Advertisements make Socially Acceptable Goods through psychological Manipulation

Advertisements make Socially Acceptable Goods through psychological Manipulation

Introduction

Language is an imperative aspect of advertising because it is how companies communicate their products to the public. In modern cultures, various styles are identified differently and through learning distinctively. According to Haarman (249), the French language is classified as a tasteful and elegant, while German is typified with technical reliability and precision. How advertisers use words to appeal to audiences impact on how the public accepts a good or service. Adverts are an integral part of life and pervasive because they persuade diverse demographics to purchase items, and hence advertising plays a significant role in augmenting demand and production. The messages communicated through language are likely to become successful if the targeted group believed in the advert. For instance, luxury goods are associated with sophistication, and hence the language used must communicate complexity. Thus, unlike using a local African language, it is likely that product development will likely adopt English because it might convey prestige, quality, exclusivity, and use of regional signs in the advert messages may fail to create a similar effect, particularly as concerns luxury. New products face unique challenges due to aspects such as globalization and technology advancement, and finding the appropriate methods for advertising must increase sales and the exclusivity the product needs to present. This research will focus on Skims, a product that is culturally relevant today and because it attracts a wide range of the female demographic. Arguably, Advertisements presents their products as meaningful socially acceptablegoods by use of signs (texts and images) that are manipulative to create feelings of excitement and need for the products that are not essential We can understand the impact of marketing manipulation tactics and discover the actual messages of advertisements by using semiotics that deciphers signs to deliver individual messages to particular audiences such as how the signifier links to signified and how these aspects connect to the psychology from various writers including Ferdinand de Saussure, Victoria Welby, and Jib Fowles. From these discourses, people can identify the correlation and causation of visual symbols and slogans in the Skims advertisements, which inspire beauty and modernism to augment the feeling of femininity.

Conceptualizing Product Advertisement

It is imperative to note that every advertisement has diverse levels of interpretation; for instance, the surface level depicts the advert with the visible elements that are the words, images, and colors. In contrast, the underlying aspect of the advert consists of linking the mythical and archetypal world connecting with the subliminal mind, which fulfills the implicit desires in purchasing a product that is deemed to augment value for a consumer. Adverts use language and belong to both a person and society, and thus, signs are social and a product assimilated by speakers as it only exists within a collective, making it a structure of signs that expresses notions. Saussure, in his book Course in General Linguistics, indicated that symbol comprises of the signifier and the signified. On the one hand, the signifier denotes the sound pattern while the signified delineates the concept. Still, it is essential to note that the signifier is not material; thus is a psychological aspect (Saussure, 67)..

So how do women gain a similar understanding when using Skims? Perhaps it is best to understand the arbitrary nature of the sign, according to Saussure. For instance, people all over the world agree to use the word tree to signify to communicate a consistent item, and if another word were used to donate trees is would be used to a similar effect. However, it is essential to note that people have diverse experiences and psychology, and thus languages have a distinct meaning in different languages. As such, styles reflect shared experiences that paint various pictures depending on where people originated. Therefore, expressions used in advertisements attempt to reflect shared experiences in complicated means. To elaborate, Saussure (68)uses the word boeuf in English and French and asserts that in the following language, the word boeuf refers to both Ox and beef. In the ancient language, there are different words for the animal and meat. As such, different terms are borne due to a society’s needs rather than pre-existing notions. When thinking about the product Skims, for instance, there is deliberate attention to Ski, which directly links to the word skinny in English. The signifier here is conscious in a psychological sense because women exist in a society where the outward perfection of the body is glorified and hencea product that would signify that would ultimately augment a consumer’s need for the product. Thus, women unite with this phrase because the sign understandably provides a psychological impact through social interactionsmaking women feel the need to wear the product even without needing products before the advert.

Language is changed by rearranging and re-interpreting units and represents a system of values. However, the word does not exist in isolation but must live within a set of speakers. Saussure asserts that “for the realization of language, a community of speakers is necessary. Contrary to all appearances, language never exists apart from the social fact, for it is a semiological phenomenon. Its social nature is one of its inherent characteristics” (Saussure, 77). As such, language is social, and therefore people understand meaning through social interactions and also through cultural icons and narrative involvement. Perhaps one aspect of reiterating is that signs (both text and images) are both psychological and conceptual and ideally help societies communicate effectively. Perhaps Harris, in his discourse Language, Saussure, and Wittgenstein: How to play games with words best describes how psychology fitted into social interactions when he noted that language is not peripheral to how people perceive the world but central. Hence, language phrases are not communicative adjuncts or vocal labels. Instead, these elements are products of social interaction and essential tools that help people articulate their existence (Harris, ix). Therefore, Harris affirms Saussure’s claim that language is immutable in that signifies is fixed concerning communities that use them. It is indeed true when people consider communities and styles. Words may represent the same meaning to people, but they have different sound patterns. For example, young women may use the name “tots” to delineate completeness while mature women could say “totally” to mean the same thing. However, these are two diverse communities/ clusters that may use various sound patterns and concepts to mean the same thing.

The psychological aspect that leads to women purchasing a product and, in this case, Skims, is vital in understanding advertising as a manipulativesubconscious endeavor. Psychological manipulation is essentially the activity of influencing a group of people or an individual to change perceptions or behavior through an indirect or deceptive method. Therefore, marketers have to identify an aspect of the target group and use that notion to augment the need for a product. Fowles (410), in his text Advertising’s Fifteen Basic Appeals, begins his article by quoting Marshall McLuhan’s text that the most crucial aspect of advertising is the marketer’s ability to pressure target groups motives and desires. As shown in figure one below, Skims attempt to catch deep-lying attractions as women today yearn for something that would make them feel good, and hence Skims become something they privately crave. As such, advertisers developing this product ensure that by using the language developed and images accompanying the advert that it is long enough for women to have Skims in their minds. In the United States and other big economies, the monopoly is almost non-existent for most products. Thus competition is extreme, and thus, for a brand to stay relevant, capturing the psychological being of a person is not subjective as manipulation is central to shifting a person’s psychology.

