Ad Morality and Its Social Impact

8/9/2019 Ad Morality and Its Social Impact

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Advertising’s Impact on

Morality in Society:Influencing Habits andDesires of Consumers

ANDREW GUSTAFSON

Of all the major perspectives by which people construe the world, advertising is at once among the most influential andthe least examined.1

Advertisements saturate our social lives. We participate, daily,in deciphering advertising images and messages. . . . Yet, because ads are so pervasive and our reading of them so rou-

tine, we tend to take for granted the deep social assumptionsembedded in advertisements. We do not ordinarily recognizeadvertising as a sphere of ideology.2

Much of the literature written on advertising ethics by philosophersfocuses on “Truth in Advertising”—puffery, disclosure, and other such issues.3 My concern here is quite different. I am interested inexploring the moral effects of advertising on individuals in society—particularly how advertising affects the desires and inclinations

of individuals, and then, whether that influence has any moralramifications. Should advertisers simply follow the dictum “buyer beware”—and maintain no responsibility for the effects of advertise-ment so long as they are not outright lying? Or should advertiserstake partial responsibility for the effects of their advertisements

© 2001 Center for Business Ethics at Bentley College. Published by Blackwell Publishers,350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, and 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK.

Business and Society Review 106:3 201–223

Andrew Gustafson completed his Ph.D. in philosophy at Marquette University in May 2001. His

dissertation was on J. S. Mill’s view of moral sentiments, with reference to advertising ethics.Gustafson has articles published in BEQ and reviews in Journal for Teaching Business Ethics . Heis presently an assistant professor at Bethel College in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Many thanks to Joyce Wolburg, Kevin Gibson, Gene Laczniak, and Pat Werhane for encourage-ment, discussion, and advice.


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upon the moral compass of consumers? If advertising does change

the sentiments and affections of individuals, and if moral action is

dependent in part upon maintaining particular sentiments andaffections, then it would seem that advertising does in fact play a

role in the development or unraveling of an individual’s capacities

to act morally, and so cannot claim to be an amoral practice.I will limit my focus to three main authors, drawing from their

work and some examples from alcohol and tobacco marketing toconvince the reader that advertising does have a significant impact on both moral sentiment and moral behavior in society. In part oneI set up the problem. In effect, what I am arguing against in thisarticle is the myth of amoral advertising—the view that advertisinghas no significant moral impact on society. In part two, I draw fromthe work of Schudson and others to claim that advertising is a pow-erful force in our society, which indeed does radically affect the very ways we think, the concepts we have, and the associations wemake. In short, advertising is a vital semiotic force in our society. Inpart three, I show that advertising is like art in that it gives us inspi-rational dreams, ideals, and goals—it invests our lives with mean-

ing and significance. In part four, I provide criticism of Levitt’samoral view of advertising, in part by reference to Waide’s critiqueof associative advertising. I argue that advertising must not simply give us goals, but must be held responsible for the sorts of goals it gives us. Lastly, I will use examples from the marketing of “sin”products to demonstrate how that advertising detrimentally influ-ences our sentiments, desires, and moral habits.

1. MYTH OF SOVEREIGN SELF IN MARKETING THEORY: ADVERTISERS IN DENIAL

The economist John Kenneth Galbraith was one of the early critics

of the assumption that the market simply meets the needs of

consumers without changing or even creating them—that “wants

originate in the personality of the consumer.”4 Galbraith argued

forcefully that most consumer desires are created by the economy

itself. “As a society becomes increasingly affluent, wants are in-

creasingly created by the process by which they are satisfied. . . .

The higher level of production has merely a higher level of want cre-

ation necessitating a higher level of want satisfaction.”5 Galbraith

referred to this tendency as “the Dependence Effect.” In proposing

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that some of the wants of consumers are artificially sponsored by the market and marketing, he was providing a critique of the

sovereign consumer—the mythical isolated consumer who remainsunmoved by advertising. Advertisers often assume that their influence on society is

benign, because they assume the consumer to be a sovereign ratio-nal self. This view of self conceives of the human as being controlled by reason alone, able to isolate one’s will from the emotional andsentimental inputs of daily experience. Many think that marketingis just a matter of getting products to the consumers to fulfill their wants, but that it avoids creating desire or shaping the consumer’saffections. For example, Rotzoll et al. claim that “under theassumption that man is rational, it is quite appropriate to attempt to persuade. For it is assumed that rational man will be able todetect truth in the clashing views of self-interested individuals inthe economic marketplace in the same manner that his discerningnature would enable truth to arise in the political arena.”6 Theassumption then is that when advertisers mold and shape theaffections, desires, and feelings of moral agents they are not influ-

encing moral behavior because morality is a matter of rationality alone.

But the idea that emotion and sentiments play no role in moraldecision making is not well founded. I call such a one-dimensional view the “myth of the autonomous agent” and I don’t think it islegitimate. It seems false to say that advertising does not havepowerful effects on consumers and their behavior, since advertis-ing does affect our desires. And if the training and directing of our

desires is an important aspect of moral training, then advertising isnot a morally benign practice. On the other hand, I do not think that the moral agent is a puppet on the strings of culturalinfluences—I do not think that the demands of the consumer areentirely dependent upon the production, as Galbraith contends.But to paint the picture in these stark either-or terms distorts thereal issue. In the traditional debates about consumer responsibil-ity vs. marketing responsibility (i.e., Galbraith vs. Hayek, Pollay

vs. Holbrook

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), I believe that false dichotomies are often set up, par-ticularly with regard to the influence and consequences of advertising.

