Power Of Mesmerizing People

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

ADVERTISING CONCEPTS AND PRINCIPLES II

COURSE CODE – MMM 407

Submitted to:

Ms Ruhi Lal

Submitted by:

Nisheeth Ray Saxena

Enroll no.- A2021311033

MBA MM II

SAVE

YOUR

LIFE

STYLE

WANT TO LIVE LARGE?

WANT TO LIVE THE DREAM?

STYLE

LUXURY

ELEGANCE

Foreword

Advertising today is one of the largest generators of revenue in the world economy. It moves markets and mind, even their mechanism. It gives employment both directly and indirectly. It influences a large section of masses. Advertising intrigues and entertains. It gives and creates lifestyles. It involves people with products and services. The key words describing advertising are presentation and promotion. Dorothy Cohen described advertising as a business activity that uses persuasive techniques to sell goods and services.

Subhash Ghoshal, another pioneer of advertising in independent India, once said about advertising – We make advertisements and we run advertising for the purpose of selling satisfaction to a generally dissatisfied or at least unsatisfied consumer. The most important job that advertising must do is to persuade large number of people on behalf of the particular satisfaction advertised.

When one closely looks at all the definitions and arguments put forward by various experts over a period spanning almost one and a half centuries, advertising comes out as an art and to an extent, an applied science of persuasive communication. It must, in the beginning, inform, incite and interest the prospect about the product and later reinforce the message over a period of time, either by similar positioning or a changed one, keeping in view the strategy of the competitive brands, changing expectations of the consumers, changed environment etc.

So this gives advertising the flexibility to adapt to the changing social, economic and political environment by further creating lifestyles for the people of its own. This is the reason why it’s been said that Advertising has a power to mesmerize people to the extent that they buy the product they don’t even need.

Let’s examine this power of mesmerizing people and giving them a reason or a way of living life as per the products and services consumed by them.

Changing trends in Lifestyle Advertising

In television

From 1980 to 2013

(Trend analysis)

Media convergence has a sustainable influence on market relations and added value processes. Technological innovations and changing customer demands expand production and marketing possibilities of media enterprises on the one hand and offer, simultaneously, the chance of a well-directed positioning on the market. On the other hand, they threaten the existence of some co-competitors. The markets and their various participants, interconnections, products and customer demands are becoming increasingly complex. A company needs to have a clear vision about what they want to sell to their consumer. Is it just going to be some product? Which will not leave any memories or some sort of value once consumed by a customer. Or is it going to be a product with some value, the kind that a consumer will be able to relate to. Before we get too much into the details. Firstly, it is of immense importance to understand what lifestyle advertising is really about.

Lifestyle advertising is, when a company tries to sell you a way of living, as opposed to simply just the product. It's coolness by association. For instance, Harley-Davidson doesn't just sell motorcycles; they sell the image (lifestyle) of the biker dude.

An overarching theme of the book is the transformed role of branding both for the corporations producing it and for our society. Advertising has developed in western society along with manufacturing. Throughout the industrial era, advertising has been used as a way to distinguish mass produced products from one another. There has always been a struggle to place regulatory limits on the types of claims that can be made in advertising. However, we have entered an age where the lifestyle brand dominates.

A lifestyle brand is an attempt to make a corporate brand part of the identity of a person or group. People already identify very strongly with their employment, ethnicity, religion, and socio-economic status. Lifestyle brands often attempt to create similar cultural connections. Their goal is to become another way that people use to relate to one another. Lifestyle brands are an attempt to sell an identity, or an image, rather than a product. Advertisers for lifestyle brands make an effort to call attention to those, who would use this product or what ideals it represents, as opposed to what the product actually does.

Investors today favor brands that can transcend their products and become a "free-standing meaning. Investors are worshipping the brand for brand’s sake, with the hope that consumers will do so as well. Investors have good reason to expect that this will lead to greater profits. The ability to manipulate consumers and fabricate the perception of value is the core of a lifestyle brand and of a lifestyle corporation.

Lifestyle brands are one of the most important concepts explored. They have drastic implications for the structure of advertising and the market system. Future will explore related issues such as the poor pay found in both the retail industry that sells branded products and the factories of the developing world where the products are produced. At its core, creating a lifestyle brand is a game of subtle psychology. Embedding the central ‘ideal’ and ‘philosophy’ of a lifestyle brand into the public psyche requires an increased rate of repetition of exposure to branding.

