Question:

This is an Argumentative Essay for my English language class.

The essay topic is:
-Advertising is primarily a brainwashing tool to convince us to buy products we don’t need.

20 valid and relevant references are required for this essay.

Answer:

Title: Advertising is primarily a brainwashing tool to convince us to buy products we do not need

 

Summary

This paper explores the various ways in which advertising brainwashes consumers into buying products that they do not need. The paper has found out that it is true that the brainwashing effect of today’s advertising strategies is influencing consumers into buying products and services that they do not need. The advertisers first exploit consumers’ emotional needs, for example the quest for power, to create desire. The targeted consumers become brainwashed and end up buying the products so as to satisfy the newly-created desire and not to fulfill an inherent need. This results in a culture of consumerism and conspicuous consumption.

Some of the most commonly used advertising strategies that brainwash consumers into buying certain products include subliminal advertising, puffery, and indirect information transfer. Subliminal messages are normally designed in such a way as to influence the consumer’s sub-conscience, thereby promoting certain buying behaviors in a covert manner. Advertising is observed to entail the creation of qualitatively distinct psychological motives that bring about certain consumption patterns. Although no force is used in creating a brainwashing effect through advertising, many critics abhor the reckless manner in which advertisers play around with consumers’ emotional states. For the public, the feeling that their intelligence is being insulted sometimes makes them shun adverts.

Main Paper

In today’s world advertisers to craft adverts aimed at convincing others to buy products. In many cases, the efforts made through advertising convince many of us to keep buying as many products and services as possible, some of which are not only unnecessary but also unaffordable. In other words, advertising changes our thought processes, thereby brainwashing us.

Adverts normally take the form of notices, motion pictures, or films that inform people about a product or a service. For an advertisement to be effective there must be a product, a message, a medium, and a target group. In an advert, a message may be designed in such a way that it is informative and argumentative. Alternatively, it can be designed in a psychological and emotional manner. In today’s materialistic world, majority of adverts are overly laden with psychological and emotional overtones. Some adverts contain well-designed messages that easily attract our attention, enabling us to develop some interest in a product. If one is interested in a product, desire is created and one feels the need to buy a product (Stavrakakis, 2009).

In the postmodern culture, advertising has become synonymous with the capitalist economy. According to Bellinson (2006), it addresses its human subjects in a manner that exceeds all monetary exchange considerations. It not only sells to people the products of their desire, but also changes this desire, and in the process transforming the people themselves. This brainwashing effect is evident in the manner in which the people of today have become consumers.

In advertising, aspects of fantasy cannot be wished away as they are an integral part of all appealing advertisements. While in the fantasy world, the subject of an advert is not able to engage in critical thinking (Bellinson, 2006). Bellinson (2006) discusses this issue from the methodological perspective of ideology and psychoanalysis. Bellinson concludes that although ideology remains a relevant ideology, it still remains incomplete. On the other hand, psychoanalytic theory is a source of multiple avenues through which an interpretation can be made on how the conscious and unconscious minds are affected by advertising.

For one to understand the extent to which advertising functions as a brainwashing tool, one of the issues that should be put on focus is subliminal messages (Ehrenberg, 2000). In subliminal advertising, messages are presented below the individual’s level of consciousness. A classic example is the words that appear during a movie in a single frame, which are long enough to be picked up by the subconscious but too short for the viewer to become aware of. Indeed, the issue of subliminal advertising has remained a bone of contention between skeptics and advertising agencies for many years. Byrne (2000) states that this contention may be traced back to 1957 at the time of the notorious Jim Vicary experiments were carried out. Since then, the advertising industry has faced accusations of brainwashing the public and the consumers into buying things that they do not need. In subliminal advertising, the grand strategy entails preying on the consumer’s sub-conscience (Han, 2010). In strategy, the advertisers simply embed words, images, or sound in audio, video, and print advertising media in an effort to prevent them from being consciously heard or seen, as a way of helping them sell their products or services.

There is no formal research or any empirical evidence indicating that subliminally embedded images affect consumer behavior (Lippke, 1989). However, as reported by Byrne (2000), three quarters of the US public believe that such an effect exists. Byrne (2000) also reports on the public speaking presentations and writings of Wilson Brian Key, whose theories have been fiercely discredited by academicians even though they are viewed as credible by a large section of the public. In the face of accusations of brainwashing the public, advertisers appear to have resorted to using subliminal messages satirically (Byrne, 2000).