This view of the consumer is artificial and problematic, as I show below. But many philosophers would contest such a view of self and

ANDREW GUSTAFSON 203


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morality. It has been argued by many philosophers that the devel-

opment of moral sentiments and affections, including feelings of

mutual sympathy and conscientiousness, is essential to moral behavior.8 But if the development of proper sentiments and desires

is important for morality in a society, then those who influence

moral sentiments and desires do in fact play a role in the moral

development of society. So, if advertisers do in fact develop and

mold the desires of society, advertisers would then have a very

important role to play in the morals of a society. Advertisers would

at least have a responsibility to do what they can to not encourage

the loss of noble sentiments, moral feelings, and moral imagination. This would then support those who believe that the consumer is not

solely responsible for decisions made under the persuasion of mar -

keting, and that advertisers must be reflective about what sorts of

sentiments and desires they are nurturing and encouraging. As

John Waide has said, “Associative marketing tends to desensitize

its practitioners to the compassion, concern, and sympathy for oth-

ers that are central to moral virtue and it encourages its audience to

neglect the cultivation of non-market virtues.”9

2. ADVERTISING AS SEMIOTIC FORCE IN SOCIETY

Advertising is far more ancient, and in some respects morerespectable, than many people imagine. In a sense, the first person to cut open a fruit or vegetable so that passersby couldsee its interior before buying it was engaged in advertising.”10

Sherry points out a variety of views of advertising. It has been

referred to as cave art of the twentieth century,11 official art of mod-

ern capitalist society,12 ritual geared to producing personal trans-

formation,13 and as a myth.14 Sherry himself describes advertising

as a “system of symbols synthesized from the entire range of cultur-

ally determined ways of knowing that is accessible through ritual

and oriented toward both secular and sacred dimensions of tran-

scendental experience in hyper-industrial society. As a variant of

rhetorical behavior, advertising is both expressive and program-

matic.”15 Some consider advertising to be an aggressive activity, and

others believe it is simply a passive activity: “Some advertisers

claim that they simply respond to the desires of consumers. On

this model, advertising is a passive activity, a responsive activity.



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Others claim that advertising has a heavy influence on society, providing content, meaning, and significance to our lives, and foisting

upon us an identity as consumer. The truth of the matter is probably somewhere in between. Advertising affects us and we affect advertising.”16 Advertising does not control us, but it does influenceus in a host of subtle ways, particularly through its impact on our language, concepts, and aspirations.

Advertising’s Semiotic Effects

Every day that we routinely participate in the social grammar of advertisements, we engage in a process of replicating thedomain assumptions of commodity hegemony. These domainassumptions are important because they condition and delimit the field of discourse within which our public and private con- versations take place.17

Advertising is a powerful force in society because it is the matrix or context within which we understand ourselves and the world.

Our perceptions and conceptions are molded and informed by way of the ideas, hopes, and language advertisers give us. As MichaelSchudson says, “Advertising is part of the establishment and reflec-tion of a common symbolic culture. . . . Advertising, whether or not it sells cars or chocolate, surrounds us and enters into us, so that when we speak we may speak in or with reference to the language of advertising and when we see we may see through schemata that advertising has made salient for us.”18 The point here is that adver-

tising is a force in the hands of institutions which affects our world.It is like a language, or perhaps what Wittgenstein would call a lan-guage game. Just as words can be co-opted and modified for politi-cal or other purposes—like “gay,” “liberal,” “right-wing,”“fundamentalist”—so, too, advertising can be used to play animportant role in society as it helps associate ideas, desires, or goals with one another. This brokering of ideas, concepts, andmeanings is what advertising does, regardless of who is sponsoringthe advertising.19

Marketers discuss their product design and conceptualization,advertising, and in fact the economic process itself in terms of semiotics, referring to thinkers such as Peirce, Chomsky, andBarthes; yet few talk about the ethics of this semiotic process.20 Thequestion is, Are there any ethical questions to be considered with



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regard to how advertising changes and shapes our very conception

of the world by its impact on our language? If we understand adver-

tising as an important structural force which fosters particular hopes and identities for people through a web of language—andhere I mean language in the broadest possible sense—the contex -tual strata within which we think, learn, and live: phrases, ideas,

points of reference, looks, modes of dress and style, etc.—then we

can more clearly see the pervasive influence of advertising in our

lives. “[Advertising] is a distinctive and central symbolic structure.

And, strictly as symbol, the power of advertising may be consider-

able. Advertising may shape our sense of values even under condi-

tions where it does not greatly corrupt our buying habits.”21 This is

an important point—that advertising may, even when it does not cause us to buy a new product, cause us to make new associations,

or cause some of our values to change, through influencing our lan-

guage. This is a subtle sort of influence because it is a gradual pro-

cess, and if advertising really is changing our values, then it may be

having a powerful, if somewhat hidden, impact on morality in

society:

Advertisements pick up and represent values already in theculture. But these values, however deep or widespread, are not the only ones people have or aspire to, and the pervasiveness of advertising helps us forget this. Advertising picks up some of the things that people hold dear and re-presents them to peo-ple as all of what they value, assuring them that the sponsor isthe patron of common ideals.22

Advertising is not a completely different way of looking at the world, but it adds on to our existing framework. It does not eliminate theold, and it is not simply a competitor with a noncommercial worldview; rather, advertising usually attempts to penetrate and co-opt all aspects of worldview with consumer ideas and values. That isthe power of advertising—that it converts our worldview as it helpsfoster consumer values in our family, personal, communal, andeven religious rituals.23 Examples of this are deBeers Diamond mar-keting campaigns, which have quite successfully convinced womenthat a necessary part of the marriage ritual is the purchasing of a diamond;24 or Hallmark cards, which attempt to produce a con-sumer product for every conceivable personal interaction and holi-day. Advertising helps facilitate consumerism in all dimensions of our life, and the better it does this, the more successful it is. In this



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sense as well it is like language: “Recall again that languages differ not in what they can express but in what they can express easily.”25

Advertising equips our language, as it infiltrates our worldview withsymbols and meanings, habituating us to associate consumer products and symbols with our various sentiments, desires, andinclinations.

