Lesson 13: Advertising,
Consumerism and
Commodification
Robert Wonser
• “It is useless to invent something that can’t be sold.” – Thomas
Edison
• Pop culture could not have become the default form of culture in a
non-capitalist society.
• Shopping, advertising, and pop culture have developed such an
intrinsic partnership that we no longer are able to separate them in
our minds.
• Remember the Frankfurt School’s critique? Culture, art, religion,
and philosophy are now “sold” and “packaged” in the same way as
commercial products.
• “If mass communications blend together harmoniously, and often
unnoticeably, art, politics, religion, and philosophy with commercials,
they bring these realms of culture to their common denominator—
the commodity form. The music of the soul is also the music of
salesmanship. Exchange value, not truth value, counts.” – Herbert
Marcuse
• Many early children’s cartoons were program length commercials
that promote action figures, dolls, and other figures the same name
as the program.
Advertising
• Advertising as ubiquitous? Understatement..
• The average American is exposed to 3,000
advertisements each day and watches 3 years
worth of television commercials over the course
of a lifetime
• Advertising is designed to influence attitudes
and lifestyle behaviors by covertly suggesting
how we can best satisfy our urges and
aspirations.
Integrating with Pop Culture
• The line between ad culture and pop
culture is virtually nonexistent.
• Think hockey rinks with the boards
covered by ads or nascar drivers as
walking, or driving, billboards.
• Can you think of a place not covered with
ads?
What have we allowed ourselves to become?
• The integration of advertising and pop
culture involves not only products but
entire corporations.
• Part of the mythology of childhood
Ad Culture
• Ads have become an intrinsic part of
modern society. Although we may
condemn its objectives, as an aesthetic
experience we invariably enjoy advertising
in the same way that we enjoy pop culture
texts.
• Ads sway, please and seduce.
•  legislation against ads aimed at
children; tobacco and alcohol
Co-optation
• Most effective strategy: not only to keep up with the
times but to co-opt trends.
• 1960s co-opted the rebellion
– Ex: The Dodge Rebellion, Oldsmobile Youngmobile
• Coke’s stupid song; the Pepsi Generation
• These ads directly incorporated the rhetoric and
symbolism of the counterculture youths, thus creating
the illusion that the goals of the hippies and the soft drink
manufacturers were the same.
• Rebellion through purchasing became the subliminal
thread woven into ad campaigns.
• This is long gone though, right?
No Logo
• Modern day consumerist economic systems
depend almost entirely on the partnership that
has been conveniently forged among the
previously autonomous worlds of business,
media, and entertainment.
• The history of pop culture is intrinsically woven
with the history of advertising.
• As McLuhan put it, advertising has become the
“art of the modern world.”
Branding
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The technique of integrating products with pop culture is called branding.
The intent: to tap into cultural tendencies that governs lifestyle, values and
beliefs, turning the product into symbolic means for becoming part of those
tendencies.
“The most common marketing definition of a brand is that it is a promise—
an unspoken pact between a company and a consumer to deliver a
particular experience.”
First act in branding process: Name your product
Brand names imbue products with identities the same way that given names
to human beings impart a distinct identity, allowing the bearer entry into a
social reality.
Don’t name it you’ll get attached! In branding; that is the point.
Implicit law of the marketplace: trends in pop culture cross over to
advertising and advertising styles mirror what is emerging in pop culture.
Those silly role reversal texting, twittering facebooking parent ads
As P.T. Barnum put it, consumerism can be fun, especially is advertised to
be so.
The Golden Arches
• Kroc bought out the McDonald brothers and successfully
marketed McDonald’s restaurants.
• Marketed to kids (our favorite clown)
• Kroc opened his first restaurant in 1955 coincided with
the rise of youth culture in the 50s.
• To attract adults, and to continue to thrive, he branded
McDonald’s as a place the family could go and eat
• Golden arches reflected the chain perfectly:
• Arches reverberate with mythic symbolism—they beckon
good people to march through them in anticipation of
reaching a world of cleanliness, friendliness, hospitality,
and family values.
