Page 136 - Introduction to Electronic Commerce and Social Commerce

Sport in Advertising • 125

better be represented as more fluid, contingent and fleeting in the context of ongoing
social changes and groupings (Paterson 2006).
Williamson (1978) also linked social structures to product differentiation. She drew
on Marxist insights into the operation of ideology to suggest that this process of creating
difference between objects, relying as it does on the sign value attached to the products,
imposed systems of social difference over real, structural differences between people.
While groups such as the low-paid single parents and the elderly (and many more) exist
in society with genuine interests in common—groups that would benefi t from self-
recognition to unite in campaigning for fair treatment and equal rights—these are not
the differences between people that we see in advertising. Instead, we imagine that the
differences between us lie in our choice of consumer goods. One of the paradoxes of
advertising is the need to address each consumer as unique—you are different, but so is
everyone else. Slogans such as the recent strapline for the UK food and fashion retailer
Marks and Spencer, ‘exclusively for everyone’, make the contradiction clear.

Absence and Identity in Advertisements

The address of advertisements, therefore, is to a unified subject differentiated from
others who do not consume the product advertised. However, theories of identity
drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis argue that the unitary subject is a myth: “the
subject is split; but an ideological world conceals this from the conscious subject,
who is supposed to feel whole and certain of a sexual identity” (Sarup 1996: 34).
Lacan argues that the mirror stage is a vital part of identity formation, when the child

misrecognises itself in its reflection as more complete and powerful than it feels (see
Chapter 5). Advertisements present to us ideal images of coherent selves constituted
through the consumption of a product resulting in a similar process of misrecogni-
tion. Advertising depends on this being achieved through the consumer’s engage-
ment with a complex sign system. Since identity is fragmented, rather than unitary,
advertising offers us images of the different facets of the self. A Nike-Women.com
print advertisement with the strapline the art of contradiction at nike-women.
com featured an image split into two: the top half of the advertisement showed female
hands (signified by a silver bracelet) pulling on the handles of exercise equipment,

which merged into the bottom half of the advertisement, showing a corkscrew at-
tached to a cork. The advertisement presented dual faces of femininity: the gym-goer
and the hostess. The traditional feminine art of conversation is morphed in the art of
contradiction by a vigorous workout. The consumer was invited to step into this split
and ease the contradiction by cracking the joke. Once the consumer gets the play on
language and imagery, she steps into the place of the whole subject, becoming the
mirror offering the coherent reflection back to this seemingly fragmented self.

Jokes require something to be left out. Absences, puzzles or jokes in advertise-
ments include gaps that need to be supplied by the consumer. However, our conscious,