As part of the culture industry, advertising constitutes anapparatus for reframing meanings in order to add value toproducts. Ads arrange, organize and steer meanings into signsthat can be inscribed on products—always geared to trans-

ferring the value of one meaning system to another. In this way, advertising comprises a system of commodity-sign pro-duction designed to enhance the exchange value of commodi-ties, by differentiating the meanings associated with eachcommodity.26

Commodity signs like the Nike swoosh or simply names like Rolex,Levi’s, or Calvin Klein have real effect in our culture, because they have use-meanings. It is much like a computer program that helps

our old system learn to communicate and understand in new ways. The question is, Is it really an upgrade?

3. ADVERTISING GIVES MEANING TO OUR LIVES,LIKE ART

A commercial is an opportunity for the consumer to reinforce,alter, or update his or her attitude about the advertised

brand.27

It is fruitful to see advertising as having a power similar to that of art in a society. “If advertising is not an official or state art, it isnonetheless clearly art. The development of painting, photography,and prints in the fine arts has been intimately intertwined with thedevelopment of commercial art for a century.”28 Advertising in fact does produce images and markings (like the Nike swoosh, or JoeCamel, Lexus or Mercedes symbols, etc.) that resonate with people,and which function much as the images and markings of tradi-tional art—they inspire joy, pride, hope, and other sentiments. Whether it is art or not, advertising produces symbols and helpsdevelop nonliteral meanings and significance behind those symbols. As Theodore Levitt points out, “Poetic descriptions of things



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make no pretense of being the things themselves. Nor do advertise-ments, even by the most elastic standards. Advertisements are the

symbols of man’s aspirations.”29

According to Levitt, advertising is not our enemy, but our friend —our support and savior in fact: “Whether we are aware of it or not, we in effect expect and demand that advertising create these symbols for us to show us what life might be, to bring the possibilitiesthat we cannot see before our eyes and screen out the stark reality in which we must live” (91). Advertising invests particular conceptsand products with meaning, which thereby gives our lives a richer meaning, much as art does. Art and advertising in fact have many similarities:

Both are rhetorical, and both literally false; both expoundan emotional reality deeper than the “real”; both pretend to“higher” purposes, although different ones; and the excellenceof each is judged by its effect on its audience—its persuasive-ness, in short. . . . [T]hey both represent a pervasive, and I believe universal, characteristic of human nature—the humanaudience demands symbolic interpretation in everything it

sees and knows. If it doesn’t get it, it will return a verdict of “nointerest.” (89)

Advertising and art, whether music, poetry, or painting, are de-signed not just to convey cognitive information, but more impor-tantly, to produce particular emotive and effectual responses:

Like advertising, poetry’s purpose is to influence an audience;to affect its perceptions and sensibilities; perhaps even tochange its mind. Like rhetoric, poetry’s intent is to convince

and seduce. . . . Commerce, it can be said without apology,takes essentially the same liberties with reality and literality asthe artist, except that commerce calls its creations advertising,or industrial design, or packaging. As with art, the purpose isto influence the audience by creating illusions, symbols, andimplications that promise more than pure functionality. (85)

One does not get angry with artists for giving us an ideal picture of the world rather than our dull reality. In the same way, people

should not be angry with advertising for inspiring our hope by mak-ing unfulfillable promises. That people are sometimes disappointed by the reality of what was advertised being less than the vision pro-duced by the advertisement, Levitt has little sympathy:



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As every eager lover has ever known, the consummation sel-dom equals the promises which produced the chase. To fore-stall and suppress the visceral expectation of disappointment that life has taught us must inevitably come, we use art, archi-tecture, literature, and the rest, and advertising as well, toshield ourselves, in advance of experience, from the stark andplain reality in which we are fated to live. I agree that we wishfor unobtainable unrealities, “dream castles.” But why prom-ise ourselves reality, which we already possess? What we want is what we do not possess!

Everyone in the world is trying in his special personal fashion

to solve a primal problem of life—the problem of rising abovehis own negligibility, of escaping from nature’s confining, hos-tile, and unpredictable reality, of finding significance, security,and comfort in the things he must do to survive. Many of thedistortions of advertising, product design, and packaging may be viewed as a paradigm of the many responses that manmakes to the conditions of survival in the environment. With-out distortion, embellishment, and elaboration, life would bedrab, dull, anguished, and at its existential worst. (90)

Levitt believes that advertising should not be criticized for manipu-lating people’s desires, and making them think they need productsto fulfill desires. Rather, advertising should be seen as a valuableproducer of meaning and significance in people’s otherwise hum-drum lives. If anything should be vilified for manipulating desires, it should be traditional art:

While the ad man and designer seek only to convert the audi-

ence to their commercial custom, Michelangelo sought to convert its soul. Which is the greater blaspheme? Who commitsthe greater affront to life—he who dabbles with man’s eroticappetites, or he who meddle’s with man’s soul? Which act isthe easier to judge and justify? (88)

