality of typography.” The point that Beatifulmeme states that image has too many distractions within advertising restricts the design team to just use text and language to communicate the product which would make a good investigation into how powerful type by itself is.
The first chapter was dedicated to the use of the gaze to sell the Gucci fragrances to offer a more fulfilled life, chapter two is to investigate the use of text and language being used in two adverts selling similar products but from two different brands, this would use two different brands selling the similar product but through different marketing techniques and offering different personalities and character through their branding. It is important that both adverts are aimed at 18-25 year olds but one brand offering the product to an everyday audience and the other offering to sell the product through the promise of a more fulfilled life.
To make the investigation as fair as possible I wanted to find two adverts selling for the same gender audience, aimed at 18-25 but both brands trying to sell a similar product. Two adverts selling fashion ware such as jeans or perfumes to a female audience would have been good to use for this investigation into the language used as these offer to sell brands as both, a more fulfilled life/ lifestyle and also selling products for what the product actually is produced for. Instead I’ve found two brands selling hair products one being Loreal and the other Toni & Guy. The Loreal advert uses the language, “Hold it, Glam it, Don’t party without it.” (This being the advert suggesting a more fulfilled lifestyle due to the idea of this hair product is used for nights out, or going to parties). The other brand Toni & Guy used a mathematical equation concept of replacing the algebra with words describing the product,” (Suede Tassels – Fancy a cuppa) & (Sea Salt texturing spray - finger twirling)” this suggesting to sell the product as an everyday product rather than offering an everyday lifestyle, this referring to the use of everyday language such as “fancy a cuppa”.
The language used within the two adverts use different techniques. The loreal Advert (fig.7) uses short sharp buzzwords such as, “Hold”, “Glam” & “Don’t” which are all actions that can relate to the audience. The repetition of the word “it” suggests the brand is refereeing to the hair spray and creates a really short memorable slogan. The idea of “Glam” referring to glamour and “Party” suggests the slogan is aimed at a more exclusive, professional audience. Toni & Guy use the content of their algebra slogan to replace numbers with an equation with the language of a more everyday purpose such as “Fancy a Cuppa” and a natural product with the words “Sea Salt” which creates a more organic feel for the brand.
To make this investigation fair I have decided to write these phrases on the same piece of paper using the same colour font to take away any influences of font choice, and to ask the target audience of 18-25 females which hair product would they most likely buy into buy only looking at the two phrases and not the image to support them in the advert or the brand name (figure.3). I hope to find out what the target audience of 18-25 females would rather buy, the everyday hair product or the hair product trying to sell the product as a lifestyle just from the restrictions of language used and question Beautifulmeme (appendix 1) how important the use of copy text is within adverts and trying to sell brands through his stated method.
I asked twenty females aged between 18 – 25 years of age, on a Saturday (7th January, 2012) afternoon on The Headrow Road, Leeds city centre (geographical location) to find out which hair spray product they would rather buy. Sixteen out of twenty females said they would prefer to buy the Toni & Guy hair product,” (Suede Tassels – Fancy a cuppa) & (Sea Salt texturing spray - finger twirling)” and the remaining four females said they would buy the Loreal hair product “Hold it, Glam it, Don’t party without it.” Ideal lifestyle- loreal party glamour rather everyday use. Bullmore (1996: 54): “Of all the time-honoured accusations levelled at advertising, it’s refusal to reflect a true picture of the real world is one of the most familiar. It is, we are told, a failure to face up to reality.” As Bullmore stated to face up to reality, this investigation of the use of language show the statistics that offer a more fulfilled life (Loreal advert) has shown less of it’s target audience would rather buy into the product due to the language use than Toni & Guy’s advertising the product on an everyday use. The brand Toni & Guy relates to their audience as the suggestion of everyday living, which from the investigation argues that the use of a more fulfilled lifestyle within language gains a smaller section of it’s target audience compared to offering the product as an everyday use. This then questions the investigation of the dissertation whether or not people would rather buy into hyper-reality or more practical adverts offering the product as an everyday use.
As part as the same investigation to see how important the elements are within selling brand products as a more fulfilled life, I showed the same participants the two adverts as images and marked out the text and brand logos to see which hair product they would then buy by just looking at the images of the two adverts to question Beautifulmeme’s stance that text is more effective than image within advertising. Eleven from the twenty said they would buy the Toni & Guy hair product and the remaining nine said they would buy the Loreal hair product.From the statistics is seems that for a brand offering a more fulfilled life the image is more important to use rather than the language, and for the purpose of advertsisng as the product being sold for it’s everyday purpose the text is just as important as the image. These findings are quite interesting to question why people would choose the everyday product. “Publicity increasingly uses sexuality is never free in itself; it is a symbol for something presumed to be larger than it; the good life in which you can buy whatever you want. To be able to buy is the same thing as being sexually desirable… Usually it is the implicit message, If you are able to buy this product you will be loveable. If you cannot buy it, you will be less lovable.” Berger (1972/ 144) The image however of the Loreal advert offers the more fulfilled life, buy choosing the model Cheryl Cole as a familiar celebrity who tends to live a luxurious lifestyle and is a public role model to many of it’s 18-25 years old target audience which adds value to the brand, rather than the a less known public figure model used within the Toni & Guy figure who represents the brand as an everyday person, and the statistics of the text and image investigations support this.
The statistics of the image showing the different personalities and characteristics of the brand compared to the language used disagrees with (Appendix 1) statement of, “within our design team it consists of a copywriter and a designer who produced adverts and branding based around the use of language and text, because if we use images there is a lot of noise and distractions within a photograph or image, rather than looking at language and the personality of typography.” The power of the image within fashion and beauty advertisements seems that the offer of a more fulfilled lifestyle is more powerful than the use of text. If this is true it seems to reflect why it was difficult to find slogans and language next to fashion advertisements and why a lot of adverts mainly use the image as the main communication of the brand product rather than language to offer a more fulfilled life or as an everyday use.
