According to Jib Fowles, people get attracted by advertisements due to the advertisers’ employment of tactics that are emotional and sub rational and hence appealing to the potential consumers.
According to Fowle’s psychological analysis, advertisements usually tend to circumvent logic and the consumers’ skeptical powers. Instead they tend to prey on people’s unfulfilled desires and their motives that lie deep within hence attracting the attention of the potential consumer. Advertisements may for instance use sex as bait for getting people’s attention.
Some of the advertisements that use sex to attract consumers include ‘Che’ which is a magazine for men. The magazine has a lady’s picture. The lady is wearing a white miniskirt and behind it is written, ‘My number one,’ and right below it are written the words; ‘Let’s keep on dreaming of a better world.
There is also the Nokia S 60 that has the picture of a man and a woman that are half naked and in a compromising position. The other advertisement is that of jbs Men’s underwear which has an almost nude lady posing herself suggestively.
To remain in business, most advertisers try to seize any opportunity and use any technique that would be appealing to the consumer to purchase the given product or receive the services being offered. This has made the advertisers to employ methods that appeal to people’s emotions some of which have been abhorred in the past and have not been used as in the case of using sex appeals in the advertisements.
There seems to be a significant shift in the cultural attitudes in the recent past towards the male versus female romance. Sex has been a taboo subject and for a long time, society has abhorred it. Most advertisers today believe that ‘Sex sells.’ People seem to have become more open-minded in today’s society and this has prompted the advertisers to become bolder.
Sex is nowadays considered as a strong influential tool in advertisement. Some of the advertisements that have used sex as bait include Toyota Corolla car which feature a beautiful lady in its advertisement. An Italian coffee company has also employed sex as a tool in advertising. In some of these advertisements, there may be no direct connection between sex and the product yet sex is still used as attraction tactic.
The Nair television commercial is a good example of how advertisements use people’s emotions to lure them to buy their product. The product is usually used to remove facial and body hair and it targets both men and women. The commercial features for beautiful ladies who dance while holding the product and demonstrating how it works.
Given that most men get attracted to beautiful ladies, and most ladies want to be perceived as being beautiful, this commercial tends to lure the consumers into buying the product as they want to be associated with beauty. The advertisers seem to have succeeded in using the people’s emotions and hidden desires to get consumers to buy their product (Behrens and Leonard 609).
This seems to be in agreement with Fowle’s argument that advertisements tend to prey on people’s emotions and hidden desires. They will for instance use people’s desires and need for sex, affiliation, prominence, attention, beauty among others in promoting their products and services. Advertisements are usually expected to appeal to the potential consumers’ desires and motives and they may not necessarily be based on reality.
They give form to people’s inner desires. Advertisements must stand out so as to capture the consumers’ attention given that people come across so many advertisements in a day. They are also supposed to have a lasting effect in people’s minds and this could be achieved through appealing to people’s emotions.
A good advertisement is composed of a brilliant idea and a simple execution. The Coca-Cola advertisement is a good example of a simple advertisement that is composed of a few words with graphics yet it is so effective. The advertisement is composed of a picture of people flying out of a huge Coca-Cola bottle together with the drink.
Some are playing guitars while one is holding onto a radio receiver while dancing and right across the bottle are written the words; ‘Live on the Coke side of life’ and bellow the bottle the word Coca-Cola is. The advertisement tends to suggest to the potential consumer that in case he/she takes the drink then he/she will have the power to do extraordinary things.
Another advertisement is that of ‘Yop’ a yoghurt drink, whereby a lady flies out of the bottle together with the drink and belongings. This tends to exaggerate the energy that is associated with the drink. These two advertisements tend to play with people’s emotions and desires to be extraordinary and do extraordinary things.
Advertisements are in most cases falsified. They are exaggerated and do not reflect the whole truth about the product or service. They tend to lure people by targeting their emotional weaknesses (Behrens and Leonard 611). They are known for perpetration of gender as well as racial stereotypes.
Taking the example of the Toyota corolla advertisement which features a lady with a reasonable section of her body exposed standing close to the car; it tends to make ladies to be perceived as objects rather than humans with their own dignity. Such advertisements exalt materialism while at the same time lowering people’s dignity.
Advertisements use graphics to add to the effect of the advertisement. The headline and the body of any advertisement are usually reinforced with the graphics. A good example being CEMEX, whose advertisement features a construction vehicle that lays the concrete on a bridge and the concrete dries immediately as the vehicle moves and at the right hand side are written the words; ‘CEMEX: FAST DRYING CONCRETE.’
Advertisements seem to change with time. We live in a fast and instant world that is characterized by exploits. People will therefore tend to respond to advertisements that suggest fastness and instance.
One may for instance go for a money transfer system that advertises its services as being instant (Behrens and Leonard 610). Today, advertisements are less wordy and use more graphics that show the extraordinary powers of the product. In the early nineties, Coca-Cola advertisements were for instance too wordy. These days they are less wordy.
Advertisements that target political candidates are similar to the product advertisements in the sense that they use exaggeration and emotional effect to appeal to people (Behrens and Leonard 610).
They tend to exaggerate the candidate’s ability and use emotional effects to draw people to the candidate. Public service advertisements also tend to use emotional and exaggerated effects to appeal to the audience. An advertisement warning people not to drink and drive will for instance show straight road as being wound and hence warn the audience of possibly causing an accident.
Work Cited
Behrens, Laurence and Leonard J. Rosen. Writing and Reading Across the Curriculum. 11. Boston:Longman, 2011. Print.