Page 113 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

AN INTRODUCTION TO POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

will achieve the emotional attachment which shows up
as brand loyalty.
(1957, p.50)

In a marketplace where there are twenty brands of soap powder,
all performing essentially the same function (or thirty auto-mobiles,
or fifty types of margarine), each brand must take on a unique identity
in the minds of the consumer. To use the language of Marx: the
manufacturer creates a commodity by endowing raw materials with
‘use-value’ (or utility). The advertiser gives it ‘exchange-value’, which
will be based partly on utility, but also on its meaning as a distinctive
entity in a status-conscious world. Baudrillard writes of products
having ‘sign-value’, in so far as they ‘are at once use-value and
exchange-value. The social hierarchies, the invidious differences, the
privileges of caste and culture which they support, are encountered
as profit, as personal satisfaction, and lived as “need”’ (1988, p.59).
Commodities come to signify meanings other than those of their
utility. A Porsche is more than a vehicle for transporting people from
one point to another. Levi 501s are more than hard-wearing work
garments. Flora margarine is more than an oily spread. And in so far
as commodities take on these meanings, advertising is the most
important means available to producers for bringing them to the
market.
Advertisements function, therefore, by making commodities mean
something to their prospective purchasers; by distinguishing one
product from another, functionally similar one; and by doing this in
a manner which connects with the desires of the consumer. As Leiss
et al. put it, ‘in advertising, the creators of messages try to turn
signifiers [commodities] with which audiences may have little or no
familiarity, into meaningful signs that, they hope, will prompt
consumers to respond with appropriate behaviour’ (1986, p.153).
A variety of strategies are available to advertisers in pursuing
this goal. All have in common that they import familiar (to the
audience) meanings and signifiers from outside the narrow world
of the product itself, and load them on. The products being
advertised appropriate meanings from other signifiers existing in
the culture (Williamson [1978] calls them ‘meaning systems’). For
example, the advertising of soap powder is frequently organised
around the meaning system of ‘science’. In advanced capitalist
societies, ‘science’ carries with it many positive connotations—
objectivity, authority, reliability, ‘modernness’, and so on. Thus, in
a soap powder ad we frequently find a white-coated ‘scientist’

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