Comments on: More on selling

By: Barbara Mulvenna

Barbara Mulvenna — Tue, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Interesting that you should choose Harvard as your example. According to this article in The Harvard Crimson, some students hate the school, but want the name on their degree.

By: Alex

Alex — Tue, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Ah, but is that why they went to Harvard? Did they say to themselves, “Harvard is going to suck bunnies, but I can work my way through it for four years because I want my diploma to say HARVARD”? I doubt it. They bought the advertising. C.f.:

Sanzone, a physics concentrator in Kirkland House, remembers this discontent forming early in her undergraduate career. When the friendly veneer of her fellow first-years wore off shortly after Freshman Week, the socially inept masses bewildered her.

A good college experience is about finding others who are your intellectual and social equals–who both challenge you and whom you challenge. That’s often a difficult thing to find. And I suspect you can find it more easily at Harvard or Yale (even more so at Princeton and Cornell, from what I hear), you can also find it at… gasp!… the UB or any other decently sized state university.

The trick is deflating the hype and figuring out if what the college says they *do* attract is merely wishful thinking (or worse, an attempt to trick applicants).

I guess that get’s at what I am trying to say. Advertising shouldn’t be about tricking the customer, and it sometimes isn’t.

By: brandon

brandon — Tue, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

You touched an important issue here. You say, “My problem is really that consumers lack media literacy—in general, but especially when it comes to advertising. Lots of folks claim that 15-25 year-olds have grown up in an ad saturated world and are therefore sophisticated consumers of advertising. I’ve seen nothing to support this claim.”

I agree with you. Saying that is like because you’ve seen alot of Hollywood blockbusters, you’re a film critic. It doesn’t quite ring true.

I agree that advertising has a lot in common with art and poetry–in fact, before I left my PhD program, that’s what my dissertation was to be on. Most art and poetry is comfortable to an audience because it is what we expect it to be, WHERE we expect it to be. Most advertising is the same way. The problem is that an ad’s main message–“buy me!”–isn’t something palatable to an audience, so when we see that message where we expect it and in the forms we expect it in, it makes us uncomfortable and we tune it out.

In that way, advertising is more like a contact allergy: the more contact there is, the more abrasive it becomes, and the more we attempt to avoid it.

That means that to truly get their message across, advertisers must get under the audience’s radar. That is, a “mindful” consumer is a bad consumer.

Art that doesn’t come to us where we expect it or how we expect it makes us uncomfortable. Look at public reactions to avant-garde art in public spaces. Advertising that is effective is advertising we don’t recognize as such. Sometimes that also makes us very uncomfortable–like PETA’s and A&F’s contraversy mongering.