As with language advertising is also significantly impacted through visuals. Fowles (411) suggests that adverts use images with supine females’ such as celebrities, to induce impulses and desires that would have otherwise not impacted people as such. The significance of images is because images more than language affect the more primal levels of the brain than the emotive elements of writing. Considering Skims, advertisers advance the notion that a woman in possession of skims will be fulfilled with the product. However, just understanding that the product can fulfill a purpose is not enough because to perform the functions adequately, two essential tasks ought to be fulfilled through the advert including the capacity for the advert to show service and the ability for the advert to ideally appeal to deep-running drives among potential buyers. Folwles (411) uses Murray’s list to highlight how advertisers appeal to people’s emotions. As shown in figure one below, Skims attempt to use various emotional appeals, including the need for sexand attention. Skims invokes the need to be the focus or center of attention but do not necessarily communicate sexual intercourse. As well, the cosmetic industry exists for attentive purposes, and hence, for a product such as Skims, this is imperative. Fowles (421) declares that:

The clothing and cosmetic industries exist just to serve this need, and this is the way they pitch their wares. Some of this effort is aimed at males, as the ads for Hathaway shirts and jockey underclothes. But the more considerable bulk of such appeals are targeted single-mindedly at women.

As such, this suggests that it is crucial for people to advertisers to understand a brand and who the target market is, which will be easier to target the emotions. Indeed,For Skims, reaching an only female audience is essential, but and hence it is crucial. Thus, Fowles suggests that it is imperative to assess how many appeals used to determine effectiveness. The advantage of say attention and sex appeals for Skims reduces too much diffusion and ultimately communicate what is needed to have the most significant impact on the market through subconscious manipulation.

Language in the advertising links to psychology is critical because Saussure asserts that a linguistic sign ought to combine a concept and sound pattern in an associative mind. When a person uses, for example, Skims something beyond the peripheral, meaning something more profound in the brain, Which then arouses a reflection of a notion in the senses. Thus Saussure affirms that both concept and sound patterns (signifier and signified) are psychological, which essentially makessigns binary mental entities. Therefore, how do women similarly interpret Skims?It seems then advertisers must be careful when using symbols because they are supposed to assess how they can augment interpretative power and ultimately make adverts more than those of average accomplishment (Welvy, viii). In her writing What is Meaning, studies in the Development of Significance, Victoria Welby noted that there is an issue with the meaning of everyday language use. The author noted that there are no fixed meanings for the language but only in a distinctcontext or a sense in which a word may be used.

Ideally, adverts ought to provide meaning to a state of mind they ought to subject. it is for that reason that language is critical because to use for example Fowles appeals of emotion it is crucial that the meaning conveyed in the language is unique in a way to reach a specific demographic. Welby, in her text, used the term significance to declare that signs appeal to people when there is a sense of intensified meaning through four primary means:

There is, strictly speaking, no such thing as the sense of a word, but only the spirit in which it is used-the circumstances, state of mind, reference, and universe of discourse belonging to it. The meaning of the word is the intent which it is desired to the convey-the intention of the user. The significance is always manifold and intensifies its sense as well as its meaning by expressing its importance, its appeal to us, its moment for utilization, its emotional force, its ideal value, its moral aspects, and it is universal or at least social range (Welby, 5).

Therefore, Welby’s work essentially molds with Fowles’s work in that it demonstrates that for an advert to augment the fifteen appeals, the sign must regularly consider the overall meaning of the messages. Within this frame, an advert’s concept and sound pattern must find Welby’s ethical, aesthetic, pragmatic, and social value for it to be relevant and appeal to a particular demographic. With the case study example of Skims, a famous brand uses concept, and sound patterns heighten a psychological impact through social interactions making women feel the need to wear the product even without needing products prior the advert Also, the advert creates attentive and sex appeals which make women feel the need to wear a product and most importantly because the advert considers Welby’s meaning and significance of language to make the advert more specific and targeting making women feel they need the product even without the necessity.

Conclusion

All three theoretical foundations from Fowles, Welby, and Saussure are critical because they demonstrate how adverts incorporate manipulative aspects by using signs (language and images) to make socially acceptable advertisement products. The importance of this topic is not subjective because it utilizes research on linguistics and psychology to understand how adverts can become successful. For that reason, an advertisement should attempt to appeal to various appeals but should not be diffused to numerous attractions. As well, sound patterns and concepts must be based on social interactions to make manipulative adverts. However, various issues such as morality, pragmatic, aesthetic, and social values must be present to make an advert manipulative and entrenched in peoples’ memories.

Works Cited

De Saussure, Ferdinand. Course in general linguistics. McGraw Hill Book Company, 2011.

Fowles, Jib. “Advertising’s fifteen basic appeals.” Language Awareness,” Pearson High Education, New York (2009).

Haarmann, Harald. Symbolic values of foreign language use: From the Japanese case to a general sociolinguistic perspective. Vol. 51. Walter de Gruyter, 2011.

Harris, Roy. Language, Saussure, and Wittgenstein: How to play games with words. Psychology Press, 1990.

Welby, Victoria Lady. What is Meaning?: Studies in the Development of Significance (1903). Vol. 2.John Benjamins Publishing, 1983.