Lifestyle brands try to present themselves as more of a culture than a consumer good. Rather than making factual (and falsifiable) claims that may be subject to government regulation, lifestyle branding tries to convince you that their brand is the embodiment of a set of values or aspirations that you desire. In practice, this can be as simple as presenting the product in a fun situations with attractive people enjoying themselves. Most cigarette and alcohol advertisements of the last several decades are good examples of this approach. Companies rely heavily on repetition to embed complex, subtle, and nuanced perceptions of their brand in the minds of the public.

It is not only lifestyle brands that make use of extensive branding and advertising tactics. However, they make the most effective use of the power of advertising and branding, turning low quality products into ‘must have’ social symbols without producing appropriate tangible benefits.

Lifestyle advertising in Postmodernism:

A common attribute of postmodernism refers to not judging by saying something is wrong or right, true or false. Similarly, the world is seen from a more extensive point of view as a flexible place where social boundaries are blurred and former ideologies are less influential.

It becomes increasingly difficult to separate fantasy from reality.

And that’s what lifestyle advertising, particularly, uses to increase its customer base. In postmodern world refers to the place where national and international boundaries shift quickly and where consumerism shapes the society as it can be proved by the United States where ‘more shopping malls can be found than public schools. New franchise opens every eight minute and online shopping becomes a multi-billion dollar industry.

An expressive example, Bourdieu (1984) introduces Elizabeth F., a woman who has done her A-levels with philosophy and lives alone in a one-room flat without any furniture, just with a mattress and a couple of books. She loves hitch-hiking to the Mediterranean where she can explore and experience something new, as she stated – ‘I love travelling that way partly because its so different what I usually do for the rest of the year, a different lifestyle’. This quote makes clear that travelling behaviors and requirements changed from going on holidays to the beach as being part of the mass to individual vacations where holidaymakers can experience a whole new lifestyle.

Voase (2002) sees postmodernism as a ‘regime of significance’, where products are purchased because they have a special meaning for the consumer as being a symbol for their way of living and not because they really need it for a special use.

Singh (2011) argues that consumer culture is about the consumption of that are necessarily needed but desperately wanted, and that value has been divorced from the material satisfaction of wants and the sign value of goods takes precedence. Thus, marketers respond to this sign value consumption by advertising their products with a symbolic meaning for their customers in order to communicate a certain lifestyle.

An insight into the world of unrealistic needs

In lifestyle advertising, a brand tries to sell an image and identity, rather than a product. In order to, make people associate the brand to a certain lifestyle. When lifestyle brands advertise, they tend to focus on what kind of person would buy the product, rather than the product itself. A lifestyle brand would try to convince consumers that their brand relates and have the same values and aspirations as you do. Their product is a "must-have". Many luxury brands like Chanel, Gucci are associated with life-style branding because their advertisements display suave people living and leading a life of luxury. To persuade consumers that they "need" to buy their products, companies consciously make people feel dissatisfied with what they already have and try to convince that if they don’t buy that particular product, they are lacking something.

Lifestyle advertising targets certain cultural and social groups when advertising. People who live a certain lifestyle will automatically be attracted to advertisements that display their interests. If they see an advertisement that displays similar interests to theirs, they will be more likely to purchase products from the brand.

E.g. "The all new sonata", Think about it. The Television advertisement by HYUNDAI

This advertisement sets an example of how consumers are led to believe through advertising that products have magical properties that provide simple, anxiety reducing answers to seemingly complex problems. Advertisers have had a long-standing goal of associating products with certain social situations. They find a set of products and services that can be linked to consumers in order to create a lifestyle that appeals to them. The products that consumers purchase are a statement about what they are and where they stand in a society and who they are not. Whether we are conscious about it or not the products that are advertised all around become part of our lifestyle.

Freud believed that consumers buying preferences are influenced by unconscious motives. This helps advertisers to reach their audience by using selling points that will appear to their unconscious motives. Advertisers make sure that the language and images they use in their advertisements appeal to the id in the consumers, making consumers want the immediate gratification of purchasing that specific product.

"That’s one of advertisement most brilliant accomplishments,

To get us to believe we are not affected by it."