From Levitt, then, we can see that the real power of advertising isto highlight particular values or desires, and accentuate them,helping us forget about others. A fine piece of art might make us feelas though we have left the troubles of the world behind as weachieve aesthetic ecstasy, and it usually does this by helping us for -get what the piece of art neglects—the lowly, the mundane, the triv-ial. In much the same way, advertising’s power is in helping us to become focused on particular ideas or ideals, and in helping us toforget our other desires. An ad may try to inculcate obsession for a



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Snickers bar, a Lexus, or Red Lobster’s lobsterfest—and in the pro-

cess attempt to help us forget about our concerns for our weight or

financial budget constraints. The value of Levitt’s picture of advertising is that he has shown

us quite powerfully that advertising, like art, provides meanings,

dreams, and ideals for us to pursue. Like an existential elixir,

advertising provides us with the immediate hopes and dreams

which help us to pass through this otherwise humdrum world. On

this view, then, to criticize the images advertising gives us to hope

for is like criticizing art for inspiring us with fantastic forms of

beauty beyond our normal lives, or like criticizing the poet for evok-ing romantic notions about love which are not always found in my

run-of-the-mill relationship. To make such criticisms is to miss the

point and purpose of advertising—which is to help us cope with life

by giving us hopes and dreams, no matter how unreal. But Levitt

cannot seriously think that advertising is not conveying any literal

information whatsoever about the product. As a friend of mine said,

“When I see an advertisement for a lawnmower that cuts grass,

when I buy that lawnmower, I expect it to cut my grass!” Advertise-ments don’t simply give us dreams, they tell us real facts about real

products, and that aspect of advertising—the importance of some

degree of truth in advertising—seems to be neglected by Levitt. The larger philosophical problem with Levitt is that, like many

existential ethicists, he does not provide any particular means of

choosing what sorts of dreams are better or worse for us. His only

concern is that we are provided dreams that help lift us from the

monotony of life—but it seems that there are better and worse

dreams to pursue. Levitt seems to be a proponent of the myth of

amoral advertising ethics. But life is not quite so desperate that we

need neglect all concern for where we are going and simply get ridic-

ulous dreams that will get us through the day. In the next section

we see how Waide provides some critical responses to Levitt-like

amoral advertising ethics.

4. ASSOCIATIVE ADVERTISING: THE MANIPULATIONOF EMOTIONS FOR MARKETING PURPOSES

Waide is critical of Levitt’s uncritical praise of advertising for itsartlike ability to invest our lives with meaning: “Levitt appears to



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assume that in a satisfying life one has many satisfied desires —which desires is not important.”30 For Waide, it is extremely

important what sorts of desires advertising directs us toward, for our desires direct our lives, and so indicate the sorts of people weare and will become. This may strike some defenders of amoraladvertising as being paternalistic; for instance, Robert Arrington, who claims that the responsibility of advertisers is simply to not corrupt the autonomy of the consumer.31 In his view, advertising isacting unethically if it somehow overrides the autonomy of the con-sumer, but as long as this does not take place, advertisers havemoral license to advertise anything they want, with ethical immu-nity. Waide criticizes those defenses of advertising like Arrington’s which, in Waide’s words, claim that “our only legitimate concernsare whether an advertisement violated the autonomy of its audience by deceiving them or controlling their behavior. I want to suggest that there is another legitimate concern—whether the advertising will tend to influence us to become worse persons.”32 Waide does believe that advertising contributes to people becoming worse per-sons, and he focuses on what he calls “associative advertising” as

an example of how this is done. Waide defines associative advertising as involving the following

characteristics:

1. The advertiser wants people to buy a product.

2. To increase sales, the advertiser targets a nonmarket good (sex appeal).

3. Marketed product bears only tenuous relation to the non-market good with which it is associated.

4. Marketed product is associated with the nonmarket desire it cannot possibly satisfy.

5. No deception is involved. (We really know better.)

6. The product actually provides partial satisfaction.33

An example of this would be the association of Bud-Lite beer with women wearing bikinis (sex appeal), or the Benetton ad campaignin which they used pictures of death-row inmates or starving Afri-can children to promote their product, or stranger still, the con-stant image of the independent Marlboro Man or liberated Virginia Slims woman associated with addictive cigarettes.

It is quite obvious that there is no natural or necessary connec-tion between beer and bikini-clad women—women in bikinis are



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often found without any beer nearby, and usually beer can be found without any bikini-clad women in the vicinity. There is no reason to

think that drinking beer will increase your likelihood to find bikini-clad women, much less to have sex. But the commercials areeffective because they play on men’s affections—men are stimu-lated and quite interested to see the bikini-clad women, and whilethey are feeling happy about that, they suddenly see the beer. Onemight say that the residual emotive effects of the sight of the womensomehow is connected (subliminally?) to the beer. The consequenceis that, in many people’s minds, thoughts of Bud-Lite beer and bikini-clad women seem to come in tandem.

Benetton is playing on a different emotion—perhaps politicalactivism or sympathy. In heightening public awareness and evok-ing sentiments of sympathy or political activism, they stimulate a particular emotional response which they attempt to attach to their own name. Perhaps consumers will feel that Benetton is just or moral in some special way.