Whenever such controversial issues arise, corporations resort to institutional advertising efforts whose aim is normally to express the viewpoint of the management on matters where vital interests are at stake Sethi, 1979. According to Sethi (1979), such corporation communications tend to blur the line between purely commercial speech and political rhetoric. Indeed, many people find it difficult to differentiate between idea/issue advertising and image/goodwill advertising. It appears that many consumers tend to be brainwashed by advertising because of not being able to differentiate between these two forms of advertising.

According to Moore (1982), many advertising techniques that are common in the capitalist world are designed to subconsciously alter the attitudes and preferences of consumers towards target products. As for subliminal advertising, Moore (1982) points out that there is marginal evidence that this kind of stimuli can influence consumers’ affective reactions. However, Moore is quick to point out that researchers are yet to document literature on the relevance of this influence on marketing. Nevertheless, contradictory findings exist relating to the ability by subliminal directives to influence actions or motives of consumers. In this case, the main source of controversy is on compatibility with theoretical conceptions of motivation and perception. For marketing specialists, the main concern in terms of theory is behavioral or choice responses (Theus, 1994).

The act of brainwashing in advertising also entails the notion of violating consumers’ autonomy. In this regard, advertisers have been accused of making use of techniques that blatantly manipulate and control consumers’ behavior (Arrington, 2009). Apart from subliminal advertising, the other commonly criticized techniques include puffery and indirect information transfer. It is common for researchers to carry out studies that focus on both sides of the debate: defense and criticism. One such study was done by Arrington (2009). After an analysis of both sides, Allington concluded that four main concepts stand out: free choice, rational desire, autonomous desire, and control. In terms of application to advertising, Allington’s (2009) verdict is that advertising is not guilty of intrinsically violating the autonomy of consumers with regard to free choice, rational desire, autonomous desire, and control. Ordinarily, findings of this nature spark of heated debates on ethical issues in advertising.

Advertising also entails the creation of qualitatively distinct psychological motives that bring about certain consumption patterns (Taylor, 2009). In all these motives, power dynamics are always at play, and the antagonists are advertisers on the one hand and consumers on the other. According to Rucker (2009) there is abundance of literature indicating that states of this power tend to increase an individual’s own internal desires. Out of this finding, Rucker (2009) proposes that high power among consumers leads to a greater preference for products viewed as possessing utility, for example in the form of quality and performance.

Advertising is also seen by some as taking advantage of consumer’s quest for power, influencing them in the process (Zhang, 1996). In Rucker’s (2009) view, those who are powerless choose to embark on conspicuous or visible consumption that is an indication of status to others. Advertisers appear to be sure of continuity in consumers’ quest for ways of expressing their power, and this presents them with a myriad of opportunities to brainwash and end up convincing them to buy products that they do not need. The implications of Rucker’s findings are broad, and they can be used to explain why advertisers target different market segments with their advertising as well as why there is a sharp rise in consumer debt in the contemporary times.

The debate on the power of advertising to brainwash people in the society has been a concern even for the civil society, within which anti-advertising movements have been cropping up in recent times (Santilli, 2008). For these movements, the main areas of concern include ad creep into social spaces, corporate sponsorship, and disrespect for consumers’ intelligence. Crane & Matten (2007) explains that ad creep is the invasion of hitherto ad-free social spaces by advertisers. Ad creep is possibly the biggest criticism of marketing communications today. Critics abhor the senseless manner in which advertisements are being displayed virtually every public space available in the form of corporate branding, promotion, or sponsorship. Majority of people dislike it because of the way it manipulates them into buying things that are of no absolute necessity to their lives (Marquez, 2009). Some of the most blatantly invaded public spaces include television and radio programs, editorial pages of newspapers, city streets, and subways.

Because advertising is sometimes ignored by consumers, advertisers have to keep coming up with ingenious ways of making the presence of their messages known, sometimes by advertising in the most unlikely places. This makes advertising practically impossible to avoid. Persistent exposure to adverts may make consumers feel brainwashed, exploited, and sometimes even provoked to resentment and hostility. For civil society anti-advertising campaigners, the solution to this problem is to focus on adverts that convey more informative messages to consumers. Regarding corporate sponsorship, many people have no problem with the practice of sponsoring events (Zhang, 1999). What they abhor is the situation where such advertisers end up piling up pressure on the beneficiaries of the sponsorships or the media houses they invest in to make changes to their content. On the whole picture, sponsorship remains relatively accepted by the public, even by the groups that share anti-consumerist values.

Consumers also feel brainwashed by feeling that the advertisers are being disrespectful of their intelligence (Leiss, 1990). Many advertisers, in efforts to create the greatest impact within the shortest available time, make their adverts as simple as possible. In some instances, this simplicity is pushed too far, to the extent that the consumer’s intelligence is insulted. Although the use of slogans such as slogans, repetition, and jingles raises recall measurements, it may create the awful feeling of being brainwashed, particularly if overused. Sometimes scientific claims are made using demonstrations that are so simple that they seem to poke fun at the consumers’ supposed ignorance.