-Bernard McGrane

A few examples:

Measuring the impact (Lifestyle advertising in television):

The impact of television is immense on consumers, due to combination of audio- visual effect and broadly spread viewership and this feature of TV is worldwide acknowledge and used as effective tool for advertisement. Now a days marketer are heavily targeting lifestyle in TV advertisement. Alfred Adler firstly used lifestyle in 1929, for person’s basic reaction and behavior. Danial Czitrom and David Marc (1985) provide a sketch to the popularity of lifestyle in 1960s, when several lifestyles became known to individuals and groups, including; gay lifestyle, communal life style, student and youth lifestyle, all forming the new "alternative lifestyles".

The originality of the word was somewhat lost during the transformation and introduction of the alternative lifestyles, focusing more on being part of a more Hollywood lifestyle, observed by celebrities, and followed by masses. Now, the question arises how Advertisement and Lifestyle are related. In business, "lifestyles" provide a means by which advertisers and marketers try to target and match consumer aspirations with products, or create aspirations relevant to new products. Therefore marketers take the patterns of belief and action characteristic of lifestyles and direct them toward expenditure and consumption.

These patterns reflect the demographic factors (the habits, attitudes, tastes, moral standards, economic levels and so on) that define a group. As a construct that directs people to interact with their worlds as consumers, lifestyles are subject to change by the demands of marketing and technological innovation.

The advertisement industry has a tremendous impact on our thinking. Most people believe what they see on TV. The advertisers know how to appeal to our senses. They tell us what to wear (because everyone is wearing it), what to eat (because everyone is eating it), and what to do (because everyone is doing it).

They use peer pressure very heavily. "You need to wear these tennis shoes because (add a big name sports star) is wearing them and everyone else is going to wear them. You want to be cool don't you?" You have to have a fast car that can go 120 mph even though the speed limit is set at about half that.

Lifestyle advertisements confuse people with the difference between "need" and "want.

The cultural impact on life style is global; advertiser can use the same commercials in all over the world. This leads to break down in the differences of the societies. The youth now, a day grows while watching these ads and that is why the culture of almost 70% of the world is changing. Advertisement is also influencing behavior of kids. Advertising makes kids want things -- it creates desire --which puts a lot of pressure on parents.

Television is a showcase for "must have" items that parents are expected to buy .Kids and parents always have to struggle about purchases. When a parent says, 'No, I can't buy that, I don't have enough money', there's an underlying sense that the parent is not meeting the child's needs and is depriving the child of what he or she needs to be happy."

TV advertising has enhanced people’s involvement in product selection and purchase, they prefer to buy TV advertised products and sometimes they want TV advertised products even though they do not need them. They also like the advertisements of the products that they are using and believe that products are as good as expected from TV advertisements. Advertisement has an impact on buying behavior of the masses. This ultimately changes their lifestyles.

E.g. Lifestyle advertising aims to persuade people to buy product A instead of product B, or to promote the habit of continuing to buy product A because they are unlikely to buy both product A and product B). In the case of a new ball-point pen, a simple selling proposition has to be converted into an unique selling proposition or the idea that the pen makes an ideal gift or award. This principle can be seen in the advertising for Parker Pens which contrasts with that for Tempo, including point of sale display advertising and the packing of the first is a presentation case and the second on a dispenser card.

Today, many products, services plus causes and social issue, are advertised which would have been possible, acceptable or even possible not many years ago. The prime examples have been the official campaign to educate people about AIDS, and the commercial campaign for condoms. There have also been environmental campaigns (often using direct mail) for Greenpeace and Friends of the earth.

There is also a more intellectual attitude towards many products and some people are prepared to pay higher prices for purer, healthier or safer ones. With threats to the ozone layer and with fears about pollution, there has been the ‘green’ campaign, but sadly a number of manufacturers and retailers have exploited this issue.

So it would be safer to say that advertising is not just concerned with giving information. It must do in such an interesting, original, characteristic and persuasive way that the consumer is urged to take action towards it. The action may be to fill in a coupon, telephone an enquiry or order, go to a shop and remember the product next he or she needs to buy, say, a drink, a car or even an insurance policy. Creativity to attract and win the attention, the interest and eventually the action of consumers, and the most cost-effective choice and use of innumerable media are the characteristics of successful advertising. All this calls for interaction between the three sides of advertising: the advertiser, the advertising agency and the media owner.