The association of independence and cigarette smoking is per-haps the most counterintuitive association of any of the advertise-

ments. To associate feelings of independence and freedom,cigarette advertisers portray cigarette-smoking women as liber-ated, coy, knowing, and gregarious. They likewise portray Marlboromen as austere, solitary, and independent. What is ironic about this is the obvious fact that smokers by and large are enslaved totheir addiction.34 How this psychological process of associationhappens is somewhat of a mystery. Edell comments,

Theories of advertising are incomplete unless they incorporate

emotional factors. Any design of advertising research, either theoretical or pragmatic, that does not examine emotionalreactions is incomplete at best and risks being invalid. There isclear need for a continued effort to understand how advertisingand emotions are linked.35

Advertisers are influencing our reactions to symbols, brands, andeven brand-associated music jingles in their attempt to sell their product: “One aim of advertising is to influence consumer prefer-

ence; it is presumed that changes in preference will involve changesin attitudes, cognitions, and behaviors.”36 This is a very important part of what advertising is doing, and this emotional associatinghas an impact on our memory-responses. In short, advertising is



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affecting us subliminally in ways that we are not even consciously

aware of:

The emotional reactions one has in response to an ad may influence what gets activated from memory, increasing thelikelihood that valence-congruent thoughts are activated. If the emotional reaction is positive, more positive thoughts may be generated in response to the message of the ad. As a result of this process, more positive beliefs will be formed about the brand’s attributes, and the evaluation of the ad itself will beenhanced.37

Waide argues that advertisers, in associating our emotions andaffections with products, usually ignore the well-being of the con-

sumers whose affections they manipulate:

In general, influencing people without concern for their well- being is likely to reduce one’s sensitivity to the moral motive of concern for the well-being of others. Compassion, concern andsympathy for others, it seems to me, are clearly central tomoral virtue. Associative advertising must surely undermine

this sensitivity in much of the advertising industry. It is, there-fore, prima facie morally objectionable.38

Advertising tends to emphasize particular sentiments, and neglect

others. The passive consumer who is molded by advertising is likely

to become more self-centered with a drive for gaining the material

goods which he desires more and more as he and the culture he is

within are influenced by advertising. One’s time, energy, and effort

are directed more and more toward attaining these material things,

and in the process other concerns such as environment, the poor or

elderly, familial concerns, higher aesthetic and intellectual pur-

suits, and religious priorities may be neglected. As Sut Jhally

points out in his video “Advertising in and the End of the World,”

advertising makes our appetites for selfish and sensual things

grow, and in the process it often discourages our sentiments and

desires to be concerned about the unethical consequences of our

actions—the exploitation of the poor, our own contribution to the

unjust distribution of wealth, our growing lack of awareness or con-cern for the consequences of our consumer demands upon the envi-

ronment, developing countries, or lower social classes in our own

country.39 Advertising must be held accountable for these sorts of

behavioral changes in the societies that it influences.



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5. ADVERTISING INCREASES POOR HABITS, AND USE OF “SIN” PRODUCTS IN PARTICULAR

It will be helpful to consider the marketing of sin products to see

more clearly how advertisers do in fact nurture particular desires. It

seems that advertising most often directs our desires—providing a

new option to help fulfill an existing desire. For example, people

generally do not want to smell offensive to others or to themselves.

Of course it might be argued that the offense of body odor is an arti-

ficial contrivance sponsored by soap manufacturers. Perhaps the

soap manufacturers are responsible for making us feel ashamed for smelling natural. But perhaps we have a normal aversion to some of

the rancid scents of our own bodies—an innate desire to not

smell—and this desire has helped the fittest of our species to sur-

vive, since this has helped the fittest to maintain a cleaner and thus

more healthy lifestyle. Nevertheless, even if we assume that want-

ing to not smell like body odor is a natural desire, it seems obvious

that no one naturally wants to smell like $20-an-ounce perfume. It

is quite likely that it is entirely natural for us to desire to appear attractive to the opposite sex; however, it is much less likely that we

have a natural desire to wear Polo brand clothing. Expensive per-

fume and expensive clothing are overkill—more than we naturally

want. These are artificial desires—unnecessary desires which are

spawned and nurtured through marketing appealing originally to

some of our natural desires. Advertising can awaken desires in us,

but perhaps it cannot instantly create altogether new desires in us

without building upon natural desires. A smoker who is addicted to

nicotine and the psychological habituation of smoking is no longer

smoking for the same reason he began. The original desire for

smoking was probably something like the simple desire to look cool,

fit in, or to do something with one’s hands.40 But the reasons one

keeps smoking are reasons that are not natural—it is not natural to

be addicted to nicotine.Marriage is quite similar. One usually stays married for reasons

quite different from those reasons that first propelled us to get mar-ried. But one gets married for natural reasons, and one stays mar-ried also for very natural reasons—but reasons that cannot be fully understood until one is already in the marriage, like parental love,love developed from a loyal marriage of ten or twenty years, and soforth. These simply cannot be reasons for two people who are just



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engaged. Both the parental love and the love of nicotine are desires

that would not naturally arise without nurturing and habituation.

Conditions must be met for them to arise. Perhaps cigarette smok-ing is even more like an affair—one initially gets involved because of

the allure of danger and excitement, but stays in it for other

reasons.I think it is clear that advertising does promote overall consump-

tion of sin products, and that it does this by increasing desire for

these products. Admittedly, cigarette advertising probably has little

effect on middle-aged men—most middle-aged adults who have pre-

viously never smoked or drank do not suddenly begin to smoke or drink; normally they choose to do so early in life. But that does not

mean advertising does not promote overall consumption of sin

products. First, adults who already drink and smoke can and often

do increase their intake of alcohol or cigarettes, and this can

be affected by PR and advertising. It isn’t as though drinkers all

drink the same amount, and simply choose what brand to drink—

drinkers often increase their consumption of alcohol, cigarette

smokers often increase their use of tobacco, and so on.Second, there are sin products like pornography and gambling

