Page 116 - Cultural Studies A Practical Introduction

100 Consumer Culture and Fashion Studies

appeal in language to an audience it seeks to influence in some way –
usually to buy something. It is theatrical because, as television commercials

especially, it tells stories or enacts fictional scenes that make a point and
serve the rhetorical purpose of the advertisement. And it consists of visual
design because it must arrest the attention of the audience and make it look
at something appealing and meaningful. Print and televisual ads are objects
that can be analyzed into their component features – image, narrative, text,
mode of address, implied cultural context, and so on. And it can be located
within a context of production and reception that supplies it with
interpretable meaning. For an ad to be complete, it must use cultural
schemes and signs that are compatible with perceptual schemes the target
audience has ready to use in interpreting it. The signs an ad uses take
meaning from the surrounding culture. Images of a Black basketball super-
star such as Michael Jordan are immediately meaningful to a lot of young
Black consumers who would be the target of Nike ads trying to get them
to buy new styles of Nike shoes. An image of a White soccer player like
David Beckham might not be as resonant with the same target audience.
Ads usually evoke ideas and feelings that are complexly related to the sur-
rounding social world of the target audience. The image of Michael Jordan
soaring through the air to dunk a basketball might evoke feelings of freedom
and power that are at odds with the economic reality many Black youth in
the US have to content with, for example. Rather than simply refl ect or
express the culture of the audience, the image might be a way of pushing
against it by suggesting ways of transcending through fantasy and con-
sumption what cannot be so easily attained through individual action in a
highly limiting economic environment.
Advertisements, because they are so dependent for their effectiveness on
being anchored in their cultural moment, are interesting in part for how
they record differences or changes in consumer cultures. China was a com-
munist society up until the late 1970s, when it began to slowly move toward
capitalism. Businesses were allowed to exist, markets to exchange goods to
come into being, and property to be owned and traded. A new consumer
culture came into being that included advertisements. Ads of sorts existed
before, usually in the form of wall posters, but they advertised Communist
Party ideas or polemics that people engaged in. It would have been con-
sidered an affront to communist ideals to advertise something for sale for
a profit. Nevertheless, cultures that change as dramatically as China ’ s has

also possess continuities with the past. In one advertisement for a new
housing development in Shanghai, for example, the “ four basic principles