• Like a religion: from menu to uniforms, exacted and
imposed standardization.
Placement
• Products placed into pop culture as props
• Ads in Tony Hawk games oddly make it more
realistic then if they weren’t there.
• Embedding can involve cooperation among
brands.
• Ex: neopet.com created a virtual McDonald’s
and Lucky Charms. Pillsbury Doughboy and
Sprint.
• Co-branding is another form of embedding.
• Starbucks inside of Barnes & Noble stores.
• What is the subtext here?
Fetishism
• Remember Marx from your readings?
• Dolls (and toys in general) are fetishes,
objects perceived to possess a life force.
• Powers can be so strong as to constitute
an idol.
• Ex: Lucky penny
Consumerism
• “By the advent of the 80’s, Americans believed in
consumption as salvation, as the only way they
knew: shop ‘til you drop, spend ‘til the end, buy ‘til
you die. Buying was the new time religion, and
the shopping mall [or Wal-Mart] its cathedral of
consumption.” – Kowinski 1993
• Consumerism propels the insatiable belief that we
need what we do not have
• A way of being in the world
• A fundamental frame of reference for relating to
oneself, to others, to the environment as a whole
• The principle socializing force behind this way of
being in the world is television and advertising
Our new drug of choice
• We find reward through purchasing power (the
paycheck and salary) rather than labor power
(the artistic ability to create and make, and the
humanistic ability to contribute and serve)
• TV amplifies our confusion of reality
• Helps make our needs and wants ambiguous
• Advertising is it’s only true enduring program
• The primary role today of most media is to
deliver advertisements
• As McLuhan put it, “the medium is the message”
Consuming = Identity Construction
• What we acquire and own is tightly bound to our
personal identity
• Competitive acquisition has long been an American
institution.
• Comparisons we make are no longer restricted to those
in our own general earnings category, today we are more
likely to be making comparisons with or choose as our
“reference group” people whose incomes are three, four,
or five times his or her own.
•  upscale spending, the new consumerism.
• Advertising and the media have stretched our reference
groups vertically, built on relentless ratcheting up of
standards.
How Bad is it?
• 27% of all households making more than
$100,000 a year say they cannot afford to buy
everything they really need.
– Nearly 20% say they “spend nearly all their income on
the basic necessities of life”
• In the 50-100k range, 39% and ⅓ feel this way
respectively.
• Overall, half the nation’s richest country say they
cannot afford everything they need! Which half
are we talking about?
From Conspicuous Consumption to
…
• Veblen argued that in affluent societies spending
becomes the vehicle through which people establish
social position.
• This conspicuous display of wealth and leisure is the
marker that reveals a man’s income to the outside world.
(wives? Ornamental; used to display a man’s finest
purchases…).
• Rich spent conspicuously as a personal advertisement,
to secure a place in the social hierarchy.
• Everyone else stood below and watched and to the
extent possible, emulated those in the class above.
Consumption was a trickle down process.
Those damn Joneses…
• “keeping up with the Joneses” was the middle class equivalent.
Rather than trying to best your neighbors you wanted simply to keep
up with them.
• Consumer satisfaction, and dissatisfaction, depend less on what a
person has in an absolute sense than on socially formed aspirations
and expectations.
• “standard of living” suggests the point: the standard is a social norm.
• By the 1970s: in the workplace, most employees were exposed to the
spending habits of people across a wider economic spectrum,
particularly those who worked in white-collar settings.
• Daily exposure to economically diverse set of people is one reason
Americans began engaging in more upward comparison.
• The other reason? Advertising.
• Result? New reference group, not those in our social class.
• People who share lifestyles… those who marketers target (clusters)
• The shift to individuality produced its own brand of localized conformity
Intensification of Competitive
Consumption
• At a minimum: average persons spending
increased 30% between 1979-1995.
• Economic trend: diverging income distribution.
