Critique of Implicit Meaning in Advertising

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Table of Contents

Introduction
Creating an Ads
Marketers Intent
The success of Implied Meaning in Ads
Conclusion
Works Cited

Introduction

Advertisement as a component of marketing has over the years developed and attained a very dynamic status that currently marketers are faced with a very hard time marketing their products. Initially, the process of creating an ad was just to create awareness to the potential buyers, however today there are a lot of substitutes and mere awareness does not guarantee to sell anymore. Advertising has therefore gone a notch higher whereby the demands of the customers no longer define what kind of advert will be created.

Rather the customers are made to create a self-image that will be saleable. This will make them have an implied class or statuses that make them be associated with a certain way of life and so on. It is imperative to critique advertisement since it applies to many aspects of human life including entertainment, food, and housing, traveling, and dressing among as. This is because people buy everything!

Creating an Ads

When marketers create their adverts, they usually intend to make them in a way that would greatly appeal to their potential clients, this is with hopes that the more the ad appeals, the more it is likely to attract clients (Callow and Schiffman 259). To measure how much has been achieved, and then the sales data will be analyzed following the advertisement. If there is an increase then the ad worked well, but if there is no significant increase, then it can be concluded that the ad was not effective (Phillips 77).

To assess the implied meaning of an ad, it’s adequate for one to understand first the intended meaning that the creator of the ad had and assess any elements that could have shaped the ad. Second, one has to assess the average customers or group of consumers’ real understanding of the ad (Mooij 67). For instance how women perceive a certain perfume, how children react to toys or how men would respond to sports adverts, and so on (Phillips 77). The third and final is to explicate the way a critic would understand the ad in a manner that could be even new to the creator of the ad and the reader.

After an ad is created, the consumer is made to believe certain things that may be non-existence in the first place. This is where the advert creates a certain impression that is connected to the product being marketed to ensure that the customers feel satisfied. Some theories are behind the marketing tactic. They make a critical contribution (Mooij 68). These contributions draw from a wide base of disciplines and hence the vocabularies are quite numerous and so are the perspectives.

Some very important concepts have received the greatest attention and they include hyper-reality, change in consumption and production, fragmentation, decentering of themes, loss of dedication, and contradictory coincidence. Many of these beliefs are directly related to marketing consumption (Mooij 78). The hyper-real instances are based on the assumptions that the consumers experience for instance in simulations encountered by clients of the thriving tourism industry, universal studios, and virtual parks. When themes are constructed and then seriously believed by the producers and clients the same (Callow and Schiffman 259).

For instance, comfort and satisfaction that people are promised if they put on branded jeans like denim jeans. If the society is promised that they would feel more attractive or sexy and they believe it, then the jeans would produce that feeling (Phillips 77). For such reasons, marketing and consumption are trending in post-modernity despite who is the discussant (theorists, sociologists, or artists).

Marketers Intent

This is the aspect that deals with the creator’s intent when making up the advert. It is described as the intended fallacy and this is the real meaning of the ad in the eyes of its creator. In the daily activities of most people, speaking or any other form of communication is essential means to pass across some message (Callow and Schiffman 263). There is usually a perception that the creator’s intent is the true meaning of the message in the ad (Phillips 79).

The success of putting across the message in the ad context can be assessed based on the degree of a match between what the author intended and actually how the consumer understood or interpreted the advert. Just like in normal conversations and other forms of communications that take place between two or more people on the daily basis, the receiver is usually attempting to reconstruct what the sender intended to out across (Phillips 82). This is why it is no surprise that most people will perceive the intent of the author as the correct meaning of a message like a text.

Understanding what the advert means is very critical in understanding an advert. The real meaning is hence what was intended by the creator. From these, then an ad can be concluded as sexist, obscene or anti-civilization, and so on. Nonetheless, it’s very hard to deconstruct what the author was trying to pass across if the message is not explicit (Mooij 78). This means that the implied meaning can be distorted during the deciphering of the information. The intent of the creator hence becomes just like the numerous possible justifiable meanings and there could be a possibility that that is not necessarily the correct one (Mooij 78).

Furthermore, customers can never know what was intended by the marketer. For instance, when an advert reads like “Our Pizzas have been voted to be the best by our clients” and the actual meaning was that “in a survey of 5,000 people, at least five liked their pizzas. Voting the best could have been used by the advertiser to sincerely mean that some of the customers liked their pizzas. Still, there can be an argument that said message is not actually what was meant. Such an advert chooses to exclude the ones that did not like the pizzas. Furthermore, having to state that the customers voted the pizzas as the best excludes the perception of the creator hence his/her intent cannot be used to define what the advert meant.

Language, sign, or any other form of communication is usually arbitrary and not entirely a way of directly bringing out the creator’s meaning but rather it is more of a polysemic message that contains several meanings and is consequently subject to different interpretations (Stewart and Shanker 2). Language usually gets the meaning through context rather than the meaning of the sender of the message.