which people may take up as adults. If casinos did not advertise,

they would have customers, but certainly not as many as they do

when they advertise themselves as a family fun center, or as a won-

derful place to get cheap buffets or cheap rooms. These sorts of pro-

motions draw in customers who might not otherwise be customers,

and once in the casino, it is much more likely that they will gamble,

while if they had never set foot in a casino, they likely would never

have considered it. Certainly Internet advertisements for pornogra-

phy have lured in many who otherwise would not have sought out

such sites on their own. Advertising makes certain forms of behav-

ior more accessible, more visible, and in some degree more socially

acceptable. The more that society tolerates public sin products in

the media (through advertising), the less likely it will be that people

will feel social pressure to not partake in such activities.In their book Marketing Madness , Jacobson and Mazur show that

advertisers do target children—people who obviously are not already drinking or smoking. This is done through beer logos appearing

on toys, massive inflated beer-can-shaped balloons at amusement

parks, and advertisements using cute dogs (Spuds McKenzie) or Joe

Camel.41 Since the average age at which Americans begin to drink is



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thirteen, it is important for beer advertisers to encourage youth to

drink. Most anyone who can remember their first beer knows that it

was a decision, a choice that was influenced by peer pressure andother influences, and peer influence is created in part through what

is advertised as cool. It is of course impossible to prove whether or

not those same kids would drink if they did not live in a society where

drinking was encouraged through advertising, but common sense

and experience seem to testify that fewer people would drink if alco-

hol was not glorified and advertised to such a great extent. There is clear evidence that cigarette manufacturers also adver-

tise to try to entice nonsmoking young people to smoke. In a Viceroy (cigarettes) strategy plan, quoted in Jacobson and Mazur, the com-

pany stated,

In the young smoker’s mind a cigarette falls into the samecategory with wine, beer, shaving, wearing a bra (or purposely not wearing one), declaration of independence and strivingfor self-identity. . . . Thus, an attempt to reach young startersshould be based, among others, on the following major parameters:

Present the cigarette as one of a few initiations into the adult world.Present the cigarette as part of the illicit pleasure category of products and activities. To the best of your ability (considering some legal restraints)relate the product to “pot,” wine, beer, sex, etc.Don’t communicate health or health related points.42

It is worth noting that this strategy involved (a) trying to get youngpeople to smoke, or to smoke more; (b) associating the product withsentiments that the young especially can relate to, like independ-ence and rebellion; and (c) trying to hide the adverse health conse-quences of smoking.

A Brown and Williamson (tobacco company) executive was once

quoted as saying,”Nobody is stupid enough to put it in writing, or

even in words, but there is always the presumption that your mar-

keting approach should contain some element of market expan-sion, and market expansion in this industry means two things

—kids and women.”43 So cigarette manufacturers attempt to get

women and children—who would not otherwise smoke—to begin

smoking. Women did not smoke nearly as much as men until



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advertisements began to associate smoking with women’s rights, as

found in various Virginia Slims ads.44

But besides women and children, it can easily be argued that cig-arette advertisement and marketing in third world countries has

dramatically increased the number of smokers in those countries.

Obviously, before cigarette smoking was introduced to those coun-

tries, no one would smoke (as there were no cigarettes, nor any tra-

dition of smoking them). The habit of smoking is itself like a cancer

which is spread by means of marketing and advertisement. To

think that just as many people would smoke without the hard work

of advertisement and marketing executives is simply silly.In his book Selling Sin: The Marketing of Socially Unacceptable

Products , D. Kirk Davidson discusses the marketing of five prod-

ucts: alcohol, tobacco, firearms, gambling, and pornography.45 Mar-

keters of these products, Davidson argues, face special challenges

as they try to gain acceptance of their product in society. It is a

struggle just to gain simple legitimacy in the eyes of the public,

much less desire.46 But this process of changing the perception of

products, and establishing these products as not only legitimate but

essential elements of society, is the hard work of successful

marketing. Tobacco advertisers market smoking cigarettes not as an enslav-

ing product which you will find yourself addicted to, but rather as a

symbol of freedom and fun. Virginia Slims advertisements, for

example, do not encourage readers to contemplate the increased

risks of heart problems and cancer which come with women smok-

ing; rather, they portray the smoking woman as the liberated

woman. To the young, smoking can appear to be a method of dem-

onstrating their maturity and sophistication, since cigarettes are

supposedly a product only mature adults can and should use. Alco-

hol advertisers attempt to associate their product with celebration,

relaxation, and good fortune in romance. The man who drinks

Miller supposedly knows how to back his boat into the driveway

and he fixes his own car; the Samuel Adams drinker knows his

beer, the person who drinks Guinness Beer somehow transcenden-

tally becomes a participant in Irish culture, and the guy who drinksBud-Lite will probably find himself suddenly surrounded by volup-

tuous blondes in bikinis. One doesn’t, for example, find beer adver-

tisers marketing their product on the basis of less positive effects

—hangovers, beer bellies, and slurred speech.



