Page 120 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

ADVERTISING

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’ ‘proving’ the
effectiveness of the product as against others in the market. The
high cultural status of the scientist, and the scientific procedure
which he (it is, usually, a ‘he’) demonstrates, legitimises the product.
Another frequently used meaning system is that of nostalgia. In
the classic British example of this technique – the 1985 advertise-
2
ment for Hovis bread – the product was placed in a mythical past
where ‘natural’, ‘wholesome’ techniques of manufacturing bread
were used, and in which people were honest and hard-working.
These attributes – ‘naturalness’, ‘wholesomeness’, ‘honesty’ – were
implied by the structure of the ad to be in the bread. Such a strategy
could only work in a culture which values nostalgia and associates
it with the attributes mentioned. In Britain in the 1980s, such a
culture was clearly thought to exist by the advertiser concerned.
Advertisements may be constructed so as to associate their
product-signifiers with well-known icons from the wider culture.
Perfumes, for example, are often ‘sold’ by associating them with
former models and film stars. Each ‘star’-signifier has a distinctive
meaning for the audience (Vanessa Paradis is not Elizabeth Taylor,
who is different from Kate Moss, who is not Catherine Deneuve,
etc.). The perfume manufacturer aspires to borrow this meaning
and thus give the product an analogous distinctiveness. This
strategy is perhaps the most commonly used, in the advertising of
everything from training shoes to banking services (Pirelli’s Sharon
Stone ad, and Michelin’s use of the Velvet Underground song ‘Femme
Fatale’ reveal the subtleties of selling tyres in modern capitalism),
and may be applied not just to human icons but also to famous
movies (such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Star Wars),
songs, paintings and other signifiers with broad cultural resonance.
In this manner ‘advertising effects a “transfer of value” through
communicative connections between what a culture conceives as
desirable states of being and products’ (Leiss et al., 1986, p. 222).

99