The ubiquitous presence of advertisement in our times is a defining aspect of our reality.
We are constantly in the presence of marketing schemes and our modern capitalistic environment is polluted with images and slogans of coercion.
We are so immersed in a world of consumer symbolisms and allegories that everything becomes a subliminal assault upon our soul and even our ideas about self get processed through cultural archetypes and marketing mythologies.
Political discourse has become a sellers market where ideas get perverted by the need to become desirable to the lowest common denominator.
In all the hype culture dies underneath bottom lines and profit margins and what is left is the bare landscape of hollow neon signs and exaggerated imagery.

There is an advertising guru that goes by the name of Rapaille who is a French psychologist making a fortune selling his insights to corporate greed.
His genius lies in the recognition that how people explain their actions –in this case their purchases- has nothing or little to do with the real underlying reasons behind them.
He asserts that beneath every purchase lies a core reptilian motivation that cannot be resisted and which the mammalian brain is then asked to justify after the fact.
For instance he advised automobile manufacturers to build larger vehicles with tinted windows, like the Hummer, during a time of rising oil prices and diminishing car sales.
The reason, besides the explanations given about their practicality, their off-road capability, their beauty or whatever other excuses the buyers gave?
They represented a symbol of pure dominance; the reptilian need to rule over its own kind.

How do you price such metaphors of power?
You raise the prices so that they become more desirable due to their inaccessibility.
A seemingly irrational marketing ploy if one fails to consider the influence of the unconscious primitive mind on the conscious mammalian one.

Every product has a similar core effect on the mind.
Through the purchasing of a Label bearing a specific name the consumer buys membership within an exclusive club that represents what he/she would like to believe about themselves; an accessory of uniqueness that separates the buyer from the masses and becomes an outward illustration of an inner desire.
The symbolization of every particular product is constructed by meticulous attention to detail, clever marketing strategies and years of repetition until the product comes to represent a desirable primordial attribute that the consumer subconsciously must have as an accessory to his/her being.

All products have some kind of core symbolism whether they are toothpastes or sports cars.
The trick is discovering what the core symbol represents to the average consumer and then packaging it with the right metaphors.

This practice of product promotion has also entered areas we would like to consider holy, such as art.
Product placement is a popular method of exposure. A casually placed soft-drink can, a specific automobile used in a chase scene, a seemingly chance encounter in front of a particular restaurant chain all become commonplace.
The practice is so prevalent that talk shows, have turned into two-minute promotion opportunities and entertainment shows act like advertising subsidiaries to marketing firms.

Nothing escapes the vortex of consumerism.
All must be bought and sold, then thrown away so that something new can be bought and sold.

That was pretty good, Wanderer. Insightful analysis, lucid presentation. Very interesting commentary.

I've always thought that advertising was the true scourge of our era, the worst unforeseen manifestation of Adam Smith's free market. Even worse than the construct of the corporation, which civilization will barely survive.

Every study I've ever read of consistently found that advertising has only a modest impact on purchasing decisions, and is almost exclusively limited to choices between nearly identical products such as Coke and Pepsi, Nike and Adidas, or Ford and Chevy.

It seems that the only product that the advertising industry has been able to successfully market is: advertising.

Fraggle Rocker
Every study I've ever read of consistently found that advertising has only a modest impact on purchasing decisions, and is almost exclusively limited to choices between nearly identical products such as Coke and Pepsi, Nike and Adidas, or Ford and Chevy.I think advertising has had a profound impact on purchasing decisions.

The declining effectiveness of some advertising recently is due to the overabundance of imagery where a specific product finds it difficult to get noticed through all the hype of other products.
So advertising has turned more sophisticated, more understated and subtle in its approaches.

The products you mention may seem identical from a rational point of view but each possesses a particular character or displays a particular symbolism that speaks to specific emotions and instincts on a subliminal level.

We often don’t know why we buy things we only excuse the purchase after it was done by drafting rational thinking into finding practical explanations.
But the actual real reasons we bought something can be traced back to how the product has been packaged and promoted and what it has come to symbolize on a cultural level.

It then ceases to be a simple product for consumption and becomes a flag, a medal, an ornament of self that says something about the possessor and enables him to enter within an exclusive group.

In this case it isn’t that the ornament represents an aspect of the wearer’s inner character but that the individual purchases symbols of this aspect and hopes that through possession it will be absorbed within his inner core or, at the very least, that other will think of him as possessing a particular characteristic even while it may not be true.

Every study I've ever read of consistently found that advertising has only a modest impact on purchasing decisions, and is almost exclusively limited to choices between nearly identical products such as Coke and Pepsi, Nike and Adidas, or Ford and Chevy.

Yes, but the manner in which these products are presented to the unsuspecting public is what gets each individual to buy one product and not the others, regardless of how identical they may be. I'm reminded of Nike's 'Be like Mike' commercials that had thousands of teenage boys and girls scrambling for Nike shoes and products, to be like Mike. Tiger Woods promotes golf clubs and Nike products and men run like girls to their golfing stores to buy these products, disregarding the identical products on the market, in the hope that their game will improve because Tiger uses these products and look at how well he plays :rolleyes:. Unfortunately the commercials don't say that you also need skill, talent and blind luck, to play as well as Tiger, but the fans don't care. Anything that might get them to play even a little bit like Tiger, and that anything are the products he advertises.

While the impact may be modest in a study that concentrates on one particular area, when one looks at the profit intake of companies like Nike during these sports star ad campaigns, you'll see that they would have beaten their competitors. Their competitors reply with using other sports stars who can compete with the Mike's and Tiger's of the sporting world.

It then ceases to be a simple product for consumption and becomes a flag, a medal, an ornament of self that says something about the possessor and enables him to enter within an exclusive group.

In this case it isn’t that the ornament represents an aspect of the wearer’s inner character but that the individual purchases symbols of this aspect and hopes that through possession it will be absorbed within his inner core or, at the very least, that other will think of him as possessing a particular characteristic even while it may not be true.

You're absolutely right. The symbolism of each product and the prestige that the symbol implies in their advertising campaigns has a lot to do with their sales figures. People are just dumb enough to fall for it.

I have a friend who is an assistant manager in a sporting store here in Australia that only sells one particular brand usually associated with Rugby. Last Christmas she was amazed at the stupidity and gullibility of the buying public when the store owners decided to sell a range of Christmas decoration with the store logo on the baubles. These decorations weren't custom made, they had simply bought the cheap Christmas balls from the $2 shop and stuck stickers of the store logo on them. They had bought boxes of six baubles for $2 and sold each bauble with the sticker for $20. People bought them, because of that one sticker on them. When my friend came into the store to start work, she couldn't believe that people could actually be so stupid. Within 10 minutes of her shift, she couldn't stand cheating the public anymore and each time someone came in and asked to buy the baubles, she advised them that they could buy the same thing for $2 for six and could then buy the stickers for $10 (packs of 10). Only one decided to take her advice. The rest preferred to pay $20 for each bauble because of the prestige factor and because they were scared people would know that they weren't the baubles sold in the store. As she said to me a few days later, 'people are dickheads'.