Consumerism in Advertisement
Shannon Li included in Research PaperShannon Li
Daniel Johnson
EAST-UA 950 002
13 Dec. 2021
Consumerism In Advertisement
After World War II, with the economic recovery and prosperity, consumption gradually replaced production and became the core of urban residents’ lives. Western developed countries led by the United States began to enter the consumer society one after another. In Asia, Japan has gone through the most prosperous 1980s in its reflections on wars. At the same time, both South Korea and China have entered a stage of rapid economic development. At this stage, the fatal crisis of capitalism in the era of heavy industry and colonialism was hidden by the economic climax, while at the same time it was exploiting the humanity more covertly. From the post-war era until the arrival of the 21st century, consumer capitalism has always been hidden under the beauty of economic development, affecting the daily lives of Asian people.
Consumerism, in essence, is a powerful variant of capitalism and a manifestation of capitalism-it promises all happiness and beauty in the form of fetishism to maintain and suppress the inherent contradictions and crises of capitalism. The consumer society is destined to be the best habitat for advertising. One of the main characteristics of the consumer era is ubiquitous advertising. And one of the essences of advertising is consumerism, which is to encourage consumption, stimulate consumption, and lead and even create consumer demand. Consumerism in Asia in the 1980s took a ride on technological development. In the context of the technological explosion, the spread of symbols depends on emerging media. Advertisements are spread more widely through emerging technologies such as VRC, radio, and television.
The distinguishing feature of the era of mass culture is the dramatic increase in symbols. Especially the dramatic increase in image symbols, and “visualization” has been placed in a prominent position. We live in a symbolic empire. The statement that advertising is the “king” of this symbolic empire is a bit exaggerated, but it does not falsely show the prominent position of advertising in the current society. The current society is that advertising is everywhere, where “encountering” various advertisements is one of the daily experiences that modern people are familiar with. The American communication professor Sut Jhally described in his book Image-Based Culture the current situation of society being filled with information.
“In the contemporary world, messages about goods are all pervasive-advertising has increasingly filled up the spaces of our daily existence. Our media are dominated by advertising images, public space has been taken over by ‘information’ about products, and most of our sporting and cultural events are accompanied by the name of a corporate sponsor” (Jhally 200).
In the world he described, advertisements are flooded within people’s symbol systems. Sut Jhally explained the process of using symbols to represent products to engage the media then output into information. The symbolic language of daily life is squeezed by advertisements. In this squeezing process, advertising sells not only products but also a consumer social order that is universally involved and cannot be circumvented or not allowed to be circumvented. Because advertising cannot be avoided. Advertising manages the needs of consumers. It teaches people what to expect from consuming every item. In other words, it tells people what each object gives them, or an object gives them what kind of results will it bring.
Andrew C. McKevitt is introducing Sony’s attempt to promote Betamax in 1985. Betamax is a VCR that can record video on tape in a portable way. “A brief paragraph beneath the image explained in simple language just what the Betamax did—what, when, how, and how long it recorded. The ads finished by evoking the image of empowerment: ‘You’re always stuck watching what the networks want Why not watch what you want instead’” (McKevitt 138)? In the example given by Andrew C. McKevitt, Sony directly gave consumers the reason to buy Betamax: “You want it”. Sony created a demand order in the process of this advertisement, that is, people need a video recorder. Sony promotes Betamax by creating demand for consumers. It is undeniable that VCR had a positive impact on the Japanese cultural industry in the 1980s, but the positive potential of the product is amplified in publicity and is also a part of advertising. Sut Jhally pointed out that because advertising is to achieve a positive publicity purpose, then it must show the positive side of the product. But this positivity is usually not directly related to the product.
“If goods themselves are not the locus of perceived happiness, then they need to be connected in some way with those things that are. Thus advertising promotes images of what the audience conceives of as “the good life”: Beer can be connected with anything from eroticism to male fraternity to the purity of the old West; food can be tied up with family relations or health; investment advice offers early retirements in tropical settings. The marketplace cannot directly offer the real thing, but it can offer visions of it connected with the purchase of products” (Jhally 201).
The advertisement itself does not have a positive meaning, but the promotion adds a positive necessity to the product. What advertising appeals to is not the core of modernity—the spirit of rationality—but the core of postmodernity, that is, the commercial construction of an anti-rational spirit for infinite interpretation and generation of infinite meaning. Therefore, as a symbol, the advertisement itself is separated from the product itself in everything that is laid to promote the enthusiasm of the product. As a result, more and more advertisements have gradually become irrelevant to the details of the product itself and are devoted to the emotional clues that are irrelevant. Through the misappropriation of cultural resources and the mechanism of discourse conversion, savvy advertising makers can hide the consumerist nature of advertisements just right, and replace them with a non-commercial, non-utilitarian face—or tenderness, or following good temptations, or respectful teaching—that will give the audience a series of illusions, as if they are seeing scenes of family dramas, charity films, or science and education films, but they have nothing to do with consumption. Therefore, this society has moved from “function” and “entity” to “symbol” and “simulacrum”. Only signs and simulacra can transcend the real world and create endless illusions of a better life for capital.