Sometimes, a TV commercial can sell the wrong this also. A yellow pages commercial showed a cricket umpire buying a new panama hat before being seen leaving the pavilion in his crisp white hat. The commercial was repeated many a times on prime time. Consequently, there was a remarkable increase in the sale of panama hats.

A lifestyle advertisement while featuring the attributes of the product in a way, also attempts to create a pleasant feeling towards the advertiser. Realism due to the combination of color, sound and action, TV has assets no other medium can offer. With these advantages the advertiser can show and demonstrate the product. Ingenious effects can be obtained by computer graphics. Lifestyle advertisements are well received and observed when presented via Television for receptive audiences as they are produced to high technical standards and the presenter is often known as a well-known personality or at least a good actor or actress, who presents the product authentically. In fact the quality of British commercial is so high that its creators are the ones who also produce some of the best cinema films.

The advertisement can be repeated to the point when a sufficient number of viewers have seen it ample times for the advertisement to have impact. Advertisers these days don’t indulge in saturation advertising, which is not only expensive but offensive. A good advertisement should be capable of being shown again after a rest without boring its audience.

The classic examples of this would be the chimp series which has been shown for some 30 years, advertising Brooke Bond PG tips tea. The series that was launched in 1984, actually had flashbacks to sequences in old chimp commercials. "Mr Piano Shifter" has been shown so many times on television that it has won a place in the Guinness Book of Records. The series continued to develop into the late 1990’s.

A CASE STUDY -

SHOULD LIFESTYLE BRANDING BE EMBRACED? NEW RIVALS JOINING THE RACE.

In 2011, PUMA joined the long line of brands -- including Gillette, Dove, Starbucks and Swatch -- that have transitioned their positioning from focusing on functional attributes to featuring their products as representing a lifestyle.

Puma's emphasis on lifestyle is a major departure from its original concentration on soccer shoes and other high-performance athletic equipment -- a positioning solidified by endorsements from superstar athletes the likes of soccer legends Pele and Maradona. Now, instead of continuing its tradition of designing and manufacturing high-end athletic gear, Puma is looking to broaden its product line by focusing on leisure pursuits rather than professional sports products. More important, Puma is shifting away from stressing functional performance towards hyping its products as a lifestyle choice.

What caused such a dramatic change in Puma's strategy? In 2007, PPR -- one of the world's largest luxury goods conglomerates -- acquired Puma as a part of its long-term strategy to strengthen its portfolio with higher-growth and higher-margin businesses. Part of the appeal of the acquisition was that PPR's core competency in building and managing luxury brands could help propel Puma's growth. So it should come as no surprise that several years later PPR, whose portfolio of luxury brands includes Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent and Boucheron, has decided to further align the Puma brand with its core competency in lifestyle branding.

Another, and perhaps more important, reason is that Puma is facing mounting competition from its arch rivals Adidas and Nike, which have encroached on Puma's market for designer athletic gear with functionally similar products. In light of this, focusing on lifestyle rather than on functional attributes appears to be a logical strategy to sidestep the competition and connect with customers on a more personal level.

Can the lifestyle branding strategy backfire?

The success of lifestyle brands stems from their appeal to consumers' need for self-expression. For example, brands like Gucci, Polo and Abercrombie & Fitch enable consumers to express themselves by identifying with the lifestyles represented by these brands. The problem, however, is that consumers' need for self-expression, like many other needs, can be satiated. This means that as alternative outlets for self-expression continue to proliferate, the marginal importance of many lifestyle brands will likely decline.

To make matters worse, unlike competition based on functional attributes, which in most cases is limited to a given product category, focusing on lifestyle puts brands from different categories in direct competition with one another. For Puma, this means that it now has to compete not only with its direct rivals but also with lifestyle brands from unrelated categories. These include not only traditional lifestyle brands like Gucci, Abercrombie & Fitch and Ralph Lauren, but also functional brands like Gillette, Harley-Davidson, Starbucks, Swatch and Apple that have come to play a self-defining role for many consumers. Thus, by switching to lifestyle positioning, Puma might be trading traditional in-category competition for even fiercer cross-category competition.

Who benefits from lifestyle advertising? 

The increased competition among lifestyle brands does not necessarily mean that lifestyle branding is the wrong strategy. Rather, it means that to succeed a company needs to have core competency and strategic assets in lifestyle branding. As in any market, there will be winners and losers. The winners will be the brands that are best positioned to represent popular lifestyles. PPR's experience in building luxury brands means Puma is poised to become one of the winners in the lifestyle category.