For example, a word like liberal had a different meaning 200-100 years ago than it does today. One cannot decipher what the sender of a message meant since the context of making sense out of a message can never be completely distinct (Mooij 78). Furthermore, the contest of understanding a message is also subject to further interpretation and hence the message can only be understood by the understanding of the language (Shapiro and Krishnan 5; Callow and Schiffman 263).

The success of Implied Meaning in Ads

Advertisements utilize the implied meaning concept to lure customers to buy their products believing that the elements that are suggested in the advert like satisfaction will be met (Reichert, Heckler and Jackson 14). Sex appeal has been very critical to the subject of implied meaning in making advertisements (Reichert & Lambiase, 76). Since sex appeal is the widely used ideal of implied meaning in ads, this paper focuses on this line of thinking.

The dissimilarities in male and female psychology cause varied approaches to and their sensitivity to sex. The relationship between sex and advertising becomes very complex (Reichert and Lambiase 76). Adverts intend to entice people to purchase the products in question in one way or another. Advertisers have to do their job faster without going into so much detail. Advert designers are usually able to find a sexual connection between many products. However, sexual association is achieved easily in men than women (Reichert and Lambiase 76). This could be the case because men have less complex criteria for desire; a woman beautiful enough, young, and healthy is enviable to any man.

For these reasons, adverts targeting male consumers effectively draw the attention of the men using women’s bodies and relate obtaining the product being advertised to getting the woman. The advert effectively exploits a man’s instincts rather than his intellectual understanding of things. Only the mere presence of a person is adequate to elicit the urge to buy. Men, therefore, tend to like products that involve ladies in their advertisements. Implied meaning effectively influences the act of buying in men unknowingly (Poels and Dewitte 71).

In women the story is different, because though they have a sexual response instinct; it’s sometimes strongly affected by their outstanding intelligence. Since the process of attracting a woman’s attention by sexual desire is complex, adverts targeting women rarely use sex appeal as their argument for the attraction (Reichert et al 16). Research has however found a solution to this, women like something concrete, and hence to lure a woman, an advert targeting women have themes like romance as their inducement. Romance perfectly matches a woman’s intellectual perception of love, courtship, the process by which men contest to be and women decide on mates (Phillips 45). This clearly shows that sex is the strongest appeal used in advertising, only that it’s highly gender connected.

In practice, sex appeal varies according to the target consumers and also because many products are projected to one gender of the other (Phillips 45). An example of an advert targeting women perfume went like this; a woman strolling down a street. A handsome man smells her perfume and begins to pursue her, stumbling and awkward. He hurriedly bought flowers which he gives the damsel with admiration. She smiles back contemptuously and walks away much satisfied with his response as he looks on. Such ads have been very effective in attracting women to buy the products. Women usually do the buying without explicitly understanding that the advert was talking about sex (Poels and Dewitte 73).

Examples show very little or no suggestion of real sex (are implicit) though they may propose it as a possibility but not unquestionably because of the product. Only one thing is certain and that is; for men targets, sex is blatantly suggested whereas for women it’s subtle and it works very effectively (Poels and Dewitte 73).

Conclusion

Marketing is not fixed to the certain procedure but it is dynamic constantly changing with the technology change. The relationship between marketing and consumption is described as complex in the modern world and the implications are far-reaching. This is the reason why the message put across by the marketer particularly the implied meaning is very important in influencing buying. There are a lot of things that can be customized to send an implied impression to target clients and get them to buy the advertised products. This includes the social status quo, quality, class, and self-perception (self-image).

Advertising on the other hand, therefore, does not rely on the advertiser’s actual meaning to attract customers. Nonetheless knowing the intent of the advertiser helps in the appropriate ethical decision in some cases.

Works Cited

Callow, Michael and Schiffman, Leon. Implicit Meaning in Visual Print Advertisements: A Cross-Cultural Examination of the Contextual Communication Effect. International Journal of Advertising, 21. 2(2002): 259-276.

Lindaman, Kammi. Sex appeal within advertising: examining the trends from past to present. Minnesota, St. Cloud State University, 2003. Print.

Mooij, Marieke. Consumer behavior and culture: consequences for global marketing and advertising. London: Sage Publishers. 2009. Print.

Phillips, Barbara. Thinking into It: Consumer Interpretation of Complex Advertising Images. Journal of Advertising, 26. 2(1997): 77-87.

Poels, Karolien and Dewitte, Siegfried. “Getting a Line on Print Ads: Pleasure and Arousal Reactions Reveal an Implicit Advertising Mechanism,” Journal of Advertising, 37. 4(2009): 63 – 74.

Reichert, Tom and Lambiase, Jacqueline (Eds.). Sex in Advertising: Perspectives on the Erotic Appeal. Mahwah, NJ and London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 2003. Print.

Reichert, Tom. Heckler, Susan and Jackson, Sally. The Effects of Sexual Social Marketing Appeals on Cognitive Processing and Persuasion. Journal of Advertising, 30. 1 (2001):13-27.

Shapiro, Stewart and Krishnan, Shanker. Memory-Based Measures for Assessing Advertising Effects: A Comparison of Explicit and Implicit Memory Effects. Journal of Advertising, 30. 3(2001): 1-13.

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