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Gun supporters attempt to portray the use of guns as being inex-

tricably linked with the constitutional right to bear arms, while por-

nography advocates will attempt to link the production and use of their products with the right to free speech. If society perceives

gun-owning as indicative of being a dangerous and perhaps even

slightly crazed individual, consumers would be less likely to pur-

chase guns. But when guns are portrayed as symbols of individual-

ism and safety, as an exercising of liberty, and as American as apple

pie and baseball, then consumers will have less inhibitions about

purchasing guns. If pornography is seen as a psychologically

deranged activity which necessarily fosters and nurtures demean-ing and even hostile attitudes toward women or men, society will be

less friendly toward it, but if it is seen as a harmless pastime to be

winked at, society will not raise objections as readily.Gambling is, of course, much the same way. Casinos are not

likely to point out the detrimental effects of their “product”—one

won’t find casino advertisers touting the fact that almost all of

those who come to their establishments will go away with less

money, or that gambling is a contributor to other social ills includ-

ing family and financial problems. Rather, gambling establish-

ments will promote gambling as glamorous, exciting, liberating,

and fun. The whole purpose of marketing is much like that of

a lawyer. One presents the best defense possible. The goal is not

to provide the whole truth and nothing but the truth, but rather

to portray the product or client in the best possible light through

selectively choosing which information to provide (and more

importantly—not provide) while attaching to the product ideas and

concepts not necessarily obvious from the product itself. This

symbol-engineering by which products are psychologically associ-

ated with particular ideas, meanings, and desires of society is the

semiotic practice of marketing discussed previously. So it seems

that advertisements do increase sin-product consumption through

manipulating desires and sentiments, nurturing selected affections

and addictions, and helping transform the person into a consumer

of particular products.

Advertising can reinforce norms of change in a society. “Mar-keting is at once the most potent agent of cultural change and of

cultural stability at work in the contemporary world.”47 Certainly

advertising can help reinforce cultural norms insofar as it adopts

them and uses them. For example, ads portraying blacks in servant



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roles before the civil rights movement, or ads that portray womenin stereotypical roles as merely helpers of men or as sex objects,

simply reinforce incorrect traditional cultural stereotypes. Benignexamples of this would be the ways that advertisements use, amongothers, the American flag, apple pie, and baseball, all easily identifi-able images representing traditional American life and culture.

But advertising can also be an instrument of change in society. A negative example of this is the marketing of shoes as such a symbolof status that kids will shoot other kids to get a pair of shoes. With-out the effect of the advertising that amplifies the status symbol of particular shoes, the shoes would have a greatly reduced value. Theeffects of the valuation of name brands is a direct effect of market-ing. Brand names are nothing without the recognition affordedthem through advertising. Of course, advertising can also contrib-ute to positive change in society. When advertisers first began tohave blacks and whites together, this helped in some degree to sub-tly change the mindset of consumers. Anti-smoking commercialsare a more recent example of advertising specifically directed to fos-ter positive changes in society. These are examples of advertising

having a morally positive and commendable impact upon our society.

CONCLUSION

Drawing from the work of Schudson, Levitt, and Waide, and some work done on the marketing of sin products, I have here claimed

that advertising and marketing can have an adverse impact on themorality of society.48 My goal has been to show that the idea of amoral advertising is a myth—the assumption of the purely rationalagent unaffected by the effectual and sentimental impact of adver -tising is not borne out in actuality. Certainly not all advertising hasnegative effects. Certainly much advertising doesn’t have mucheffect at all. But some advertising does have some negative effects,and examples seem to bear this out. Since advertising can be

shown to have negative effects on the morality of society through itsnurturing particular sentiments and affections, advertisers cannot claim that their practice is morally benign.



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NOTES

1. John F. Sherry, “Advertising as a Cultural System,” in Marketing and Semiotics: New Directions in the Study of Signs for Sale , ed. J. Umiker-

Sebeok (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1987), 441.

2. RobertGoldman, ReadingAds Socially (NewYork:Routledge, 1992), 1.

3. Thomas Carson, Richard E. Wokutch, and James E. Cox, “An Ethical

Analysis of Deception in Marketing,” Journal of Business Ethics 4 AP (1985),

93–104; Robert Arrington, “Advertising and Behavioral Control,” Journal of

Business Ethics (1982), 3–12.

4 John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (Boston: HoughtonMifflin), 119.

5. Ibid., 131.

6. Kim Rotzol, James E. Haefner, and Charles H. Sandage, “Advertising

and the Classical Liberal World View,” Advertising in Contemporary Society

(1986), 20–21.

7. See Galbraith, The Affluent Society , 119; F. A. von Hayek, Individual-

ism and Economic Order (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1948); Richard

W. Pollay, “The Distorted Mirror: Reflections on the Unintended Conse-

quences of Advertising,” Journal of Marketing 50 (April 1986), 18-36; Morris

B. Holbrook, “Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall, What’s Unfair in the Reflections

on Advertising?” Journal of Marketing 51 (July 1987), 95–103.

8. Hume, Adam Smith, and J. S. Mill are three such philosophers. For

example, Mill says: “So long as they are co-operating, their ends are identi-

fied with those of others; there is at least a temporary feeling that the inter-

ests of others are their own interests. Not only does all strengthening of

social ties, and all healthy growth of society, give to each individual a stron-

ger personal interest in practically consulting the welfare of others; it also

leads him to identify his feelings more and more with their good, or at least

with an ever greater degree of practical consideration for it. He comes, as

though instinctively, to be conscious of himself as a being who of course

pays regard to others. The good of others becomes to him a thing naturally

and necessarily to be attended to, like any of the physical conditions of our

existence. . . . Consequently, the smallest germs of the feeling are laid hold

of and nourished by the contagion of sympathy and the influences of educa-

tion; and a complete web of corroborative association is woven round it, by

the powerful agency of the external sanctions. This mode of conceiving our-

selves and human life, as civilization goes on, is felt to be more and more

natural. . . . In an improving state of the human mind, the influences are

constantly on the increase, which tend to generate in each individual a



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feeling of unity with all the rest; which feeling, if perfect, would make him

never think of, or desire, any beneficial condition for himself, in the benefits

of which they are not included” (J. S. Mill, Utilitarianism , 3.10, ed. Roger Crisp [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998], 30–57).