Puma's future trajectory might be similar to other brands that have managed to successfully transition from functional to lifestyle positioning. For example, Montblanc has repositioned itself from a functionally focused brand that manufactured high-end pens into a lifestyle brand spanning different categories that include leather goods, watches and sunglasses, in addition to its core pen business. In the same vein, Lacoste managed to broaden the appeal of its brand from being closely associated with tennis to representing a lifestyle of exclusivity and luxury.

The casualties of lifestyle branding

Conventional wisdom would argue that a company's switch to lifestyle branding should have the greatest impact on its direct competitors. In Puma's case, this means that its repositioning will have the biggest effect on its direct rivals in the sports gear market, including Adidas and Nike. By effectively removing itself from the market in which brands compete on functionality, Puma might have made life a bit easier for Adidas and Nike.

The brands that will really suffer from Puma's repositioning are the lifestyle brands that do not have the resources or commitment to sustain their lifestyle positioning in the face of increasing competition. Consider, for example, Nestle's Coffee-Mate creamer, which recently launched the "express yourself" campaign aimed at repositioning itself from a functional coffee-creamer to a self-expressive brand. Ironically, Puma might even sink its competitive claws into fellow feline, Kellogg's Tony the Tiger, because despite being in different categories both brands compete to satisfy the same customer need -- the need to express one's self.

Patterns observed in recent lifestyle advertisements:

In the domain of luxury goods a certain type of advertisement has emerged that relies almost exclusively on the evocation of pure sensation. Only in part do the depicted scenes, characters or objects trigger these sensations. Rather, aesthetic features of style – such as depth of field diffusion, color or light – enhance the spectator’s sensorial response. In the context of the avantgarde of the 1920s, similar strategies were employed. While these avant-garde films combined a modernist hope for utopia with a democratization of aesthetics and taste for the masses, contemporary lifestyle advertisements tend to be suffused with nostalgia. However, this nostalgia is a historic, offering only the most pleasurable aspects of an imaginary experience.

In his 1964 essay Rhetoric of the Image (Rhétorique de l’image), Roland Barthes analysed the three messages at work in an advertisement for the pasta brand Panzani: ‘a linguistic message, a coded iconic message and a non-coded iconic message’ (1977: 36). In the linguistic domain Barthes discovered a double communication in the name Panzani, which denotes a (France based) food company while at the same time – by its assonance – evoking a culturally coded connotation he called ‘Italianicity’ (1977: 34). On the level of the pictorial representation the coded iconic message carries a number of connotations: freshness, expressed by the depiction of the half-opened bag; Italianicity, with the vegetables and the ‘tri-coloured hues’; ‘the idea of a total culinary service’ with ‘the serried collection’ of all the objects necessary ‘for a carefully balanced dish’; and finally the nature morte (still life) with its tradition in painting and (1996) and Featherstone (2007).

Therefore Italianicity requires a stereotyped image of Italian culture as constructed by foreigners and their tourist experience, be it personal or mediated through magazines, films or advertisements. The more this quality is established, the more it becomes transparent and thus ideologically charged on a very subliminal level, or, as Barthes put it, ‘Bourgeois ideology … turns culture into nature’ (1973). It requires a hegemonial reading to uncover its ideological effect. As with Fredric Jameson’s notion of pastiche, it is the wearing of a mask that informs a neutral-seeming practice of mimicry (Jameson, 1984). According to Barthes it is especially the mechanical and thus objective status of photographic depiction – the photograph as a non-coded message – that enhances the myth of naturalness, because by its tight coupling with the depicted world it naturalizes the symbolic layers of meaning. Furthermore, it is on the level of style that human interventions manifest themselves and a shift from the natural to the culturally coded occurs, thus triggering another layer of meaning. It was this notion of style that Barthes (2004: 47) described as the ‘third’ or ‘obtuse’ meaning. The term ‘meaning’ is – as Kristin Thompson (1999: 488) notes – actually ‘a misleading one, since these elements of the work are precisely those that do not participate in the creation of narrative or symbolic meaning’. Rather it ‘frustrates meaning – subverting not the content but the entire practice of meaning’ (Barthes, 1973).

