Essay about Marketing: Appeal and Need

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Jib Fowles’ “Advertising’s 15 Basic Appeals” (adapted from Common Culture, 2004) In this essay, Jib Fowles looks at how advertisements work by examining the emotional, subrational appeals that they employ. We are confronted daily by hundreds of ads, only a few of which actually attract our attention. These few do so, according to Fowles, through "something primary and primitive, an emotional appeal, that in effect is the thin edge of the wedge, trying to find its way into a mind." Drawing on research done by the psychologist Henry A. Murray, Fowles describes fifteen emotional appeals or wedges that advertisements exploit. I have summarized those appeals below, and included some introductory quotes to frame his argument. "The continuous pressure is to create ads more and more in the image of audience motives and desires." (Marshall McLuhan qtd. in Fowles) “By giving form to people's deep-lying desires and picturing states of being that individuals privately yearns for, advertisers have the best chance of arresting attention and affecting communication. And that is the immediate goal of advertising: to tug at our psychological shirts sleeves amd slow us down long enough for a word or two about whatever is being sold.” (Jib Fowles) “There are assumptions about personality underlying advertisers' efforts to communicate via emotional appeals, and while these assumptions have stood the test of time, they still deserve to be aired. Human beings, it is presumed, walk around with a variety of unfulfilled urges and motives swirling in the bottom half of their minds. . . . Advertisers want to circumvent this shell of consciousness if they can, and latch on to one of the lurching, subconscious drives. In effect, advertisers over the years have blindly felt their way around the underside of the American psyche, and by trial and error have discovered the softest points of entree, the places where their messages have the greatest likelihood of getting by consumers' defenses.” Advertisements can appeal to . . . 1. The need for sex. Surprisingly, Fowles found that only 2 percent of the television ads he surveyed used this appeal. It may be too blatant, he concluded, and often detracts from the product. The need for affiliation. The largest number of ads appeal to the need to associate with others, including the desires for romance, family, and friendship. Advertisers can also use this negatively, to make you worry that you'll lose friends if you don't use a certain product. “As self-directed as Americans pretend to be, in the last analysis we remain social animals, hungering for the positive, endorsing feelings that only those around us can supply.” The need to nurture. Every time you see a puppy or a kitten or a child, the appeal is to your paternal or maternal instincts, your desires to feed, heal, protect, console, and comfort. The need for guidance. “The opposite of the need to nurture is the need to be nurtured: to be protected, shielded, guided.” Parent-like figures, celebrities, and even fantasy spokespersons like the Jolly Green Giant invoke this need. Other products use tradition, custom, and feelings of nostalgia to play on this need.

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The need to aggress. We all have had a desire to get even, and some ads give you this satisfaction, but like the need to sex it can backfire on advertisers to it is used cautiously. The need to achieve. “This is the drive that energizes people, causing them to strive in their lives and careers.” The ability to accomplish something difficult and succeed identifies the product with winning. Sports heroes as spokespersons project this image, as do superlatives (the best, the finest). The need to dominate. “This fundamental need is the craving to be powerful.” The power we lack is what we can look for in a product. The need for prominence. We want
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