However as the increase of the audiences vote from the language figures compared to the image investigation proved that the offer of a more fulfilled life for the Loreal advert proved that the audience would rather buy into the product if they could see the offer of a more fulfilled life as an image which uses techniques which Bullmore stated that (1996: 54): “Of all the time-honoured accusations levelled at advertising, it’s refusal to reflect a true picture of the real world is one of the most familiar. It is, we are told, a failure to face up to reality.” Proves that the audience would rather buy into product more with the image to show a more fulfilled life compared to Beautifulmeme’s (Appendix 1) statement that, “images there is a lot of noise and distractions within a photograph or image, rather than looking at language and the personality of typography”, which works better for brands advertising for its product the be advertised for the products everyday purpose.
The costings for each advert would vary as Loreal uses a celebrity instead of Toni & Guys professional model for the adverts but both brands have chosen these decisions to communicate their brand to different market audiences. For both of the image and language investigations, the target audience of 18-25 females choose Toni & Guy both times to buy into the hair product rather than the more fulfilled Loreal advert. From this investigation, it seems that within selling hair products females aged 18-25 are more likely to buy into the brand offering the brand as an everyday use. This argues against the dissertation question, whether or not a more fulfilled lifestyle is a good marketing technique compared to an offer as the brand as an everyday use product. I am aware that this investigation was only for hair products so for other products or brands the use of a more fulfilled lifestyle may increase or decrease depending on the subject. My verdict for why the majority of the votes went in the favour of Toni & Guy advert agrees with Bullmore “It is, we are told, a failure to face up to reality. “and the reality of the audience can see themselves as the using the more everyday attainable hairstyle shown in Toni & Guy’s advert rather than the more luxurious, more sculptured hairstyle used for the Loreal advert.
Chapter 3: Needs Must
Fashion brands and advertisers create these personality’s and characters to show hyper-reality and offer their brands as a more fulfilled life, but from a consumers perceptive why would they want to buy into hyper-reality and not just buy a product for the practicle everyday purpose of the product.
A statement from Slater (1997 :57) talks about consumer desicions that realy on the different social groups formed around different cultural backgrounds, created different values and priorities.“Consequential issues about how social resources are allocated between different social groups and to debates between social groups about values, priorities and power.” This idea of creating hierachys between values and priorties composes different social groups and individuals to lead to different needs. Different social groups have different needs. Needs are branded for targeted for specific individual/ groups. The variations of groups varies the needs more for necessities and luxuories. From identifying specific audiences advertisers can then choose the personality of the brand and deliver the commuincation of the advert to specific medias for the audience. As from the research into fashion advertisng the offer of a more fulfilled life appears in most adverts which from Slater’s statement (1997 :57) .“Consequential issues about how social resources are allocated between different social groups and to debates between social groups about values, priorities and power” it means that these adverts are aimed to a specific social group who value their needs for fashion more than other social groups. Another veiw about the catergorization of the consumer comes from Costantino (1998 :22) who states “in order to market clothing in volume, groups of consumers with similar needs and wants have to be identified and supplied with similar products”. Both statements, Costantino and Slater agree that catergorization takes place within social groups and fashion designers will then standardize garments to fit the needs of identified groups
Costantino (1998 :24) also states that, “at any one time, location, occupation, economic circumstances and social class” varies within the catergorization. “Clothing reflects our professional status and also indicates that we belong to a particular occupational group”. (1998 :25) Within the current resession, the jobs within manual and technical skilled jobs would have changed which would be a factor to certain brands who have had to think of new stratergys to target their desired markets or move into other sectors of the market. The target makret is an essential for brands to identify who they want to target. An interesting paragraph from Costantino (1998 :27) discusses the different division of income classes. It seems that the more luxuorios brands within fashion are the more likely it to offer the more fulfilled life. “Fashionable clothing thus became something of a status symbol rather than the expression of good taste, and consequently many consumers demonstrated their financial success by buying and wearing expensive clothing” Costantino (1998 :27). This point from Costantino that people buy into the brand because of the status symbol doesn’t need to be backed by anyones financial status, because if it was only a few items compared to a waredrobe it wounld’t cost as much. It depends what brand is classed as a “status symbol” Costantino talks about. If it is the more luxourios fashion brands such as Gucci from chapter one, then the audience is for young professionals and the bussiness market it would disagree with the “financial success” of anyone because the adverts were found within Mens health magazine and Red magazine which is aimed at a range different working classes. Costantino mentions that fashion becomes a “status symbol rather than the expression of good taste” which makes sense due to different adverts, as advertising the product as a status symbol – more fulfilled life rather than the expression of good taste – advertsing the product for practicality and taste. This then creates social catergories one for status symbol and the other for good taste.
From asking Andy Park (appendix 2) are there any brands you have worked for that have asked not to add lifestyle to the product and have marketed the product for the functionality of the everyday use of the brand? Park (appendix 2) stated “Smeg company, asked for just the product as they don’t do lifestyles. Their point was if the product is drop dead gorgous, why would you need to add an extra value to the brand?” It is pretty much similar to Apple, if the product can do the advertising why would want to add lifestyle to the product, although apple advertise with hands to show the functionality of the product, they don’t show characters or peoples faces within the advertisiements offering a morefulfilled lifestyle. It seems that apple are at the end of the scale by producing adverts that show the product in its context and the futher away from apple adverts the more lifestyle is added to the brand. What be interesting is if Apple did add lifestyle to their brand and see whether or not they were succesful than showing the product as its functionality.
Park (appendix 2) then stated that “the reason for why fragrance brands add lifestyle to the product is because they are familiar with the lifestyle of the brand and make social connections with the models in the adverts”. This supports Bergers (1972: 47) theory ,”Men look at women” as the third person and relate to the models used within the adverts. Comparing Apple’s advertising to the fashion industries advertsing, they both are advertising for two different purposes, one being a machine and the other for a human to ware. The idea for using just a product on it’s own is mainly due to the fact it is a machine which the functionality of everyday use becomes the focus of the advert, but within fashion advertising the product has to relate and commuincate to the audience as it is made for human’s to ware, this then needs a model to ware the product to show the product in context, and by using a model this creates decisions for which model to use within the advert and what social group is the product aimed towards.
