Download Morality of Persuasive Advertising

Morality of
Persuasive
Advertising
By:
Gaurav Pant
Prashant Pal
What is advertising?
• Communication from a specific source that intends to inform and
influence the audience so that they believe something and/or
behave in a certain way
• Types of advertising 1) Informative and 2) Persuasive advertising
• Informative advertising focuses on selling a product by calling the
customer's need and interests.
• Persuasive advertising focuses on "stimulating demand”.
Benefits of Advertising
• Advertising helps consumers decide what to buy
• Informs about the existence of new products
• Advertisers claim to be helping consumers to freely choose
how to best satisfy their needs and wants
• Some advertisements are funny and address moral issues to
sell their product, like JAGO RE (Tata tea) and IDEA 3-G ads
What is Persuasion?
• “A symbolic process in which communicators try
to convince other people to change their attitudes
or behaviors regarding an issue through the
transmission of a message in an atmosphere of
free choice”
• Self-persuasion is key. People are not forced;
they are instead free to choose.
Persuasive Advertising
• Creating a demand is the main motive
• Selling people a product by changing the autonomy
• Do these types of ads make people unhappy?
• Example: Fairness creams, slimming belt, deodorant, alcohol
• Some of these ads like cigarettes and alcohol actually claims
that people who are stylish, cool and ambitious are smokers
and drinkers
• Minette E. Drumwright and Patrick E. Murphy interviewed 51
advertising practitioners who work in 29 advertising agencies
in eight cities two persisting problems among advertising
practitioners
• “Moral muteness”—the unwillingness of practitioners to
acknowledge and discuss ethical problems.
• “Moral myopia”—the inability even to see clearly ethical
issues when they arise.
Robert Arrington’s view
• Instances portrayed in ads are “Puffery”.
• Puffery is not just bragging; it is bragging carefully designed to
achieve a definite effect.
• In purchasing something we may think we are free, when in
fact our act is completely controlled by factors in our
environment and advertising is one of them
• But Theodore Levitt argues that if we remove puffery from
ads then they will just nearly be empirical descriptions and do
not offer joy and adventure
• “We need automobiles not just for transport but for feeling of
power and status they give”
Is advertising information or
creation of desire
• To answer this we need to know what is involved in autonomy
•
•
•
•
Autonomous desire
Rational desire
Free choice
Control or manipulation
What fairness creams
persuade people?
• Dark and brown complexion is not good and its ugly
• You can’t achieve success in life until you are fair
• People will actually make fun of yours if you are dark
What is the ground reality?
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Unlabeled_Renatto_Lus
chan_Skin_color_map.png
How actually these ads work?
• Persuasive ads are subliminal, i.e. they affect one’s mind
without their being aware of it.
• If you are aware of seeing/hearing it, then it’s not subliminal
advertising
• Most of the ads target our Unconscious Desires of sex and
power. For example advertisements of deodorants.
• Persuasive advertising overrides our autonomy (which is
immoral)
Does such ads really make you
unhappy?
• These type of advertisements create gap between what we
have and what we want
• Happiness is proportional to satisfaction
• But now a days people always want a better form of what they
already have
1. Even a slim guy want a better body or abs
2. Guy with a decent hairstyle uses hair gel to impress a
girl
Robert Crisp’s View
Persuasive advertising is immoral because
• Because it overrides our autonomy
• It makes us desire products without us realizing.
• Persuasive ads coerces us into a constant state of
dissatisfaction
References..
• Advertising, Autonomy, and the Creation of Desire by Roger
Crisp Journal of Business Ethics, Vol. 6, No. 5 (Jul., 1987), pp.
413-418
• Advertising and Behavior Control by Robert L. Arrington,
Journal of Business Ethics, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Feb., 1982), pp. 3-12
• Getting to Persuasion by John L. Mcreeky, Anthropological
Quarterly, Vol. 74, No. 4 (Oct., 2001), pp. 163-169
• The morality of advertising by Theodore Levitt, Harvard
Business Review, 1970
• Ethics and Advertising: Moral Muteness, Moral Myopia, and
Moral Imagination by Minette E. Drumwright , The University
of Texas at Austin
• Patrick E. Murphy, University of Notre Dame