| Persuasive Communication: Advertiser's Play On Consumer Emotions |
In a world where humans are bombarded with “approximately 1,500 advertisements a day,” advertisers need to relay a successful message about a product, in a limited amount of airtime and or ad space, while ensuring that the advertisements message, reaches it’s targeted audience. (par.1) For advertisers getting a product noticed, requires a strategic plan. By eliciting emotional responses versus rational responses, advertisers use a form of persuasive communication, to address a consumer’s unconscious needs.
More often than not, many of the product advertisements consumers see, read or listen to on a daily basis, are advertisements for products, which serve no functional biological or physiological need. Obviously consumers need a reason to buy a product, and many times no logical reason exists. If no logical reason for purchasing a product exists, then advertisers need to find some way to communicate with consumers about a product, which will “stimulate, facilitate and reinforce,” a consumer’s un-rational choice to buy the advertised product. (par.1)Thus, companies like the cosmetic giant, Estee Lauder link their product advertisements to consumer’s emotional needs, thereby giving consumers a reason to purchase their products.
Cosmetics, unlike food and water, are not required to maintain life. If a consumer doesn’t purchase a bottle of perfume, he or she will not die as a result. Advertisers know that consumers consciously realize that certain products are not necessary to maintain life and therefore the decision to purchase such a product is based on an un-rational choice. If a product does not serve a rational purpose then “advertisers [need] to circumvent the logical, cautious, [and] skeptical powers,” consumers develop, to try and reach the “unfulfilled urges and motives swirling” around “in the bottom half of [consumer’s] minds,” which warrant the consumer’s decision to make un-rational product choices. (Fowles P. 73)
 Persuasive communication, which, warrant’s the consumer’s decision’s to make un-rational product choices and can be seen in almost any advertisement. Take Estee Lauder’s “Sensuous,” perfume advertisement for example. The two-paged advertisement has been meticulously planned so as to forge connections between Estee Lauder’s product, and consumer’s emotions. Set on a black backdrop, the advertisement’s right hand page, features big, bold, purple, advertising text, which, tells the consumer that the product goes by the name of Estee Lauder “Sensuous.” Directly below the product name in smaller white text, the advertisement reads, “Every women wears it her way.” Below the “every women wears it her way,” caption, lies the product information, i.e., information about where the product can be purchased and finally below the product information, lies a picture of the product itself. On the left hand side, or left page of the advertisement, there is an isolated model. At first glance we find nothing suspicious about the product, the product’s information and the model’s placement. We naturally assume that the product and its information have been located on the right page of the advertisement because magazines naturally require us to grab pages from the right hand side and flip the pages leftward. Locating the product information on the right hand page seems logical. Until we stop and realize that all the product information has been located on the right hand page, leaving the model isolated on the left.
The isolated model, a young women, scarcely dressed in what appears to be men’s attire, has light brown, bed-ridden hair. Her eyebrows have been brushed to give them a disheveled look. Her lips painted with a nude lip-gloss and her cheeks colored with a soft pink blush, to give her skin a flushed look. She has a seductive, come hither look on her face, with her mouth slightly open. Her clothing has been carefully placed so as to reveal a small portion of her left breast, the curvature of her left hip and her black underwear. She has been set against a black backdrop and her only goal, is to catch our attention. To appeal to our sexual needs and desires.
The appeal has been well planned out. While the product is intended for women, the advertising company realizes that the vast majority of men, will buy perfume for a women at some point or another in their life time. As a result the advertising company uses the model to play on the basic biological criteria men have in regards to sex. This, criteria can best be summed up as follows; “a women must be healthy, she must be young, she must be receptive and she must be impregnable.” (par. 9) By portraying a young, healthy, attractive, impregnable, looking women in the advertisement, the advertising department at Estee Lauder, hopes to forge a psychological connection in the minds of men between, buying the company’s product and increasing a male’s chance of producing offspring.
Contrary to the sexual appeal used in the advertisement to attract male buyers, the advertisement appeals to its female audience by eliciting a “need to dominate.” (Fowles P. 82) The advertisement’s statement, “every women wears it her way,” conveys to its female audience the sense of “control [over] one’s environment.” (82) The white, men’s dress shirt, which has been placed on the model, reinforces the idea of a women being in control. Society may say that, “the dress shirt should be worn by a man,” but the model in the picture breaks societal norms. The model lives by her own rules, not societies. The advertisement thus attempts to psychologically reinforce the idea in the minds of women, that should they buy this product, they too will be in control.
Though the advertisement’s appeal to men and women may be different, the goal remains the same. By using a carefully planned out and placed model, the advertisement “[gives] form to [consumer’s] deep-lying desires,” and “[arrests] attention and [affects] communication,” by providing consumers with the “[state] of being that [consumers] privately yearn for.” (73) Further, by separating the model from the product, the sex appeal used in the advertisement does not “obliterate the product information” and or “[reduce] the brand recall.” (78) By using the magazine’s natural structure to lay out the advertisement in such a way that the product information gets viewed first, followed by the model and the subconscious message, then forcing the consumer to take a second glance at the product information before flipping to the next page, the advertising company stands the best change at eliminating any reduction in product recall that may otherwise be associated with the use of sexual appeals.
In the end, while there “is no evidence,” to suggest “that advertising can get people to do things contrary to their self-interest,” there is evidence to support the claim that advertisers can and do appeal to consumer’s emotions, through forging subconscious links between advertised products and emotional needs in the minds of consumers as we have shown. (89) Thus as Michael Petracca and Madeleine Sorapure put it, “consumers [would be] well advised to pay attention to [advertiser’s] underlying appeals in order to avoid responding to [advertisements] unthinkingly.” (73)
Works Cited:
Fowles, Jim “Advertising’s Fifteen Basic Appeals.” Common Culture: Reading and Writing About American Popular Culture. Patracca, Michael and Sorapure, Madeleine Ed. New Jersey: Pearson 2007. 73
Riemsdijk, Celine Home Page. 6 May 2005 http://www.unc.edu/~celinev/Celine
Taflinger, PhD Richard F. Home Page. 28 May 1996. http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~taflinge/sex.html |
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