Japan in the 1980s and 1990s was the era when consumerism prevailed. Before the Plaza Accord, the Japanese economy had been in a booming bubble. This prosperity also brought soil for the spread of consumerism. Coca-Cola used “I Feel Coke” as a slogan in TV commercials produced for Japan in the 1980s. In the 1987 “I Feel Coke” TV commercial, Coca-Cola filmed many scenes where young people were very happy with Coca-Cola in their hands. This montage technique connects Coca-Cola with happy, energetic youth. From a semiotic point of view, in the visual expression of advertising, signifier, every scene is full of strong “voiceover”, signified. This advertisement brings the audience into the setting scene by reproducing various desirable happiness scenes in real life. The purpose of Coca-Cola is to make consumers think that Coca-Cola is the cause of their happiness in this connection, and this is a fashion trend. So, advertising doesn’t just encourage people to buy products. It also brings people to a world where they learn how to connect special things with special social concepts and meanings. Therefore, even if advertising cannot persuade people to buy a particular product, it is still a winner, because its main goal is to force society to accept the meaning of the advertising language or object and its relationship with people’s lives. In short, the main purpose of advertising is to make people believe in and obey the rules that it bestows on people.
Jean Baudrillard is one of the most important social scientists and philosophers in France in the 20th century. Because of the importance of advertising in consumer culture, his book The System of Objects repeatedly mentioned the operating logic of advertising as a symbolic communication medium. “The entire modern environment is thus transposed onto the level of a sign system, namely ATOMOSPHERE, which is no lover produced by the way any particular element is handled, nor by the beauty or ugliness of that element” (Baudrillard 40). Jean Baudrillard found that in today’s society, signs are gradually decoupled from the signifier that refers to signs. As a medium for propagating goods, advertisements are becoming more and more detached from the goods themselves. Advertising is not just an appendage of the object system. Because the role of advertising is never strictly to provide information. Advertising as a whole creates a useless and unnecessary universe. It is a pure, woven “meaning”. Advertising has no contribution to the production or the direct practical application of things, but it plays an inseparable role in the object system, not only because it is related to consumption, but also because it itself has become an object of consumption.
Penguin’s Memory: Shiawase Monogatari is a 1985 Japanese animation film. This movie uses the image of a cartoon penguin to tell a cruel story about war and love. The male protagonist Mike and the female protagonist Jill experience love in the trauma of the post-war period. But instead of treating this movie as a pure movie, it is more of a promotion for a beverage brand. Suntory Beer first printed the images of these two cartoon penguins on beer cans in 1983. This kind of publicity not only links the image of Penguin to the taste of beer but also makes Penguin itself a brand. At the moment the penguin is born, the penguin can survive without beer. Because the penguin does not contain any information about the beer itself, nor does it exist depending on the beer. This pure, woven penguin is an objects to be consumed independent of beer. Penguins were born to promote beer, and in the end, they themselves became the objects to be consumed.
American philosopher Fredric Jameson pointed out in his article Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism that contemporary society is gradually disintegrating the meaning of signs. The existence of meaninglessness itself is replacing the meaning of signs. “… in a cultural form of image addiction which, by transforming the past visual mirages, stereotypes or texts, effectively abolishes any practical sense of the future and of the collective project, thereby abandoning the thinking of future change to fantasies of sheer catastrophe and inexplicable cataclysm……” (Jameson “Postmodernism” VI). The deconstruction of meanings is the projection of postmodern society. In modern society, advertising is responsible for promoting consumption. While in postmodern society, advertising itself is the objects to be consumed.
A very representative postmodern derivative work is “M.C.ドナルドはダンスに夢中なのか？最終鬼畜道化師ドナルド・Ｍ” published on the Niconico website in 2008. This is a spoof of Ronald McDonald’s video, which shows an absurd look and feel by adding background music and creating a “twitch” picture. The original video is a McDonald’s advertisement in Japan between 2004 and 2007. Ronald McDonald’s own image is actually the same as Suntory Beer’s penguin. Their existence has nothing to do with the product itself. Although the derivative work that has received much attention spreads the existence of Ronald McDonald on a meaningless level, it does not tell the audience what McDonald’s sells. This lack of meaning makes the existence of the advertising image itself added “meaning”. The derivative work directly expresses how the advertisement itself is used as an object to be consumed.