“Despite the populist turn in analyses of consumer culture some of the questions raised by the critical theorists such as “how to discriminate between cultures values”. “how we should live.”, it can be argued have not actually been supersede but have merely been put aside” (Featherstone 1991/ viii)
“We come to most of our decisions in this country as a result of what has been called “the principle of competitive persuasion”. Bullmore (1996: 12)
Chapter 4: ?
Conclusions
Bibliography
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Appendix 1
Commuincation within advertsing, November 2011, Leeds College of Art. Beautifulmeme
“Within our design team it consists of a copywriter and a designer who produced adverts and branding based around the use of language and text, because if we use images there is a lot of noise and distractions within a photograph or image, rather than looking at language and the personality of typography.”
Appendix 2
Language for advertising, January 2012, Leeds College of Art, Andy Parks
Why is it important for fragrence brands to add a lifestyle to thier product so that audiences realte and buy into the product?
“the reason for why fragrance brands add lifestyle to the product is because they are familiar with the lifestyle of the brand and make social connections with the models in the adverts”.
Are there any brands you have worked for that have asked not to add lifestyle to the product and have marketed the product for the functionality of the everyday use of the brand?
“Smeg company, asked for just the product as they don’t do lifestyles. Their point was if the product is drop dead gorgous, why would you need to add an extra value to the brand?”
Friday 20 January 2012
Dissertation backup copy
(Adair, 1988: 51).
Paul Brandreth
Graphics Design Level 6
Would 18-25 year old males and females more likely to buy into a product/ brand offering the product as an everyday purpose or as an offer of a more fulfilled life?
“Of all the time-honoured accusations levelled at advertising, it’s refusal to reflect a true picture of the real world is one of the most familiar. It is, we are told, a failure to face up to reality.” Bullmore (1996: 54)
This dissertation is to find out if the offer of a more fulfilled life is a successful medium to sell products to audiences, which are more luxuries not necessities. The quote above from Jeremy Bullmore argues the decisions the marketing team decides to market certain products as hyper-reality and not facing up to the product in it’s purpose/ context to reality. From looking at advertisements it is clear that hyper-reality is used to target all ages/ backgrounds as offering a more fulfilled lifestyle rather than showing the reality of the product. This dissertation will focus on the principles of advertising for 18- 25 year old males and females to find out is the strategy of marketing brands and products as hyper-reality more successful rather than reality of the purpose of the product. I will focus the dissertation on the 18-25 year olds audience within Britain because I fall into this age category and can relate to part of my design practice.
The areas the dissertation will to investigate is how do marketing teams use hyper-reality to sell brands and products offering a more fulfilled life/lifestyle within advertising. Also to find out for if the target audience would rather buy the product as an offer of a more fulfilled life or the product for being advertised for the context of everyday living.
Chapter 1: An analytical breakdown of two adverts from the same brand aimed at a male/ female audience to understand the power of offering a more fulfilled life.
“Publicity increasingly uses sexuality is never free in itself; it is a symbol for something presumed to be larger than it; the good life in which you can buy whatever you want. To be able to buy is the same thing as being sexually desirable… Usually it is the implicit message, If you are able to buy this product you will be loveable. If you cannot buy it, you will be less lovable.” Berger (1972/ 144)
The best starting point to this dissertation is to analytically summarise two magazine adverts aimed at the 18 – 25 years of age audience to find out what techniques the adverts use to offer a more fulfilled life. From looking through articles and magazines to find a set of adverts aimed at male and female audiences, I noticed that fashion, fragrances and watch brands (luxuries), offer the promise of a more fulfilled life more than adverts advertising everyday necessities such as cereals and mobile phone adverts. To make this investigation fair I have chosen to use the same company marketing two products, one towards a male audience and the other at a female audience. The two adverts I have found are marketing Gucci fragrances (figure.1. – male & figure.2.-female). They were found within the same magazine which makes it a fair test due to the date they were designed and published (2011), so the same techniques and culture would be similar to each other rather than analysing a male advert from the 70’s to a female advert from 2011 which would use different culture and language within the adverts.
The first advert aimed at the male audience (figure.1.) uses a direct gaze of the male, where he looks out of frame directly to the male audience viewing the magazine. The male advert also has another gaze of the female who uses an intra-dietetic gaze where her focus is looking up to the male. Quoted from Berger (1972: 47),” Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at” which defiantly applies to this advert, as the male audience would instantly look towards the female and read her body language, this would give the audience the idea of how much power this male has within the advert. Thinking back to the initial question of “the promise of a more fulfilled life”, the brand is trying to sell the product as a certain character/ person regarding the idea if you wore this product, this is the lifestyle you could purchase. Although the males direct gaze is strong, the appearance and body language of the females intra-dietetic gaze is just important to gain the males attention which supports the quote from Berger (1972: 47),“women watch themselves being looked at”. This consequently offers the women audience the promise of a more fulfilled lifestyle of being loved by male without being sold a product.
However within the other advert aimed at a female audience (figure.2), the gazes used are a lot different from the male target advert. The roles of the male and female have been switched. This time the female gazes directly towards the audience and the male uses the inter-dietetic gaze. Although these gazes of the male and female have been switched for different audiences, Berger’s (1972: 47) statement, ”Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at”, still applies to the female advert (fig.2). The female audience again would look into the direct gaze of the female because of the strong eye contact looking towards the viewer, and the males would also look towards the female because of her seductive body and facial composition. Although the purposes of both adverts are to sell the fragrances, they both use powerful imagery that stands out to be more of a focus of the brand lifestyle rather than the product itself. The statement by Berger applies to these adverts as the adverts offer the lifestyle of the male and female roles to become a more fulfilled life when buying into the Gucci brand.
The series of gazes are very similar, because both gazes being used in each advert are switched for the different gender audience but what is different between the gazes are the different body languages used within the roles of the male and female. The female intra-dietetic gaze in the male target audience advert, looks up towards the male, but in the female advert the male intra-dietetic gaze doesn’t look at the female because of his eyes being shut, so the use of the eyes is an important sign to the audience to communicate the message of power and gazes being used to sell Gucci.
