Blog 5: Consumer Cultures

How powerful is advertising to the consumer?
Are we taken in by everything an ad tells us?
How much are you willing to believe?

This is the job of an advertisement, to make you, the consumer, believe everything they say. Do they really care about what the product does to change your life, that Max Factor's 'New Age Renew Foundation really does take 5 years off your face? Or are they more concerned with the cash?

Advertisement campaigns spend vast amounts of money into researching what the consumer wants and what they're after. Take this advert for Max Factor's Natural Minerals Foundation:

Adverts like these are very common, the women are almost always young, attractive supermodels who you are hardly going to find strolling through Morrisons. And yet, cosmetic companies continue to dish out the same old adverts, maybe including a well-known celebrity every now and again. Notice the language used to sell the product, always very scientific, sometimes with a diagram of how it microscopically fights off aging within your pores, or something like that.
Max Factor claims to be the 'make-up of make-up artists'. What does that mean? Because the make-up artists use them we can be just like them. Women can look as glamorous as the models who grace the catwalk? It doesn't mean that these women ever will be catwalk models, or make-up artists for that matter. Buying the product doesn't grant you years of experience as a make-up artist either.

I'd like you now to take a look at a very different advert from Dove:

These adverts don't use young supermodels, they use ordinary women to model for them. Dove wanted to go for a radical change from the norm, and show what their product did for real women. So much so, that they wanted to show that aging wasn't a bad thing, changing the slogan from anti-aging to pro-aging.