My dissertation deals with the importance of moral sentiments in Mill’s

philosophy, the effects of advertising upon sentiments in society, and the

resulting moral responsibility of advertisers (Marquette University, May

2001).

9. John Waide, “Making of Self and World in Advertising,” Journal of

Business Ethics 6 (1987):73–79.

10. Burton Leiser, “The Ethics of Advertising,” Ethics, Free Enterprise,

and Public Policy: Original Essays on Moral Issues in Business , ed. Richard

T. De George and Joseph A. Pichler (New York: Oxford University Press,

1978), 173.

11. Marshall McLuhan, Culture Is Our Business (New York: McGraw-

Hill, 1970).

12. Raymond Williams, Problems in Materialism and Culture (London:

NCB, 1981).

13. David Wright and Robert Snow, “Consumption as Ritual in the High

Technology Society,” in Ritual and Ceremonies in Popular Culture , ed. Ray Browne (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Press, 1981),

326–37.

14. Grant McCracken and Richard Pollay, “Anthropological Analyses of

Advertising,” Working Paper no. 815, History of Advertising Archives, Uni-

versity of British Columbia, 1981.

15. Sherry, “Advertising as a Cultural System,” 443–44.

16. Judie Lammon and Peter Cooper, “Humanities Advertising: A Holis-

tic Cultural Perspective,” International Journal of Advertising 2 (1983),195–213.

17. Goldman, Reading Ads Socially , 2.

18. Michael Schudson, “Advertising as Capitalist Realism,” in Advertis-

ing, The Uneasy Persuasion: Its Dubious Impact on American Society (New

York: Basic Books, 1984), 210.

19. Not all advertising is done by businesses, obviously. Advertising

against cigarette smoking and advertisements to draw men into the Catho-

lic priesthood are examples of advertising being used by institutions other

than corporations.

20. A variety of semiotic approaches to marketing can be found in

Umiker-Sebeok, Marketing and Semiotics (see note 1). Kotler, Hoshino,



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Kawama, Kloepfer, Mick, and Langhoz-Leymore in particular relate

semiotic theory to marketing in this book.

21. Schudson, “Advertising as Capitalist Realism,” 210.22. Ibid., 233.

23. Sut Jhally, The Codes of Marketing: Fetishism and the Political Econ-

omy of Meaning and the Consumer Society (London: Frances Pinter, 1987),

197.

24. Ibid., 130.

25. Schudson, “Advertising as Capitalist Realism,” 233.

26. Goldman, Reading Ads Socially , 5.

27. Julie Edell and Helen Anderson, “Affect and Attitudes in Advertising:

The Impact of Brand Name and Product Category Introduction,” in Emotion

in Advertising: Theoretical and Practical Applications , ed. Stuart Agres, Julie

Edell, and Tony Dubitsky (New York: Quorum Books, 1990), 211.

28. Schudson, “Advertising as Capitalist Realism,” 222.

29. Theodore Levitt, “The Morality (?) of Marketing,” Harvard Business

Review (July–August 1970), 90.

30. Waide, “Making of Self and World,” 77.

31. Robert Arrington,”Marketing and Behavioral Control,” Journal of

Business Ethics 1 (1982), 3–12.32. Waide, “Making of Self and World,” 77.

33. Ibid., 73–74.

34. Michel F. Jacobson and Laurie Ann Mazur, Marketing Madness

(Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995), 153–55.

35. Edell and Anderson, “Affect and Attitudes in Advertising.”

36. Basil Englis, “Consumer Emotional Reactions to Television Advertis-

ing and Their Effects on Message Recall,” in Agnes, Edell, and Dubitsky,

Emotion in Advertising , 231 (see note 27).37. Edell, Preface to “Emotion and Advertising: A Timely Union,” in Emo-

tion in Advertising , xiv.

38. Waide, “Making of Self and World,” 75.

39. Sut Jhally, Advertising and the End of the World [Videorecording]/

Media Education Foundation.

40. In their research, Peracchio and Luna found that smokers them-

selves often admitted that the reasons they began smoking and the reasons

they continued were quite different (David Luna and Laura A. Peracchio,

“The Development of an Advertising Campaign to Discourage Smoking

Initiation Among Children and Youth,” Journal of Advertising [fall 1998],

49–56).

41. Jacobson and Mazur, Marketing Madness , 165–66.



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42. Ibid., 152.

43. Ibid.

44. Ibid., 154–55.45. D. Kirk Davidson, Selling Sin: The Marketing of Socially Unacceptable

Products (Westport, CT: Quorum, 1996).

46. Ibid., 2.

47. Sherry, “Advertising as a Cultural System,” 442.

48 Unfortunately, I have only space here to discuss the impact of adver-

tising upon quite visible behaviors and habits. Advertising also has a per-

haps more powerful influence on our habits of thought, our feelings of

sympathy or lack thereof, and hedonistic materialistic tendencies in think-

ing patterns. Beyond affecting the use of sin products, advertising certainly

can help to nurture a narcissistic self-centered hedonism which disregards

the other, and which is perhaps even more harmful to society (and “sinful”)

than use of sin products. There is some interesting research done on the

materialism and frustration that media can bring about in society. Sirgy et

al. claim, “Socially responsible advertising professionals should make a

concerted effort to create messages that reflect instrumental material-

ism—materialism for the sake of meeting essential and basic needs” (M. Jo-

seph Sirgy, Dong-Jin Lee, Rustan Kosenko, H. Lee Meadow, et al., “Does Television Viewership Play a Role in the Perception of Quality of Life?” Jour-

nal of Advertising [1998], 125).


Documents

Ad Morality and Its Social Impact