Within both of the Gucci adverts, the female gaze offers a strong visual representation of fetishistic and voyeuristic pleasure. "In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness" Toland (1997: 226). Both in the male and female-targeted adverts, the female gaze of her eye positioning and body language suggest a sexual connotation due to her composition and actions in the advert. The male gaze supports the idea of fetishistic and voyeuristic pleasure but his gaze and body language isn’t as strong as the females. This supports Toland’s statement that the woman offers a strong role woman displayed for visual and erotic impact but also supports the idea from Berger (1972: 47) that ”Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at”. The males gaze is important to sell the product/ brand of Gucci, his gaze become a commodity to sell a product through the thought of being someone else. In the male advert the male audience would look into the males eyes and think about the females body positioning looking into his eyes as if the viewer has now become part of the advert where the female is seductively looking into his eyes. The female advert, the womans gaze become a commodity to women to be in her position with a male next to them, feeling loved. Laura Mulvey stated, “I was interested in the relationship between the image of the woman on the screen and the “masculinisation” of the spectator position, regardless of the actual sex (or possible deviance) of any real live movie-goer. In built patterns of pleasure and identification impose masculinity as a point of view; a point of view which is also manifest in the general use of masculinity third person.” (1989: 29) Both adverts are visually strong with the purpose to sell a more fulfilled life. Both have used the concept of creating the interaction through the third person to relate to the actions of the male and female used within the adverts. This quote indicates that the woman sells the product to a masculine audience but it also applies to a female audience who look at her sharing similar aspirations of the perfect life.
These connotations regarding visual voyeuristic and fetishistic pleasure support the idea of being in the males/ female’s position within the advert to sell the product Gucci, as an offer to a happier fulfilled life, through buying the product. The use of the gaze and image within the two adverts are important elements to sell the brand as a comoddity to it’s target market of 18-25 year ols
Chapter 2– Case study: Language within adverts vs. images used within adverts
After the first chapter critical analyzing two adverts for the same brand aimed at a male and female audience of 18-25 years old through the use of imagery, I have decided to concentrate this next chapter on text and language being used within adverts to support and sell a product. During reasearch into advertisements for fashion and fragrence brand I noticed that from the language used in adverts they can persuade audiences into being products they don’t necessarily need through the promise of a more fulfilled life. Copywriter from design firm Beautyfulmeme (Leeds) (Appenidix 1) stated that, “within our design team it consists of a copywriter (being himself) and a designer who produced adverts and branding based around the use of language and text, because if we use images there is a lot of noise and distractions within a photograph or image, rather than looking at language and the personality of typography.” The point that Beatifulmeme states that image has too many distractions within advertising restricts the design team to just use text and language to communicate the product which would make a good investigation into how powerful type by itself is.
The first chapter was dedicated to the use of the gaze to sell the Gucci fragrances to offer a more fulfilled life, chapter two is to investigate the use of text and language being used in two adverts selling similar products but from two different brands, as this would use two different brands selling the similar product but through different marketing techniques and offering different personalities and character through their branding. It is important that both adverts are aimed at 18-25 year olds but one brand offering the product to an everyday audience and the other offering to sell the product through the promise of a more fulfilled life.
To make the investigation as fair as possible I wanted to find two adverts selling for the same gender audience, aimed at 18-25 but both brands trying to sell a similar product. Two adverts selling fashion ware such as jeans or perfumes to a female audience would have been good to use for this investigation into language as these offer to sell brand as both through the offer of a more fulfilled life/ lifestyle and also selling products for what the product actually is produced for. Instead I’ve found two brands selling hair products one being Loreal and the other Toni & Guy. The Loreal advert uses the language, “Hold it, Glam it, Don’t party without it.” (This being the advert offering a more fulfilled lifestyle due to the idea of this hair product is used for nights out, or going to parties). The other brand Toni & Guy used a mathematical equation concept of replacing the algebra with words describing the product,” (Suede Tassels – Fancy a cuppa) & (Sea Salt texturing spray - finger twirling)” this selling the product as an everyday product rather than offering an everyday lifestyle, this reffering to the use of everyday language such as “fancy a cuppa”.
****Annotate the language of both adverts****
To make this investigation fair I have decided to write these phrases on the same piece of paper using the same colour font to take away any influences of font choice, and to ask the target audience of 18-25 females which hair product would they most likely buy into buy only looking at the two phrases and not the image to support them in the advert or the brand name (figure.3). I hope to find out what the target audience of 18-25 females would rather buy, the everyday hair product or the hair product trying to sell the product as a lifestyle just from the restrictions of language used and question Beautifulmeme (appendix 1) how important the use of copy text is within adverts and trying to sell brands through his stated method.
I asked twenty females aged between 18 – 25 years of age, on a Saturday (7th January, 2012) afternoon on The Headrow Road, Leeds city centre (geographical location) to find out which hair spray product they would rather buy. Sixteen out of twenty females said they would prefer to buy the Toni & Guy hair product,” (Suede Tassels – Fancy a cuppa) & (Sea Salt texturing spray - finger twirling)” and the remaining four females said they would buy the Loreal hair product “Hold it, Glam it, Don’t party without it.” Ideal lifestyle- loreal party glamour rather everyday use. Bullmore (1996: 54): “Of all the time-honoured accusations levelled at advertising, it’s refusal to reflect a true picture of the real world is one of the most familiar. It is, we are told, a failure to face up to reality.” As Bullmore stated to face up to reality, this investigation of the use of language show the statistics that offer a more fulfilled life (Loreal advert) has shown less of it’s target audience would rather buy into the product due to the language use than Toni & Guy’s advertising the product on an everyday use. The brand Toni & Guy relates to their audience as the suggestion of everyday living, which from the investigation argues that the use of a more fulfilled lifestyle within language gains a smaller section of it’s target audience compared to offering the product as an everyday use.
