Marketing Is the Production of Signs and their Meanings Essay

Marketing Is the Production of Signs and their Meanings - Essay Example Advertising is basically a source of societal information implanted in products that mediate personal identity as well as interpersonal associations. Advertising should thus be perceived as a vital part of the consumer society. This is because it generates patterned sequences of meaning which have a key role in social reproduction as well as personal socialisation. The "marketplace" can actually be perceived as a "cultural system" of sorts and not merely a method for the exchange of changes in the transactions involving products and money. It is the images as well as cultural symbolism that offer key insights into the character and operations involved in advertising. Cultural types of social communication actually generate meanings via non-discursive imagery which affects behaviour and consciousness in a subtle manner by allowing some kinds of behaviour and thought while delegitimizing others. For example, advertising suggests through its images affirmative presentations of self-assu red "masculine" manners and illustrations of fashionable as well as well-groomed women and men who desire to be successful in finding spouses. Therefore, advertising offers improper as well as proper depictions of behaviour as well as role models for both women and men. The outcome of this is the development of a culture where a person’s image has a more significant role than his or her linguistic discourse. Visual imagery is non-discursive, and thus associative, fictive, emotional and iconic, whereas vocal imagery is discursive (Elkington, Hartigan and Schwab, 2008). Advertising has played a major role in the evolution into a new culture that is observed with image, and thus in the change from a book/print or...The all important consumer is put on a pedestal and venerated. Successful marketing operations create a hyper-reality that the ordinary customer believes in because most of the time it is unanticipated and unusual but exhilarating and artistic. For example, the Disney Empire is actually founded on the creation of fantasy which is not actually a requirement but a product of the cooperation of Disney’s employees, consumers, reviewers, and agents (Hurley, 2005). This is also the case where the electronic corporations are concerned. For example, Apple’s Macintosh computer was not a requirement that was necessary for the consumers. It was simply a persuasively seductive computer vision with a â€Å"warm and responsive† image that had been created by Steve Jobs and his group. The actual computer product was then created to occupy this vision. Marketing practice, is, therefore, not really created by the model of a sovereign customer in the post modern world, as by the pursuit for an influential hyper-reality that marketers as well as consumers can believe in. It is not the consumer but the image that is considered as being sovereign. A good example of this is found in a Pepsi commercial that was shown not so long ago. A beautiful supermodel who neglected to consume the product was instantly transformed into an ugly mannish creature.