It is exactly this shift from denotation to connotation and obtuse meaning, or – to put it differently – from information to sensorial and affective qualities that is the topic of this discussion. In the luxury domain in recent years, a certain type of advertisement has emerged that relies almost exclusively on the evocation of pure sensations. Only in part do the depicted scenes, characters or objects lead to these sensations. Rather, the aesthetic features of style – such as depth of field, diffusion, color or light – enhance the spectator’s sensorial response. Most often, these types of advertisements understate the brand’s account to the degree of showing the product only incidentally, usually dimly lit, in fragments and/or out of focus, while barely mentioning the brand’s or product’s name. In addition, the images are usually accompanied only by music, with little or no spoken word and no sound effects, which stresses the dreamlike quality already present in the photography that is often supported by the use of slow motion.

Similar commercials were produced for BMW (‘The Follow’, produced in 2001, directed by Wong Kar-wai with Clive Owen); for Philips (‘There’s Only One Sun’, produced in 2007, directed by Wong Kar-wai); for Tourism Australia (‘Australia Walkabout’, produced in 2008, directed by Baz Luhrmann); for Chanel No 5 (‘N° 5 the Film’, produced in 2004, directed by Baz Luhrmann, with Nicole Kidman and Rodrigo Santoro); for Dior Midnight Poison (produced in 2007, directed by Wong Kar-wai with Eva Green); for Gucci by Gucci (directed by David Lynch); for J’Adore by Dior (with Charlize Theron); for Rouge by Dior (with Monica Bellucci); for Gucci Jewellery (with Drew Barrymore); and for Coco Mademoiselle (with Keira Knightley), to name a few. All these commercials share similar aesthetic features. They represent a certain lifestyle – a distinctive ‘form of status grouping’ (Chaney, 1996: 14) – rather than a consumer’s immediate benefit. Perfume is arguably the most prevalent product segment that applies these strategies to express a cross-modal relationship between a scent and its visual representation.

Before analyzing the aesthetic principles of contemporary lifestyle advertisements, it is worth examining a historical period during which similar patterns emerged in audiovisual forms that relied heavily or exclusively on the use of connotations. In the 1920s, a film-making avant-garde in Germany – including film-makers such as Walther Ruttmann, Oskar Fischinger created what was called der absolute Film, or ‘absolute film’ (cf.Brinckmann, 1997) At the centre of this movement was a close investigation into the relationship between the organisational principles of music and their implementation in the pictorial composition of pure forms. There is still a tendency to establisha discursive dichotomy between consumer culture and the elitist thoughts of avant-garde movements, it should be stressed that both share a common rhetoric of innovation and progress. Furthermore, it was precisely this intellectual reflection about the status of art vis-à-vis everyday life that called for a tight bond between the two and led to the goal of aestheticisation of everyday life.

More than eighty years later, it is not so much a utopian use of technical innovations that marks the current trend in lifestyle advertisement, but – on a deeper level – an aestheticisation of everyday experience. In postmodernism, however, this aestheticisation has adopted a different range of functions and expressions than in the modernist conception, because in postmodern society ‘traditional distinctions and hierarchies are collapsed’ (Featherstone, 2007). As for formal features, in recent advertisements abstraction is found not as a flat composition of graphical or animated elements, but as a reduction of photographic images to a painterly arrangement of light and colour. However, the arrangement of the visuals based on music harks back to the concept of rhythm so central in the modernist avant-garde. An additional aspect common to both periods of advertisement production is the use of notable invoking specific cultural knowledge on the part of consumers.

While these arguments support the consumer benefit associated with the product, they do not answer the question of why and how the product fulfills the promise. There is clearly a gap between the added value expressed in the atmospheric images. Hence the ‘unique selling proposition’ is not supported. This gap is no coincidence, but part of a strategy that builds more on the third line of communication – namely ‘tonality’, ie the style and expression of the message – than on delivering arguments. In addition to the static, calm rhythm and the exotic touch, the tonality includes the stylistic patterns: shallow depth of field with bokeh, colour, over-exposure and diffusion. According to Featherstone (2007: 83), ‘consumption, then, must not be understood as the consumption of use values, a material utility, but primarily as the consumption of signs.’ These signs, however, are not rooted in the world depicted, but in the mode of depiction. While the referent is still available – the images represent something and their connection to the real is of high significance – the higher-order meaning or the symbolic value is transferred to the realm of style. This difference can best be explained by the distinction between ‘looking through’ and ‘looking at’, established in art theory. ‘Looking through’ refers to a transparent mode of depiction where the recognition of objects dominates. ‘Looking at’, on the other hand, means focusing on the material quality of the surface structure of a painting or a photograph. In this system the shift to the symbolic value of the signs occurs mainly in the ‘looking at’ mode of perception, while – in contrast to the abstract, modernist artworks of the avant-garde that were fully opaque and thus non-referential – the ‘looking through’ mode is equally available.