As part as the same investigation to see how important the elements are within selling brand products as a more fulfilled life, I showed the same participants the two adverts as images and marked out the text and brand logos to see which hair product they would then buy. Eleven from the twenty said they would buy the Toni & Guy hair product and the remaining nine said they would buy the Loreal hair product. From these findings it is interesting to question why people would choose the everyday. “Publicity increasingly uses sexuality is never free in itself; it is a symbol for something presumed to be larger than it; the good life in which you can buy whatever you want. To be able to buy is the same thing as being sexually desirable… Usually it is the implicit message, If you are able to buy this product you will be loveable. If you cannot buy it, you will be less lovable.” Berger (1972/ 144) The image however of the Loreal advert offers the more fulfilled life, buy choosing the model Cheryl Cole as a familiar celebrity who tends to live a luxurious lifestyle and is a public role model to many of it’s 18-25 years old target audience which adds value to the brand, rather than the a less known public figure model used within the Toni & Guy figure who represents the brand as an everyday person.
The statistics of the image showing the different personalities and characteristics of the brand compared to the language used disagrees with (Appendix 1) statement of, “within our design team it consists of a copywriter and a designer who produced adverts and branding based around the use of language and text, because if we use images there is a lot of noise and distractions within a photograph or image, rather than looking at language and the personality of typography.” The power of the image within fashion and beauty advertisements seems that the offer of a more fulfilled lifestyle is more powerful than the use of text. If this is true it seems to reflect why it was difficult to find slogans and language next to fashion advertisements and why a lot of adverts mainly use the image as the main communication of the brand product rather than language to offer a more fulfilled life or as an everyday use.
However as the increase of the audiences vote from the language figures compared to the image investigation proved that the offer of a more fulfilled life for the Loreal advert proved that the audience would rather buy into the product if they could see the offer of a more fulfilled life as an image which uses techniques which Bullmore stated that (1996: 54): “Of all the time-honoured accusations levelled at advertising, it’s refusal to reflect a true picture of the real world is one of the most familiar. It is, we are told, a failure to face up to reality.” Proves that the audience would rather buy into product more with the image to show a more fulfilled life compared to Beautifulmeme’s (Appendix 1) statement that, “images there is a lot of noise and distractions within a photograph or image, rather than looking at language and the personality of typography.”
The costings for each advert would be different as Loreal uses a celebrity instead of Toni & Guys professional model for the adverts but both brands have choosen these decisions to commuincate there brand to different market audiences. For both image and language investigations the target audience of 18-25 females choose Toni & Guy both times to buy into the hair product rather than the more fulfiled Loreal advert. From this investigtion, it seems that within selling hair products females aged 18-25 are more likely to buy into the brand offereing the brand as an everyday use. This argues against the disseration question, whether or not a more fulfilled lifestyle is a good marketing technique compared to an offer as the brand as an everyday use product. I am aware that this investigation was only for hair products so for other products or brands the use of a more fulfilled lifestyle may increase or decrease depending on the subject. My verdict for why the majority of the votes went in the favour of Toni & Guy advert agrees with Bullmore “It is, we are told, a failure to face up to reality.”and the reality of the audience can see themselves as the using the more everyday use, atainable hairstyle shown in Toni & Guy’s advert rather than the more luxurious, more sculptured hairstyle used for the Loreal advert.
Buzzwords
“These terms have often been called buzzwords, suggesting a kind of electrical charge as a result of making a connection, hitting the spot, having a finger on the pulse , pressing the right buttons”.Slater (1997:73)
“Comparatives are more likely to feature in the advert slogan, while the adjectives in their base from often occur in the body of the text (called the copy).” Slater (1997:73)
Chapter 3: Needs Must
Andy Park,
I asked Andy Park (appendix 2) are there any brands you have worked for that have asked not to add lifestyle to the product and have marketed the product for the functionality of the everyday use of the brand? Park (appendix 2) stated “Smeg company, asked for just the product as they don’t do lifestyles. Their point was if the product is drop dead gorgous, why would you need to add an extra value to the brand?” It is pretty much similar to Apple, if the product can do the advertising why would want to add lifestyle to the product, although apple advertise with hands to show the functionality of the product, they don’t show characters or peoples faces within the advertisiements offering a morefulfilled lifestyle. It seems that apple are at the end of the scale by producing adverts that show the product in its context and the futher away from apple adverts the more lifestyle is added to the brand. What be interesting is if Apple did add lifestyle to their brand and see whether or not they were succesful than showing the product as its functionality.
Park (appendix 2) then stated that “the reason for why fragrance brands add lifestyle to the product is because they are familiar with the lifestyle of the brand and make social connections with the models in the adverts”. This supports Bergers (1972: 47) theory ,”Men look at women” as the third person.
“The contrast here is with critical theorists who claim to asses actual preferences against a baseline of supposedly real and objective needs, those which can be rationally reconstructed in relation to a vision of a properly human life, and who can use these to critique wants as they are structured by contemporary social relations.” Slater (1997: 52)
“Despite the populist turn in analyses of consumer culture some of the questions raised by the critical theorists such as “how to discriminate between cultures values”. “how we should live.”, it can be argued have not actually been supersesed but have merely been put aside” (Featherstone 1991/ viii)
“We come to most of our decisions in this country as a result of what has been called “the principle of competitive persuasion”. Bullmore (1996: 12)
Chapter 4: ?
Conclusions
Bibliography
Armstron, S (1997) Advertising on The Internet, London : Konan Page
Turow, J (2009) The Advertising And Consumer Culture Reader, New York: Routledge
Berger, J. (1972) Ways of Seeing, London: Penguin
Burke. J. (2000) Vision, the Gaze, and the Function of the Senses in Celestina, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press
Mulvey, L. (1989) Visual and other pleasures, Hampshire :Palgrave
Mulvey, L. (1996) Fetishism and Curiosity, London : British Film Institute
Toland Frith, K. (1997) Undressing The Ad, New York : Peter Lang Publications
Williamson, J. (2002) Decoding Advertisements, London : Marion Boyars Publishers Ltd
Baudrillard, J. (2006) Simulacra And Simulation, United States of America: The University of Michigan Press
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Nava, M (1997) Buy This Book Studies in Advertising And Consumption, Oxon: Routledge
Bullmore, J (1991) More Bull More, Oxfordshire: World Advertising Research Center
Miller, D (1987) Material Culture And Mass Consumption, Oxford: Basil Blackwell Limited
Armstron, S (1997) Advertising on The Internet, London : Konan Page
Dyer, G (1982) Advertising as Commuincation, London, Methuen & Co. Ltd
Sharma, C (2008) Mobile Advertising, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons Inc.
