COMM 390: Paper No. 1 due March 23

Write a 1,000- to 1,200-word documented essay in response to the following question. It is due Monday, March 23, the day after spring break. Please list your rererences at the end of the paper and cite them by page number in the text, but try to write in the style of an article in a quality magazine like The New Yorker or New York Review of Books instead of a college term paper. In other words, do not bore your reader! I will post further tips, hints and suggestions to the blog.

In "Ads, Fads, & Consumer Culture," Arthur Asa Berger says Americans "become too caught up in consuming things as a means of validating themselves and proving their worth" (40) He adds:

In consumer cultures, all too often people don't think about what they have but only concern themselves with what they don't have. And is, in part, because advertising constantly reminds them of what they don't have. Needs are finite but desires are infinite, and thus, as soon as our needs have been taken care of, we become obsessed with what we don't have but want. Or more precisely, one might suggest, with what advertising tells us we should want.

Well, that's one way of looking at the world. On the other hand, in their book "Integrated Advertising, Promotion, and Marketing Communications," Kenneth Clow and Donald Baack describe a consumer's buying decision as a process of: (1) recognizing a need; (2) evaluating different ways of meeting that need; and (3) choosing one of them based on rational ("cognitive") and emotional ("affective") attitudes shaped by the consumer's value system. Clow and Baack say:

By appealing to basic values, marketers hope to convince prospective customers that the company's products can help them achieve a desirable outcome. At the same time, creatives [ad copywriters] know marketing communications are considerably more effective in changing a person's attitude about a product than they are in changing a consumer's value structure. (68)

Values listed by Clow and Baack are a comfortable life, equality, excitement, freedom, a fun and exciting life, happiness, inner peace, mature love, personal accomplishment, pleasure, salvation, security, self-fulfillment, self-respect, a sense of belonging, social acceptance and wisdom.

At the end of his discussion of demographics, Berger poses a question:

The primary goal of advertising and marketing, of course, is to shape our behavior; advertising agencies can be looked at as hired guns, whose main job is to destroy consumer resistance and shape consumer desire and action -- whether it be to sell cigarettes, beer, politicians, or, lately, prescription medicines. And in some cases, it is to sell socially positive messages. There is little question that the information advertisers have about consumer motivation and the minds of consumers is a source of power. Is this power used ethically and for constructive purposes? That is the question. (135)

It's a good question, and not one that has easy answers. If you pressed him, Berger might tend to come down on one side of it. Clow and Baack might come down on the other. How would you answer it? In their quest to sell products, do advertisers manipulate their audiences in ways that are harmful? Do they help create attitudes in society that are harmful? Or do they appeal to the best and the worst in us alike? How can marketers and advertisers maintain their own values and ethical standards as they craft messages designed to appeal to others' thoughts, emotions and values?