The text contrasts defenders and critics of advertising. Harvard business profes

Question

The text contrasts defenders and critics of advertising. Harvard business professor Andrew Levitt is an enthusiastic supporter: “… life would be drab, dull, anguished... at its existential worst” without it, while the late John Kenneth Galbraith is highly critical: “(a)s a society becomes more affluent, wants are increasingly created by the process by which they are satisfied.” In other words, as our text states, “... instead of shaping the production process, consumer demand tends to be shaped by it.” Which theorist has the better perspective? Explain why and offer more than one practical example to support your view (500 word reply).

Please use the below part from the textbook to answer this question:

The debate over advertising

The controversy over advertising does not end with the issue of deceptive techniques and unfair advertising practices. advertising provides little usable information to consumers. advertisements almost always conceal relevant negative facts about their products, and they are frequently based on subtle appeals to psychological needs, which the products they peddle are unlikely to satisfy. these realities are the basis for some critics’ wholesale repudiation of advertising on moral grounds. they also desire a less commercially polluted environment, one that does not continually reinforce materialistic values.

Consumer needs

Some defenders of advertising take these points in stride. They concede that images of glamour, sex, or adventure sell products, but they argue that these images are what we, the consumers, want. We don’t want just blue jeans; we want romance or sophistication or status with our blue jeans. By connecting products with important emotions and feelings, advertisements can also satisfy our deeper needs and wants. as one advertising executive puts it:

advertising can show a consumer how a baby powder helps affirm her role as a nur- turing mother—Johnson & Johnson’s “the Language of Love.” Or it can show a teenager how a soft drink helps assert his or her emerging independence—pepsi’s “the choice of a New Generation.”

Harvard business professor Theodore Levitt has drawn an analogy between advertising and art. Both take liberties with reality, both deal in symbolic communication, and neither is interested in literal truth or in pure functionality. Rather, both art and advertising help us repackage the otherwise crude, drab, and generally oppressive reality that surrounds us. They create “illusions, symbols, and implications that promise more.” they help us modify, transform, embellish, enrich, and reconstruct the world around us. “Without distortion, embellishment, and elaboration,” Levitt writes, “life would be drab, dull, anguished, and at its existential worst.” advertising helps satisfy this legitimate human need. its handsome packages and imaginative promises produce that “elevation of the spirit” that we want and need. Embellishment and distortion are therefore among advertising’s socially desirable purposes. to criticize advertising on these counts, Levitt argues, is to overlook the real needs and values of human beings.

Levitt’s critics contend that even if advertising appeals to the same deep needs that art does, advertising promises satisfaction of those needs in the products it sells, and that promise is rarely kept. at the end of the day, blue jeans are still just blue jeans, and your love life will be unaffected by which soap you shower with. The imaginative, symbolic, and artistic content of advertising, which Levitt sees as answering real human needs, is viewed by critics as manipulating, distorting, and even creating those needs.

in his influential books The Affluent Society and The New Industrial State, the late John Kenneth Galbraith criticized advertising on exactly this point. Galbraith argued that the process of production today, with its expensive marketing campaigns, subtle advertising techniques, and sophisticated sales strategies, creates the very wants it then satisfies. in other words, producers create both the goods and the demand for those goods. if a new breakfast cereal or detergent were really wanted, Galbraith reasoned, why must so much money be spent trying to get the consumer to buy it? he thought it is obvious that “wants can be synthesized by advertising, catalyzed by salesmanship, and shaped by” discreet manipulations.

Accordingly, Galbraith rejected the economist’s traditional faith in consumer sovereignty: the idea that consumers should and do control the market through their purchases. Rather than independent consumer demand shaping production, as classical economic theory says it does, nowadays it is the other way around. Galbraith dubbed this the dependence effect: “as a society becomes increasingly affluent, wants are increasingly created by the process by which they are satisfied.” “Galbraith believed that nowadays, instead of shaping the production process, consumer demand tends to be shaped by it.”

One consequence, Galbraith thought, is that our system of production cannot be defended on the ground that it is satisfying urgent or important wants. We can’t defend production as satisfying wants if the production process itself creates those wants. “in the absence of the massive and artful persuasion that accompanies the management of demand,” Galbraith argued,

increasing abundance might well have reduced the interest of people in acquiring more goods. they would not have felt the need for multiplying the artifacts—autos, appliances, detergents, cosmetics—by which they were surrounded.