Cappo, J (2003) The Future of Advertising, United States of America: McGraw-Hill Books
Gauntlett, D (2007) Creative Exploration, Oxon: Routeledge
Johnson, F.L (2008) Imaging in Advertising, New York: Routeledge
Goddard, A (1998) The Language of Advertising, London: Routeledge
Appendix 1
Commuincation within advertsing, November 2011, Leeds College of Art. Beautifulmeme
“Within our design team it consists of a copywriter and a designer who produced adverts and branding based around the use of language and text, because if we use images there is a lot of noise and distractions within a photograph or image, rather than looking at language and the personality of typography.”
Appendix 2
Language for advertising, January 2012, Leeds College of Art, Andy Parks
Why is it important for fragrence brands to add a lifestyle to thier product so that audiences realte and buy into the product?
“the reason for why fragrance brands add lifestyle to the product is because they are familiar with the lifestyle of the brand and make social connections with the models in the adverts”.
Are there any brands you have worked for that have asked not to add lifestyle to the product and have marketed the product for the functionality of the everyday use of the brand?
“Smeg company, asked for just the product as they don’t do lifestyles. Their point was if the product is drop dead gorgous, why would you need to add an extra value to the brand?”
Paul Brandreth
Graphics Design Level 6
Would 18-25 year old males and females more likely to buy into a product/ brand offering the product as an everyday purpose or as an offer of a more fulfilled life?
“Of all the time-honoured accusations levelled at advertising, it’s refusal to reflect a true picture of the real world is one of the most familiar. It is, we are told, a failure to face up to reality.” Bullmore (1996: 54)
This dissertation is to find out if the offer of a more fulfilled life is a successful medium to sell products to audiences, which are more luxuries not necessities. The quote above from Jeremy Bullmore argues the decisions the marketing team decides to market certain products as hyper-reality and not facing up to the product in it’s purpose/ context to reality. From looking at advertisements it is clear that hyper-reality is used to target all ages/ backgrounds as offering a more fulfilled lifestyle rather than showing the reality of the product. This dissertation will focus on the principles of advertising for 18- 25 year old males and females to find out is the strategy of marketing brands and products as hyper-reality more successful rather than reality of the purpose of the product. I will focus the dissertation on the 18-25 year olds audience within Britain because I fall into this age category and can relate to part of my design practice.
The areas the dissertation will to investigate is how do marketing teams use hyper-reality to sell brands and products offering a more fulfilled life/lifestyle within advertising. Also to find out for if the target audience would rather buy the product as an offer of a more fulfilled life or the product for being advertised for the context of everyday living.
Chapter 1: An analytical breakdown of two adverts from the same brand aimed at a male/ female audience to understand the power of offering a more fulfilled life.
“Publicity increasingly uses sexuality is never free in itself; it is a symbol for something presumed to be larger than it; the good life in which you can buy whatever you want. To be able to buy is the same thing as being sexually desirable… Usually it is the implicit message, If you are able to buy this product you will be loveable. If you cannot buy it, you will be less lovable.” Berger (1972/ 144)
The best starting point to this dissertation is to analytically summarise two magazine adverts aimed at the 18 – 25 years of age audience to find out what techniques the adverts use to offer a more fulfilled life. From looking through articles and magazines to find a set of adverts aimed at male and female audiences, I noticed that fashion, fragrances and watch brands (luxuries), offer the promise of a more fulfilled life more than adverts advertising everyday necessities such as cereals and mobile phone adverts. To make this investigation fair I have chosen to use the same company marketing two products, one towards a male audience and the other at a female audience. The two adverts I have found are marketing Gucci fragrances (figure.1. – male & figure.2.-female). They were found within the same magazine which makes it a fair test due to the date they were designed and published (2011), so the same techniques and culture would be similar to each other rather than analysing a male advert from the 70’s to a female advert from 2011 which would use different culture and language within the adverts.
The first advert aimed at the male audience (figure.1.) uses a direct gaze of the male, where he looks out of frame directly to the male audience viewing the magazine. The male advert also has another gaze of the female who uses an intra-dietetic gaze where her focus is looking up to the male. Quoted from Berger (1972: 47),” Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at” which defiantly applies to this advert, as the male audience would instantly look towards the female and read her body language, this would give the audience the idea of how much power this male has within the advert. Thinking back to the initial question of “the promise of a more fulfilled life”, the brand is trying to sell the product as a certain character/ person regarding the idea if you wore this product, this is the lifestyle you could purchase. Although the males direct gaze is strong, the appearance and body language of the females intra-dietetic gaze is just important to gain the males attention which supports the quote from Berger (1972: 47),“women watch themselves being looked at”. This consequently offers the women audience the promise of a more fulfilled lifestyle of being loved by male without being sold a product.
However within the other advert aimed at a female audience (figure.2), the gazes used are a lot different from the male target advert. The roles of the male and female have been switched. This time the female gazes directly towards the audience and the male uses the inter-dietetic gaze. Although these gazes of the male and female have been switched for different audiences, Berger’s (1972: 47) statement, ”Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at”, still applies to the female advert (fig.2). The female audience again would look into the direct gaze of the female because of the strong eye contact looking towards the viewer, and the males would also look towards the female because of her seductive body and facial composition. Although the purposes of both adverts are to sell the fragrances, they both use powerful imagery that stands out to be more of a focus of the brand lifestyle rather than the product itself. The statement by Berger applies to these adverts as the adverts offer the lifestyle of the male and female roles to become a more fulfilled life when buying into the Gucci brand.
The series of gazes are very similar, because both gazes being used in each advert are switched for the different gender audience but what is different between the gazes are the different body languages used within the roles of the male and female. The female intra-dietetic gaze in the male target audience advert, looks up towards the male, but in the female advert the male intra-dietetic gaze doesn’t look at the female because of his eyes being shut, so the use of the eyes is an important sign to the audience to communicate the message of power and gazes being used to sell Gucci.