The advertising system creates a hierarchy of status and prestige and forces us to accept them. Every commodity is a symbol, which has a special meaning and status in this system. It can position a person with a special power and status. The idol industry in Japan has continued to develop since the end of the war. The idol industry eventually gradually broke away from the artists, or idols themselves, under the influence of the capitalist trend. In the end, the idol industry completely transformed people into products, and in the process of this change, idols themselves also played a role as an advertisement. As described by Jimmie L. Reeves, idols are like advertisements which “contributes to the production, maintenance, repair and transformation of social reality by animating aritual of social typification and individualization” (qtd. in Stevens and Hosokawa 241). In the second half of the 20th century in Japan, idols were produced more in the music industry. The TV companies discovered a business opportunity to build singers into products to make money. By gathering singers and holding TV events, they created fan circles centered on singers or groups. This kind of fan circle is usually exclusive and uses music taste as the criterion for distinguishing among them. When the audiences are not just listeners of music, but supporters of the singers, the mentality of the audience are not just a bystander. The popularity of their singers can be regarded as a representative of their musical taste in their eyes. Therefore, this kind of exclusive fan structure usually requires a common sense of identity, that is, to position themselves in a higher taste through consumption.
In the article So Close and yet So Far by Carolyn S. Stevens and Shuhei Hosokawa, they found that as early as the 60s TV show The Best Ten, they had already added a ranking to the singer’s program and used real-time updates to consume the audience’s fetish of idol (Stevens and Hosokawa 229). They analyzed the role of music rankings in the idol industry. “The rankings, which tell audiences what is’ hot’, act as a tool to produce a feeling of shared taste” (Stevens and Hosokawa 233). In this standard, The sales ranking of songs shaped by TV companies through programs has become a model for fans to judge their music tastes. By using musicians as products, a hierarchy is established among their respective consumer segments. In this model, idols serve as both an advertisement and a product. As a result, the audiences are forced to squeeze each other into the system created by idols. Idols, as artists, were squeezed out of creative freedom (Stevens and Hosokawa 229), in order to create economic benefits for the company. While the audiences were squeezed into sales for idols in order to satisfy the model of desire of their own musical tastes. In this process of squeezing, both parts contributed surplus value to the expansion of consumerism.
According to Karl Marx, under capitalism, the ruling class and the owners try to create new “demands” on people and try to alienate traditional needs and even give them a capital value. In a capitalist society, the biggest problem for workers is not only the exploitation of economic interests and surplus-value but more importantly, they are alienated and separated from their true interests and their own creations. They work only to create economic benefits without creating any sense of spiritual accomplishment and the positive externalities of altruism (Marx “Comment on James Mill”). This is capitalism’s alienation of people. In a society where traditional semiotic meanings are all deconstructed by postmodern consumerism, advertisements composed of pure meanings forcefully induce and call viewers to identify with the product, thus becoming a consumer. Therefore, people’s desires in a consumerist society are created, as Stijn Vanheule explained in his article Capitalist Discourse, Subjectivity and Lacanian Psychoanalysis: “Marcuse (1964) suggests that capitalism integrates people in a model of consumerism, where they work and consume more than they need. This not only has damaging effects on the environment and on social life but also contaminates mental life by installing false needs that people want to satisfy” (Vanheule). They lost their universality in the commodity fetishes that were released, and gradually alienated them into inhumanity.
Work Cited
Baudrillard, Jean. The System of Objects (Latin American and Iberian Studies Series). Verso, 1996.
Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” New Left Review, 1 Aug. 1984, newleftreview.org/issues/i146/articles/fredric-jameson-postmodernism-or-the-cultural-logic-of-late-capitalism.
Jhally, Sut. Image-Based Culture Advertising and Popular Culture. The World and I, 1990.
Kimura, Shinji, director. Penguin’s Memory - Shiawase Monogatari. 1985.
Marx, Karl. “Comment on James Mill.” Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, 1844.
McKevitt, Andrew. “A Medium but Not a Message: The VCR and Cultural Globalization.” Consuming Japan: Popular Culture and the Globalizing of 1980s America (Studies in United States Culture), Illustrated, University of North Carolina Press, 2017, pp. 131–53.
Stevens, Carolyn, and Shūhei Hosokawa. So Close and Yet So Far: Humanizing Celebrity in Japanese Music Variety Shows, 1960s-1990s. 2001.
Vanheule, Stijn. “Capitalist Discourse, Subjectivity and Lacanian Psychoanalysis.” Frontiers, 2016, www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01948/full#B15.
みくる さん. “M.C.ドナルドはダンスに夢中なのか？最終鬼畜道化師ドナルド・Ｍ.” ニコニコ動画, 16 Jan. 2008, www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm2057168.