Lifestyle – standardizing concept development in advertising practice.

Lifestyles and lifestyle values globally have many common factors other than the effect of cultural and religious orientation of individuals within a particular society. With the development of lifestyle segmentation and the use of such segmentation for advertising and marketing, there is emerging a perspective on lifestyle advertising. The emergence of lifestyle segmentation that allowed marketers to look at global consumers as a heterogeneous group of individuals has evolved into the advertising practices around the world where today lifestyle advertising takes the same segmentation as a basis for the development of campaigns and content. "Lifestyle", as a word was first coined by Alfred Adler in 1929, a Freudian psychiatrist, giving it the meaning of "a person’s basic ... reactions and behavior". Danial Czitrom and David Marc (1985) provide a trace to the popularity of lifestyle to 1960s, when several lifestyles became known to individuals and groups, including; gay lifestyle, communal life style, student and youth lifestyle, all forming the new "alternative lifestyles" the world still observes. The originality of the word was somewhat lost during the transformation and introduction of the alternative lifestyles, focusing more on being part of a more Hollywood lifestyle, observed by celebrities, and followed by masses.

Marketing has utilized the concept of lifestyle since the late 1980s, examples of which include the division of consumers into five distinct classes that span national borders and transcend cultural differences by Backer Spielvogel Bates (1989).

This segmentation that was global in nature included: 16% traditional, 13% pressured, 22% achievers, 26% strivers, 18% adapters and 5% unassigned.

The trend of segmentation of global consumers and target markets continued to gain attention with Michele Levine (1988) in Melbourne, Australia, following a similar approach, by means of developing 10 value segments for international marketing, which included: the basic needs, the fair deal, the traditional family life, the conventional family life, the look-at-me group, the something better, the real conservatism, the young optimism, the visible achievement, and the socially aware.

The most influential of all studies was that of Arnold Mitchell (1983) who developed VALS (value and lifestyle profiles). The study yielded various clusters or VALS categories. According to Mitchell, the lifestyle profiles include: Survivor (old, intensely poor; fearful; depressed; despairing; far removed from the cultural mainstream; misfits); Sustainer (living on the edge of poverty; angry and resentful; streetwise; involved in the underground economy); Belonger (aging; traditional and conventional; contended; intensely patriotic; sentimental; deeply stable); Emulator (youthful and ambitious; macho; show-off; trying to break into the system and make it big); Achiever (middle-aged and prosperous; capable leaders; self-centred; materialistic; masters of the "American dream’); I-AmMe (transition state; exhibitionistic and narcissistic; young; impulsive; dramatic; experimental; active; inventive); Experiential (youthful; seek direct experience; person-centred; artistic; intensely oriented toward inner growth); Societally Conscious (mission-oriented; leaders of single-issue groups; mature; successful; some live lives of voluntary simplicity); Integrated (psychologically mature; large field of vision; tolerant and understanding; sense of fittingness) (Mitchell, 1983).

This comprehensive understanding of how audiences are and what is there future status rather than their current, is very useful for advertising as it distinguishes different individual groups and allows for content and campaigns to be developed that focus on lifestyle, or promote a particular lifestyle therefore forming lifestyle advertising.

Arnold Mitchell’s nine American lifestyle groups are a perfect example of how advertising and lifestyle use the same basis i.e. values, dreams and attitudes. It is VALS that gave advertisers the ability to judge the audiences and create content that expressed a living that would attract the right audiences. Lifestyles segmentation therefore has given advertisers around the world the tool they needed to make sensible advertisements focused on creating expression and excitement.

Lifestyle segmentation has set the standards for advertising in context of lifestyle, and today we find many companies promoting a particular lifestyle, not only by means of self-promotion but also through co-promotion of products, where two companies with the same objective in lifestyle advertising come together to promote their products and services together.