Within both of the Gucci adverts, the female gaze offers a strong visual representation of fetishistic and voyeuristic pleasure. "In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness" Toland (1997: 226). Both in the male and female-targeted adverts, the female gaze of her eye positioning and body language suggest a sexual connotation due to her composition and actions in the advert. The male gaze supports the idea of fetishistic and voyeuristic pleasure but his gaze and body language isn’t as strong as the females. This supports Toland’s statement that the woman offers a strong role woman displayed for visual and erotic impact but also supports the idea from Berger (1972: 47) that ”Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at”. The males gaze is important to sell the product/ brand of Gucci, his gaze become a commodity to sell a product through the thought of being someone else. In the male advert the male audience would look into the males eyes and think about the females body positioning looking into his eyes as if the viewer has now become part of the advert where the female is seductively looking into his eyes. The female advert, the womans gaze become a commodity to women to be in her position with a male next to them, feeling loved. Laura Mulvey stated, “I was interested in the relationship between the image of the woman on the screen and the “masculinisation” of the spectator position, regardless of the actual sex (or possible deviance) of any real live movie-goer. In built patterns of pleasure and identification impose masculinity as a point of view; a point of view which is also manifest in the general use of masculinity third person.” (1989: 29) Both adverts are visually strong with the purpose to sell a more fulfilled life. Both have used the concept of creating the interaction through the third person to relate to the actions of the male and female used within the adverts. This quote indicates that the woman sells the product to a masculine audience but it also applies to a female audience who look at her sharing similar aspirations of the perfect life.
These connotations regarding visual voyeuristic and fetishistic pleasure support the idea of being in the males/ female’s position within the advert to sell the product Gucci, as an offer to a happier fulfilled life, through buying the product. The use of the gaze and image within the two adverts are important elements to sell the brand as a comoddity to it’s target market of 18-25 year ols
Chapter 2– Case study: Language within adverts vs. images used within adverts
After the first chapter critical analyzing two adverts for the same brand aimed at a male and female audience of 18-25 years old through the use of imagery, I have decided to concentrate this next chapter on text and language being used within adverts to support and sell a product. During reasearch into advertisements for fashion and fragrence brand I noticed that from the language used in adverts they can persuade audiences into being products they don’t necessarily need through the promise of a more fulfilled life. Copywriter from design firm Beautyfulmeme (Leeds) (Appenidix 1) stated that, “within our design team it consists of a copywriter (being himself) and a designer who produced adverts and branding based around the use of language and text, because if we use images there is a lot of noise and distractions within a photograph or image, rather than looking at language and the personality of typography.” The point that Beatifulmeme states that image has too many distractions within advertising restricts the design team to just use text and language to communicate the product which would make a good investigation into how powerful type by itself is.
The first chapter was dedicated to the use of the gaze to sell the Gucci fragrances to offer a more fulfilled life, chapter two is to investigate the use of text and language being used in two adverts selling similar products but from two different brands, as this would use two different brands selling the similar product but through different marketing techniques and offering different personalities and character through their branding. It is important that both adverts are aimed at 18-25 year olds but one brand offering the product to an everyday audience and the other offering to sell the product through the promise of a more fulfilled life.
To make the investigation as fair as possible I wanted to find two adverts selling for the same gender audience, aimed at 18-25 but both brands trying to sell a similar product. Two adverts selling fashion ware such as jeans or perfumes to a female audience would have been good to use for this investigation into language as these offer to sell brand as both through the offer of a more fulfilled life/ lifestyle and also selling products for what the product actually is produced for. Instead I’ve found two brands selling hair products one being Loreal and the other Toni & Guy. The Loreal advert uses the language, “Hold it, Glam it, Don’t party without it.” (This being the advert offering a more fulfilled lifestyle due to the idea of this hair product is used for nights out, or going to parties). The other brand Toni & Guy used a mathematical equation concept of replacing the algebra with words describing the product,” (Suede Tassels – Fancy a cuppa) & (Sea Salt texturing spray - finger twirling)” this selling the product as an everyday product rather than offering an everyday lifestyle, this reffering to the use of everyday language such as “fancy a cuppa”.
****Annotate the language of both adverts****
To make this investigation fair I have decided to write these phrases on the same piece of paper using the same colour font to take away any influences of font choice, and to ask the target audience of 18-25 females which hair product would they most likely buy into buy only looking at the two phrases and not the image to support them in the advert or the brand name (figure.3). I hope to find out what the target audience of 18-25 females would rather buy, the everyday hair product or the hair product trying to sell the product as a lifestyle just from the restrictions of language used and question Beautifulmeme (appendix 1) how important the use of copy text is within adverts and trying to sell brands through his stated method.
I asked twenty females aged between 18 – 25 years of age, on a Saturday (7th January, 2012) afternoon on The Headrow Road, Leeds city centre (geographical location) to find out which hair spray product they would rather buy. Sixteen out of twenty females said they would prefer to buy the Toni & Guy hair product,” (Suede Tassels – Fancy a cuppa) & (Sea Salt texturing spray - finger twirling)” and the remaining four females said they would buy the Loreal hair product “Hold it, Glam it, Don’t party without it.” Ideal lifestyle- loreal party glamour rather everyday use. Bullmore (1996: 54): “Of all the time-honoured accusations levelled at advertising, it’s refusal to reflect a true picture of the real world is one of the most familiar. It is, we are told, a failure to face up to reality.” As Bullmore stated to face up to reality, this investigation of the use of language show the statistics that offer a more fulfilled life (Loreal advert) has shown less of it’s target audience would rather buy into the product due to the language use than Toni & Guy’s advertising the product on an everyday use. The brand Toni & Guy relates to their audience as the suggestion of everyday living, which from the investigation argues that the use of a more fulfilled lifestyle within language gains a smaller section of it’s target audience compared to offering the product as an everyday use.
