Consumer Culture and its Influence on Media Advertising

Consumer Culture and its Influence on Media Advertising

In this blog post, we will go through what is consumer culture, the consumer culture theory and then dive into how it is shown in cinema. We’ll explore how media portrays consumer culture and how they can both reflect and shape our views on consumption in our everyday lives.

Consumer Culture Theory

We live in a world where what we buy often reflects who and what we are. The consumer culture theory (CCT) talks about how/why our shopping choices and lifestyles are influenced by culture, society, and the economy instead of just our wants and needs. Instead of seeing culture as one big set of beliefs, CCT looks at the different ways people create meaning and identity through what they buy and how they live (Arnould and Thompson, 2018). CCT talks about why people use brands and products to express who they are, how social class or ethnicity influence our purchases, and how people come together because of the same purchases. CCT also studies how media and advertising change our perspective about what is appealing, while also showing how people sometimes resist or rethink these messages. In short, CCT helps us understand that buying isn’t just about the product, but it is the choice of why we bought that product and what that decision says about us (Arnould and Thompson, 2018).

Consumer Culture in Media

Advertising has been around for centuries, but it was Edward Bernays who transformed it into an effective tool for influencing consumer behaviour and public opinion.

Edward Bernays (1891-1995)

Edward Bernays was a pioneer American publicist, born in 1891 in Austria but in 1892 Bernays's family moved to New York. He is often referred to as the "father of public relations" (archive.nytimes.com, 1995). Bernays understood that effective advertising is far from just promoting a product. It goes into the deeper and unconscious desires that drive the consumers' choices. Since he was the nephew of the psychologist Sigmund Freud, who studied the unconscious mind, Bernays had access to all the information he needed about the unconscious mind. From the psychoanalytic theory, he understood that people were motivated by other desires (unconscious), so he began to use the role of emotional connections and social status in advertising.

In the 1920s Bernays was hired by the Beech Nut company to help them improve their sales of bacon. Bernays quickly realised that the reason that this company was not selling a lot of bacon, was not because of their product but because of the American (consumer) mindset. At the time a light breakfast was recommended. Bernays came up with a way to overcome this issue by making around four thousand five hundred physicians sign a paper that says that a big breakfast of bacon and eggs was the best thing to eat in the morning (Swamy, 2023). He published his report, and when the American nation read it, the sales of bacon doubled in sales.

Beech-Nut Advert

Another example of his emotional manipulation for advertising was the Lucky Strike cigarettes. In 1934 Bernays was approached by Lucky Strike cigarettes. This company had two problems before they hired Bernays. The two problems were both linked to women. The first problem was that the sales for women were low and the taboo of women smoking in public did not help this issue. The second problem was the green packaging of the cigarettes. The colour green was considered an unfashionable colour for women and changing the packaging would have been too expensive. So Bernays called fashion designers to make their clothes the same shade of green as the Lucky Strikes Cigarette packaging and then do a green ball at a fancy hotel with all the most famous models wearing the green clothing and being photographed to be published (The Editorial Team Cultural Currents Institute, 2023). Suddenly the colour green became fashionable for women. For the other problem of the taboo, Bernays used equality to say that women can also smoke in public not only men. He photographed women smoking in public and published in the news. Suddenly the sales skyrocketed because more women started smoking. 

In conclusion, consumer culture theory shows how our purchases affect our identities and social status, and how media and advertising, as created by people such as Bernays, impact these decisions, significantly influencing the attitudes and behaviour of the consumer. 

Reference

archive.nytimes.com. (1995). Edward Bernays, ‘Father of Public Relations’ And Leader in Opinion Making, Dies at 103. [online] Available at: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/08/16/specials/bernays-obit.html.

Arnould, E.J. and Thompson, C.J. (2018). Consumer Culture Theory. SAGE. by (n.d.). Edward Bernays and Why We Eat Bacon for Breakfast – Braithwaite Communications. [online] gobraithwaite.com. Available at: https://gobraithwaite.com/thinking/edward-bernays-and-why-we-eat-bacon-for-breakfast/.

Higgs, K. (2021). A Brief History of Consumer Culture. [online] The MIT Press Reader. Available at: https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/a-brief-history-of-consumer-culture/.

Swamy, A. (2023). Bamboozled by Breakfast: Unmasking Edward Bernays’ Impact on Our Morning Meals. [online] Medium. Available at: https://anandswamy.medium.com/bamboozled-by-breakfast-unmasking-edward-bernays-impact-on-our-morning-meals-2187bc254a14.

The Editorial Team Cultural Currents Institute (2023). How Lucky Strike Became an Icon of the Feminist Movement. [online] www.culturalcurrents.institute. Available at: https://www.culturalcurrents.institute/post/edward-bernays.