Sociological trend: upward shift in consumer
aspirations and the vertical stretching out of
reference groups.
• Growing income inequality yet more of us
aspiring to ‘make it.’
• In short, 4/5ths of Americans were relegated to
earning even less than the people they looked
up to, who were now earning and spending
more.
Competitive Upscale Consumption
• An accident? Nope…
• The escalating lifestyles of the most affluent and
the need that many others felt to meet that
standard, irrespective of their financial ability to
maintain such a lifestyle.
• American consumers are often not conscious of
being motivated by social status and are far
more likely to attribute such a motive to others
than to themselves.
• We have high levels of psychological denial
about the connection between our buying habits
and the social statements they make.
• As the pressures on private spending have escalated, support for
public goods, and for paying axes, has eroded.
• Also, personal financial pressures have also reduced many
Americans’ willingness to support transfer programs to the poor and
near-poor.
• Our national discourse is focused on market exchanges, not quality
of life, or social health.
• GDP is an increasingly poor measure of well-being: it doesn’t factor
in pollution, parental time with children, the strength of the nation’s
social fabric, or the chance of being mugged while walking down the
street.
• We’re getting uneasy with this trap…
• After drugs and crime, people see materialism as the most serious
problem affecting American families.
• One 1990s study: college students reportedly relate far more to
commercials and advertising culture than they do to history,
literature or probably anything else.
Communicating with Commodities
• Lack of desire, like desire, is a social construct.
• Traditionally consumer desires were prompted by
exposure to the possessions and lifestyles of a reference
group—a comparison group located nearby in the social
hierarchy.
• We construct our personal identity in relation to these
social groups, thereby creating a social identity. Even
those of you who shun your associations with these
identities can be fitted into a category of similar
individualists.
• What people spend both reflects social inequalities and
helps to reproduce and even create those distinctions.
Bourdieu and Habitus
• Bourdieu and cultural capital
• Habitus is a habitual condition, set of social
conditionings, or “open set of dispositions.” it is the
mental schema that individuals use to process
subjectively the objective world around them.
• Through the habitus, socially produced tastes become
what we experience as natural, personal, and
individualized (that is, just what we are).
• Consumption patterns and tastes are stratified by
socioeconomic categories such as class, education, and
occupation. They are source, as well as an indicator, of
social differentiation.
Decoding Consumer Meanings
• Material goods can be “read” by observers in a process known as
decoding.
• The structure of use and ownership of products is therefore the
underlying foundation of social meaning; class (and other)
inequalities are at the foundation of the code.
• Can ads create their own association with products?
• Simmel’s fashion: ever-shifting process in which high-status
individuals attempt to keep a step ahead of low-prestige imitators.
• Researchers have found what you wear, drive and own affect how
others treat you.
• Delay at a green light you are less likely to be honked at if you are in
a prestigious car. How you’re dressed? People more likely to return
your accidentally left change in a phone booth. Salespeople?
When Spending Becomes You
• Clothes, cars, watches, living room
furniture, and lipsticks are well-known
purveyors of social position.
• Furnaces, mattresses, bedroom curtains,
foundation powders, and bank accounts
are not. What’s the difference?
• We use the first list, visibly, the others we
don’t. Competitive spending revolves
around socially visible products.
• When only the rich bought from designers, logos
were unnecessary. The market was so small so
participants could identify a designer clothing by
style.
• When the market broadened, to get their
moneys worth in terms of status, the middleclass purchaser needed to make sure that
others knew what they had bought—hence, the
visible logo.
• Logos indicate our status and our identity to
those around us. We are what we buy.
Who spends for status?
• In cosmetics example, women with higher education
levels and higher incomes did more status purchasing.
• Urban and suburban > rural
• Caucasian > African American or Hispanic
• Compulsive buyers are more status oriented
• People who are more materialistic value their
possessions more highly.