The gearing towards this lifestyle advertising approach has been seen as being used widely by fast food businesses due to the natural rebellion of the audiences towards them promoting an unhealthy lifestyle. The emergence of lifestyle products such as Subway sandwiches which promote a healthy living today employs lifestyle advertising in their promotional strategy.

A point to be noted here is that standardization of any advertisement based upon lifestyle segmentation or lifestyle based advertising itself cannot be done on a standard template, as the appeal of lifestyles across borders is different. France having greater liberalization with reference to sex appeal in their advertisement as compared to other European countries as well as America is an evidence of such standardized adaptation of lifestyle advertising templates. Furthermore cultural difference would require lifestyle values to be adjusted in the strategies or construction of advertisements, as different cultures would require different approaches to how we can project our ideas within an advertisement.

Independent variables in lifestyle advertising:

The common ground established by means of understanding the lifestyle similarities of individuals and audiences should be used as a basis for global lifestyle marketing, with customization on aspects of culture and religious orientation of the target country. In doing so the idea behind the concept development would remain the same as the target audiences would be based on lifestyle segmentation allowing for lesser time in developing advertisements that cater for a larger target audiences and are easier to implement by means of building upon the same concept and idea as that of the original or country of origin audience. We have demonstrated here that the use of lifestyle segmentation in marketing allows for us to use the basis of such in developing lifestyle advertising. We propose that lifestyle advertising can allow standardisation on the forefront of idea generation and creative concept which further would be tweaked according to cultural and religious value systems of different countries and society. The acceptance of basic lifestyle values all over the World allows for such a technique to be employed by Advertising and Marketing Agencies and practitioners.

Lifestyle advertising would be based on the following principle of three sets of independent variables: 118 European Journal of Economics, Finance and Administrative Sciences - Issue 21 (2010) –

LIFESTYLE ADVERTISING

Individual Lifestyle Group Lifestyle Cultural and religious lifestyle

Lifestyle Advertising therefore is "Communication by means of different media’s with that is personal in nature as it focuses on the way of living or projected image of an individual, or target audience, but remains non personal when looked against standardization of all audiences as not being independent in thought and reception". On understanding the implications and the uses and its effects of lifestyle advertising there.

Influence of children’s lifestyles:

Advertising targets kids as well. Towards children it has become more persuasive and less recognizable than before as a sales pitch. Companies target children in different ways than they do adults. Advertisers take current trends such as popular TV shows, movies, new musical groups and they use those trends to persuade children that they need the product associated with the trend in order to be considered "cool".

Advertisers know that if they can get a brand name well-placed into a child’s head, when specially they are teenagers or young that child could become a brand loyal customer for life. This is why advertisement try to get children familiar with adult brands earlier.

Influence of women’s lifestyle:

Normally, everyday women look at models and other women in ads an compare themselves to them. Because of this, advertising has a direct influence on women’s lifestyles. Advertising influences women to want to look a certain way, act a certain way, dress a certain way and when this doesn’t happen they are left feeling bad about themselves as to how they look like and what they are, when compared to other women.

The version of women that advertising depicts is not only harmful emotionally but also physically. 10-15% of women have developed eating disorders trying to be the "ideal" woman that is seen in media and advertisements.

Afterword

Over the past decade, advertising has influenced consumers’ perception on reality. They have created these fantasies of perfect lifestyles and what you need to achieve these ‘perfect’ worlds. For many companies, advertising has shifted from selling a product to selling a desired lifestyle in which their product is suited for.

Advertising has also changed the world perception on beauty, especially for women. With advertisements featuring models with perfect, thin bodies, log beautiful hair and perfect skin. It is no wonder eating disorders and self-hatred has increased within the female community. Women feel that they are not beautiful because they don’t live up the expectation of those the women in advertisements do, which can lead some women into drastic lifestyle changes.

In simple terms, yes, advertising does influence consumer lifestyles by created a world of unrealistic needs with the brands that they promote. More and more companies are using lifestyle branding. For some companies, it is no longer a top priority to send a message to the consumers about how great their product is, but rather the lifestyle or image associated to the brand and product. Advertising is being used as a tool to manipulate the consumers’ desire of living a perfect life that their brand and product are key elements into being able to live that fantasy.

"Where I am from.

There is no plan B.

So, take advantage of today

Because, tomorrow is never promised."

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