Page 119 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

COMMUNICATING POLITICS

is standing and what they are offering the citizenry in policy
terms.
But advertising, as already noted, also seeks to persuade. In the
1950s, writing of the role of advertising in American consumer
capitalism, Pierre Martineau observed that

in our competitive system, few products are able to main-
tain any technical superiority for long. They must be
invested with overtones to individualise them; they must be
endowed with richness of association and imagery; they
must have many levels of meanings, if we expect them to be
top sellers, if we hope that they 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 automobiles,
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, as 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).

98