• Those who score highly on materialism scales report
lower personal well-being, unfulfilled psychological
needs, insecurity, fragile self-worth, and poor
relationships than those who don’t score highly on
materialism scales.
Personal Identity
• While most experience these tastes as just being
themselves, they are actually being a lot like everyone
else.
• Personal identity does not exist prior to the social world, it
comes into being with it.
– Ex: higher the status of a brand, the more closely people
associated their self image with it.
• It is when traditional markers of identity and position begin
to break down that spending comes to the fore as a more
powerful determinant of social status.
• Worth noting: a significant number of branded and highly
advertised products, there are no quality differences
discernable to consumers with the labels removed; and
• Variation in prices typically exceeds variation in quality,
with the difference being in part a status premium.
Ah, plastic…
• Debtors pay an average of $1,000 a year
in interest fees alone.
• Credit card link is Pavlovian:
• Adding the MC logo causes people to
spend more.
• Credit card tips tend to be higher than
cash tips.
See-want-borrow-and-buy
• See-want-borrow-and-buy is a comparative process; desire
is structured by what we see around us. Our reference
group.
• Where you stand relative to those with whom you compare
yourself has a significant impact on your spending.
• Americans have a psychological resistance to admitting and
recognizing the extent to which they follow the lead of
others.
• The further away from those better off than you the more
you save! (almost 3k a year).
• The millionaires next door? How do they do it? They never
change their reference group!
• The more education a person has, the less they save!
• Whatever your income level, your comparative position has
a major effect on your saving.
Our old friend TV
• The more TV a person watches the more they spend.
• Likely explanation? What we see on TV inflates our sense of what’s
normal. The lifestyles depicted on TV are far different from what the
average American’s: with few exceptions, TV characters are upper
middle-class or rich.
• Studies show the more TV a person watches the more likely they
are to think American households have tennis courts, private planes,
convertibles, maids and swimming pools, the proportion who are
millionaires, have had cosmetic surgery, belong to a private gym,
suffer from dandruff, bladder control problems, gingivitis, athlete’s
foot and hemorrhoids.
• The inflated sense of consumer norms promulgated by the media
raises people’s aspirations and leads them to buy more.
• Correlation between debt and excessive TV: Merck Family Fund
poll, those who reported that they “watch too much TV” rose steadily
with indebtedness. 56% “heavily” in debt also said they watched too
much TV.
Tv…
• When TV was introduced it led to an
increase in a particular crime; larceny.
• In one study: each additional hour of TV
watched led to spend an extra $208 a
year.
• TV and social pressure in one’s daily life
are interchangeable sources of consumer
upscaling.
A Denial
• We live in denial of our spending habits.
• 1992’s actual $182 billion in debt was
thought to be a mere $710 billion.
• Not paying attention is also common.
• Denial also helps navigate the moral
conflicts associated with consumption.
Wow…
• Americans give their children more in pocket money than
the world’s half billion poorest adults earn each year.
• The Emulation process never ends: Growth is the goal in
our economy and our economy is built on consumer
spending.
• Beneath—indeed driving—our system of competitive
consumption are deep class inequalities. Not everyone
became (or still is) middle class.
• The standard answer to the amount of money a family of
four need to live in “reasonable comfort” has been
$1,000 – 2,000 more than whatever the median family
income happens to be.
• Luxuries of yesterday have become necessities today
(cable TV, cell phone, computer, internet).
Irrationality of it All
• If we measure our satisfaction by how well we are doing
compared to others, general increases in affluence do not
raise our personal satisfaction (as mounting evidence
shows).
• Why do we participate then? Psychological factors, and both
social and economic forces keep us in the system.
• Technology – how fast does it improve?
• With widespread adoption it becomes a necessity even if we
forgo it.
• New products promise freedom but often feel enslaving.
• The “built environment” demands a car.
• “consumer choice” is subject to social, infrastructural, and
market constraints.
• Earning to buy turns into buying to keep earning.
• Have you ever noticed how much you want it before you
have it but once you have it it means very little to you?