As part as the same investigation to see how important the elements are within selling brand products as a more fulfilled life, I showed the same participants the two adverts as images and marked out the text and brand logos to see which hair product they would then buy. Eleven from the twenty said they would buy the Toni & Guy hair product and the remaining nine said they would buy the Loreal hair product. From these findings it is interesting to question why people would choose the everyday. “Publicity increasingly uses sexuality is never free in itself; it is a symbol for something presumed to be larger than it; the good life in which you can buy whatever you want. To be able to buy is the same thing as being sexually desirable… Usually it is the implicit message, If you are able to buy this product you will be loveable. If you cannot buy it, you will be less lovable.” Berger (1972/ 144) The image however of the Loreal advert offers the more fulfilled life, buy choosing the model Cheryl Cole as a familiar celebrity who tends to live a luxurious lifestyle and is a public role model to many of it’s 18-25 years old target audience which adds value to the brand, rather than the a less known public figure model used within the Toni & Guy figure who represents the brand as an everyday person.
The statistics of the image showing the different personalities and characteristics of the brand compared to the language used disagrees with (Appendix 1) statement of, “within our design team it consists of a copywriter and a designer who produced adverts and branding based around the use of language and text, because if we use images there is a lot of noise and distractions within a photograph or image, rather than looking at language and the personality of typography.” The power of the image within fashion and beauty advertisements seems that the offer of a more fulfilled lifestyle is more powerful than the use of text. If this is true it seems to reflect why it was difficult to find slogans and language next to fashion advertisements and why a lot of adverts mainly use the image as the main communication of the brand product rather than language to offer a more fulfilled life or as an everyday use.
However as the increase of the audiences vote from the language figures compared to the image investigation proved that the offer of a more fulfilled life for the Loreal advert proved that the audience would rather buy into the product if they could see the offer of a more fulfilled life as an image which uses techniques which Bullmore stated that (1996: 54): “Of all the time-honoured accusations levelled at advertising, it’s refusal to reflect a true picture of the real world is one of the most familiar. It is, we are told, a failure to face up to reality.” Proves that the audience would rather buy into product more with the image to show a more fulfilled life compared to Beautifulmeme’s (Appendix 1) statement that, “images there is a lot of noise and distractions within a photograph or image, rather than looking at language and the personality of typography.”
The costings for each advert would be different as Loreal uses a celebrity instead of Toni & Guys professional model for the adverts but both brands have choosen these decisions to commuincate there brand to different market audiences. For both image and language investigations the target audience of 18-25 females choose Toni & Guy both times to buy into the hair product rather than the more fulfiled Loreal advert. From this investigtion, it seems that within selling hair products females aged 18-25 are more likely to buy into the brand offereing the brand as an everyday use. This argues against the disseration question, whether or not a more fulfilled lifestyle is a good marketing technique compared to an offer as the brand as an everyday use product. I am aware that this investigation was only for hair products so for other products or brands the use of a more fulfilled lifestyle may increase or decrease depending on the subject. My verdict for why the majority of the votes went in the favour of Toni & Guy advert agrees with Bullmore “It is, we are told, a failure to face up to reality.”and the reality of the audience can see themselves as the using the more everyday use, atainable hairstyle shown in Toni & Guy’s advert rather than the more luxurious, more sculptured hairstyle used for the Loreal advert.
Buzzwords
“These terms have often been called buzzwords, suggesting a kind of electrical charge as a result of making a connection, hitting the spot, having a finger on the pulse , pressing the right buttons”.Slater (1997:73)
“Comparatives are more likely to feature in the advert slogan, while the adjectives in their base from often occur in the body of the text (called the copy).” Slater (1997:73)
Chapter 3: Needs Must
Andy Park,
I asked Andy Park (appendix 2) are there any brands you have worked for that have asked not to add lifestyle to the product and have marketed the product for the functionality of the everyday use of the brand? Park (appendix 2) stated “Smeg company, asked for just the product as they don’t do lifestyles. Their point was if the product is drop dead gorgous, why would you need to add an extra value to the brand?” It is pretty much similar to Apple, if the product can do the advertising why would want to add lifestyle to the product, although apple advertise with hands to show the functionality of the product, they don’t show characters or peoples faces within the advertisiements offering a morefulfilled lifestyle. It seems that apple are at the end of the scale by producing adverts that show the product in its context and the futher away from apple adverts the more lifestyle is added to the brand. What be interesting is if Apple did add lifestyle to their brand and see whether or not they were succesful than showing the product as its functionality.
Park (appendix 2) then stated that “the reason for why fragrance brands add lifestyle to the product is because they are familiar with the lifestyle of the brand and make social connections with the models in the adverts”. This supports Bergers (1972: 47) theory ,”Men look at women” as the third person.
“The contrast here is with critical theorists who claim to asses actual preferences against a baseline of supposedly real and objective needs, those which can be rationally reconstructed in relation to a vision of a properly human life, and who can use these to critique wants as they are structured by contemporary social relations.” Slater (1997: 52)
“Despite the populist turn in analyses of consumer culture some of the questions raised by the critical theorists such as “how to discriminate between cultures values”. “how we should live.”, it can be argued have not actually been supersesed but have merely been put aside” (Featherstone 1991/ viii)
“We come to most of our decisions in this country as a result of what has been called “the principle of competitive persuasion”. Bullmore (1996: 12)
Chapter 4: ?
Conclusions
Bibliography
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Appendix 1
Commuincation within advertsing, November 2011, Leeds College of Art. Beautifulmeme
“Within our design team it consists of a copywriter and a designer who produced adverts and branding based around the use of language and text, because if we use images there is a lot of noise and distractions within a photograph or image, rather than looking at language and the personality of typography.”
Appendix 2
Language for advertising, January 2012, Leeds College of Art, Andy Parks
Why is it important for fragrence brands to add a lifestyle to thier product so that audiences realte and buy into the product?
“the reason for why fragrance brands add lifestyle to the product is because they are familiar with the lifestyle of the brand and make social connections with the models in the adverts”.
Are there any brands you have worked for that have asked not to add lifestyle to the product and have marketed the product for the functionality of the everyday use of the brand?
“Smeg company, asked for just the product as they don’t do lifestyles. Their point was if the product is drop dead gorgous, why would you need to add an extra value to the brand?”
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