Another consequence is our general preoccupation with material consumption. in particular, Galbraith claimed, our pursuit of private goods, continually reinforced by advertising, leads us to neglect important public goods and services. We need better schools, parks, artistic and recreational facilities; safer and cleaner cities and air; more efficient, less crowded transportation systems. We are rich in the private production and use of goods, Galbraith thought, and starved in public services. in 2004 Galbraith sum- marized his long-held views this way:

Belief in a market economy in which the consumer is sovereign is one of our most pervasive forms of fraud. Let no one try to sell without consumer management, con- trol. as power over the innovation, manufacture, and sale of goods and services has passed to the producer and away from the consumer, the aggregate of this produc- tion has been the prime test of social achievement. . . . Not education or literature or the arts but the production of automobiles, including sUVs: here is the modern measure of economic and therefore social achievement.105

Galbraith’s critics have concentrated their fire on a couple of points. First, Galbraith never shows that advertising has the power he attributed to it. advertising campaigns like that for Listerine in the 1920s, which successfully created the problem of “halitosis” in order to sell the new idea of “mouthwash,” are rare.* and even though in recent years pharmaceutical companies have found large profits in promoting new or exaggerated medical conditions with serious-sounding names—for example, “premenstrual dys- phoric disorder” (premenstrual tension), “gastro-esophageal reflux disease” (heartburn), or “social anxiety disorder” (sadness)—and selling drugs to treat them,106 most new prod- ucts fail to win a permanent place in the hearts of consumers, despite heavy advertising. We are inundated with ads every day, but experiments suggest we no longer care much about them. each of us sees an average of 1,600 advertisements a day, notices around 1,200 of them, and responds favorably or unfavorably to only about 12. We also appear to pay more attention to ads for products that we already have.

Second, critics have attacked Galbraith’s assumption that the needs supposedly cre- ated by advertisers and producers are, as a result, “false” or “artificial” needs and therefore less worthy of satisfaction. human needs, they stress, are always socially influenced and are never static. how are we to distinguish between “genuine” and “artificial” wants, and why should the latter be thought less important? ads might produce a want that we would not otherwise have had without that want being in any way objectionable.

although conclusive evidence is unavailable, critics of advertising continue to worry about its power to influence our lives and shape our culture and civilization. even if producers cannot create wants out of whole cloth, many worry that advertising can manipulate our existing desires—that it can stimulate certain desires, both at the expense of other, less materialistic desires and out of proportion to the likely satisfaction that ful- fillment of those desires will bring.

Explanation / Answer

In my opinion, Galbraith's view is more sensible and has a better perspective. Few decades back, advertising was not very prominent. It was just used as a tool to convey consumers what is it the company has to offer. It was more like an announcement and less of the desire instigation. So consumers focussed just on the contents of the advertisement. Secondly, there were few or say just couple of brands in the market out then and consumers tried those couple of brands products and continue with what is the best. There was no choice for the consumers but to use one or two brands that had market share. And for some products, there used to be only one brand which was a monopoly in the market. Hence, no choice for the consumers. Use what is available in market was the mindset of the companies who enjoyed a monopoly in the market. There were not customer oriented, and there was a gap between the demand and supply. As the demand was huge and the supply was not up to the mark.  

In the present scenario, there are innumerable brands. Some are local, some are international, some are new to the market, some are age old brands. It means, there are huge number of brands offering a similar product and the consumers have a wide variety of the brands to choose from based on their budget, choice and preference. So, every brand tries to portray themselves in front of the consumers in order to arouse interest and desire among them by advertising. So, every brand try to reinvent their brand presence in the market by changing the advertisement every month. This way there will be thousands of advertisements for these brands, each brand trying to control the consumers mind and by creating artificial wants.

I feel, what Galbraith said is very true - "We also appear to pay more attention to ads for products that we already have". Most of them dont even care about new products when they are satisfied with the existing products they are using. And consumers know what they want. They don't look out for new choices when their present choice is the best for they. Most of them don't try new brand unless the one they are using is no longer satisfying their need. So when they go to a big box store, they specifically dig in or put a little effort to try and find the brand they want. And consumers know what they want. So, i completely support Galbraith on this context.     

Related Questions

Navigate

• Browse (All)
• Browse T
• Subjects

Integrity-first tutoring: explanations and feedback only — we do not complete graded work. Learn more.