Some critics put into perspective the notion of force in advertising in attempting to create a better understanding of the act of brainwashing. Almost all advertisers undoubtedly exploit consumers’ emotions to brainwash them into buying certain products. However, force does not come out as an option in advertising. Perhaps the closest an advertiser can go in applying force is to blanket coverage his product, something that is even different from being part of a captive audience. In principle, the person watching the advert is always free to hop from one channel to the other, throw away the company’s brochure, or look away from the billboard. Although brainwashing is a deliberate and manipulative effort to change one’s belief, it need involve the use of force. Advertising does not entail the use of force; it entails a deliberate effort to change the mind of a potential buyer through various persuasion techniques (McCarthy, 2002).

The impunity with which advertisers brainwash consumers is enough reason for the public to be extremely skeptical about the explosion in consumer needs. Incidentally, our brains tend to associate very powerful emotions with abstract ideas, a manifestation of how easy it is to associate a certain product with a basic desire. In this case, the need is normally not for the product, but for the fulfillment of a desire that has been created by the advertiser. As Irving (1991) points out, a consumer normally accepts the product merely as a proxy. In such a scenario, it is not surprising that the consumer will feel vaguely disappointed by the purchase after reaching home.

In conclusion, advertising is indeed a brainwashing tool that merely convinces us to buy products that we do not need. This brainwashing activity is created whenever advertisers create a desire in consumers’ minds. The association created by the advertiser between the product and a certain need creates the impression that there is indeed a need to be fulfilled by the product. In reality, though, all that exists is a psychological desire created through advertising. Such an act of brainwashing has created a culture of consumerism in today’s capitalist world.

 

References

Arrington, R. (2009) Advertising and Behavior Control, Journal of Business Ethics, 1(1), 3-12.

Bellinson, R. (2006) Theory in Culture: Toward a Psychoanalytic criticism of Advertising, Georgia State University Digital Archive.

Byrne, C. (2000) The effects of subliminal advertising on consumer recall, Undergraduate thesis, Dublin, National College of Ireland.

Crane, B. & Matten, J. (2007) Integrating ethical brands into our consumption lives, Journal of Brand Management, 14(2), 396–409.

Ehrenberg, A. (2000) Repetitive Advertising and the Consumer, Journal of Advertising Research, 40(2), 39-48.

Han, S. (2010) Persuasion and culture: advertising appeals in individualistic and collective societies, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 30, 326-350.

Irving, H. (1991) Little elves and mind control: advertising and its critics, Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media & Culture, 4(2), 1-10.

Leiss, W. (1990) Social communication in advertising: persons, products & images of well-being, New York: Free Press.

Lippke, R. (1989) Advertising and the Social Conditions of Autonomy, Business & Professional Ethics Journal, 8(4), 35-58.

Marquez, F. (2009) Advertising Content: Persuasion, Information or Intimidation? Journalism Quarterly, 53(3), 482-491.

McCarthy, M. (2002) Effects of typographic factors in advertising-based persuasion: A general model and initial empirical tests, Psychology & Marketing, 19(7), 663–691.

Moore, T.  (1982) Subliminal Advertising: What You See Is What You Get, The Journal of Marketing, 46(2), 38-47.

Rucker , D. (2009) Conspicuous consumption versus utilitarian ideals: How different levels of power shape consumer behavior, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 45(3), 549-555.

Santilli, P. (2008) The informative and persuasive functions of advertising: A moral appraisal, Journal of Business Ethics, 2(1), 27-33.

Sethi , S. (1979) Institutional/Image Advertising and Idea/Issue Advertising as Marketing Tools: Some Public Policy Issues, The Journal of Marketing,  43(1), 68-78.

Stavrakakis, Y. (2009) Objects of Consumption, Causes of Desire: Consumerism and Advertising in Societies of Commanded Enjoyment, New York: Penguin Books.

Taylor, K. (2009) Brainwashing: The Science of Thought Control, London: Routledge.

Theus, K. (1994) Subliminal advertising and the psychology of processing unconscious stimuli: A review of research, Psychology and Marketing, 11(3), 271–290.

Zhang, Y, (1996) Responses to Humorous Advertising: The Moderating Effect of Need for Cognition, Journal of Advertising, 25(1), 15-32.

Zhang, Y. (1999) Moderating Effects of Need for Cognition on Responses to Positively versus Negatively Framed Advertising Messages, Journal of Advertising, 28(2) 1-15.