Lost in the Supermarket

...whenever pictures perfectly create a single figure and form from many colors and figures, they delight the sight, while the creation of statues and the production of works of art furnish a pleasant sight to the eyes. Thus it is natural for the sight to grieve for some things and to long for others, and much love and desire for many objects and figures is engraved in many men

-Gorgias, Encomium to Helen

Housekeeping

Agenda

• Discuss Project One
• Tropes
• Polemic
• Cultural Analysis
• Ask the Perfesser

Return of the Hidden Persuaders

"A growing number of CEOs have become convinced that they cannot sell their brand of deodorant, or deli meat, or automobile until they first explore the Jungian substrata of four-wheel drive; unlock the discourse codes of female power sweating; or deconstruct the sexual politics of bologna." -- Return of the Hidden Persuaders

Tropes

Troping: Vance Packard

Shifts in Marketing Technique: Far from being consigned to the maverick fringe, the new psycho-persuaders of corporate America have colonized the marketing departments of mainstream conglomerates. At companies like Kraft, Coca-Cola, Proctor & Gamble and Daimler-Chrysler, the most sought-after consultants hail not from McKinsey & Company, but from brand consultancies with names like Archetype Discoveries, PsychoLogics and Semiotic Solutions.

• Linguistics
• Collagists
• Jungian Psychoanalysis
• Archetype Research<raw><raw>

It is very logical and thus their logos is heavily enforced by results and reasoning. But overall they use peoples emotions and their uncontrollable pathological responses against them. Their ethos and pathos are at their peak, when they manipulate people without them even giving them a chance to second guess themself. As they say it has become so common that people do not even think about it when they use words like fast food.

Logos Invades Pathos?: "We were using the logic of logic, not the logic of emotion."

The Counter-example: HA! Get it? Counter example?

Products based on conquering marketshare through understanding mindshare: Rapaille's greatest triumph came last February, when the consultant was asked to preside over the design of the PT Cruiser -- a Mad Max-type vehicle described by the Wall Street Journal as "part 1920s gangster car, part 1950s hot rod, and part London taxicab." The vehicle, which hits dealerships in January 2000, is a focus group on wheels -- an actual, chrome-and-sheet-metal incarnation of the popular will. "We didn't set out to create a market," Bostwick says earnestly. "We just tapped into what people had in their heads in the first place." -- But Does It Work?: The PT Cruiser has been discontinued.

Conformity, orginality, and rhetoric: The turn probably began back in the '50s, when the admen realized, much to their chagrin, that advances in technology and the growing standardization of ingredients were resulting in brands that were technically identical. The old approach -- reciting product benefits, hammering home a "unique selling proposition" -- didn't work anymore. And so, as the marketers wrung their hands, wondering how to cope with this newfound problem of "rapidly diminishing product differences," the ad agencies groped for new and deeper persuasion techniques, sexier approaches, sharper hooks.

Pathos: Thundered the Saturday Evening Post: "The subconscious mind is the most delicate part of the most delicate apparatus in the entire universe ... It is not to be smudged, sullied or twisted in order to boost the sales of popcorn or anything else."

"But I may unconsciously use it as a cleansing ritual, to rid my body of bad thoughts. If I can take my spring water, and actually think of it as a cleaning ritual -- and as a result, feel cleaner, purer inside -- doesn't that help me in my day-day-living? It's almost like good therapy."

Ethos: "We started looking at what in human experience slows down time," he says. "And we started looking at the drive-through window as a ritual event in an anthropological sense."

Why Johnny Can't Dissent

Genre: (Pop)Cultural Criticism

Tone: Polemical

Troping: Why Johnny Can't Read

Capitalism is changing, obviously and drastically. From the moneyed pages of the Wall Street Journal to TV commercials for airlines and photocopiers we hear every day about the new order's globe-spanning, cyber-accumulating ways. But our notion about what's wrong with American life and how the figures responsible are to be confronted haven't changed much in thirty years. Call it, for convenience, the "countercultural idea." It holds that the paramount ailment of our society is conformity, a malady that has variously been described as over-organization, bureaucracy, homogeneity, hierarchy, logocentrism, technocracy, the Combine, the Apollonian. We all know what it is and what it does. It transforms humanity into "organization man," into "the man in the gray flannel suit." It is "Moloch whose mind is pure machinery," the "incomprehensible prison" that consumes "brains and imagination." It is artifice, starched shirts, tailfins, carefully mowed lawns, and always, always, the consciousness of impending nuclear destruction. It is a stiff, militaristic order that seeks to suppress instinct, to forbid sex and pleasure, to deny basic human impulses and individuality, to enforce through a rigid uniformity a meaningless plastic Consumerism.

Sometimes You Gotta Break the Rules --Burger King
If You Don't Like the Rules, Change Them --WXRT-FM
The Rules Have Changed --Dodge
The Art of Changing --Swatch
There's no one way to do it. --Levi's
This is different. Different is good. --Arby's
Just Different From the Rest --Special Export beer
The Line Has Been Crossed: The Revolutionary New Supra --Toyota
Resist the Usual --the slogan of both Clash Clear Malt and Young & Rubicam
Innovate Don't Imitate --Hugo Boss
Chart Your Own Course --Navigator Cologne
It separates you from the crowd --Vision Cologne

Assignments for Friday

Due: Find and bring in one advertising example (preferably a link to something on the computer, but a print ad will do as well) for discussion on Friday. Post the link or image, if you have one, to the Fifth Response page.

Reading Assignments

• Chapter 4 ("Drafting and Revising Arguments") in Good Reasons (52-65)
• Chapter 7 ("So What? Who Cares?") in They Say/I Say (88-97).