|
By Max Bruinsma As early as 1956, the American psychologist Vance Packard concluded that advertising was not just communicating information about products, but relied heavily on psychological strategies to seduce the reader into believing the message and thus buying the product. ‘Hidden persuaders’ Packard called these embedded seductive scripts, and his eponymous book became the first in a tradition which criticizes these scripts; Naomi Klein’s famous No Logo book is a recent variety. Seduction has of course always been a central aspect of art: various forms of realism and symbolism, of references to famous stories and indisputable truths, have always served to overwhelm the viewer, to seduce them into believing and accepting the story depicted. Seduction is deeply connected to the visual arts, even from its distant beginnings in cave paintings, which presumably were meant to exert some magical influence over the real world via the painted description of it. The double-sided essence of mysticism: that the sign gives power over the signified, and that the signified is physically represented by the sign. Today’s advertising works not principally different. Take the famous Martini ads: who really believes that buying this drink will give you access to the world of the jet set? Still, the whole campaign hinges on seducing you into believing this is the case. Why does Absolut vodka succeed in posing as one of the best vodkas in the world? Because they have successfully connected their brand name to famous artists and designers.
Designers choose their imagery and typographies to direct the associations of their audience. Often, a design can be read as a rebus or a visual riddle, which the viewer deciphers consciously or unconsciously. The design addresses a visually literate audience, which in fact become readers, not just of the literal message, but who ‘read’ the way it is embedded in its cultural contexts as well. In advertising, this is mostly done by enhancing the message (such as "buy this product") through connecting the brand name with imagery that will trigger a positive response from a specific audience, known as the ‘target’, such as Absolut has done with considerable success and panache. The achievement of Absolut is reflected in the fact that their ‘bottle-centered’ approach has given rise to a great number of sometimes quite critical pastiches and spoofs — proof that the visual language of the original ads has become part of visual culture at large. Adbusters’ variations on the Absolut theme are not necessarily directed against the vodka brand, but gratefully use its iconic status to speak out against alcohol abuse in general. Associating brands with positive ‘vibes’ can be a very bland strategy, as Vance Packard already showed. Combining, for instance, a candy brand with extreme sports imagery to convey a notion of ‘coolness’ is rather pointless — but it seems to work nonetheless. Trying to seduce a target audience by triggering their social and cultural concerns is a more responsible way of doing the same: embedding a brand name into a specific cultural domain. That is what Benetton did when they hired Oliviero Toscani to design their ‘United Colors’ campaigns in the 1990s. Toscani realized that this audience is not shy in addressing their concerns for the world at large, nor in displaying their considerations as cultural expression. For the young adults Benetton sees as its core customers, AIDS, wars, hunger and global inequality are problems that need to be openly addressed and not diplomatically sidetracked. In fact, the outrage that was caused in the general and more conservative public by for instance Toscani’s famous ‘dying aids patient’ poster, was probably exactly what Benetton’s target group of concerned young adults would have wished to provoke themselves. With the ‘United Colors’ campaign, Benetton became one of the first brands to consciously use advertising as a channel for overtly cultural communication, beyond mere brand placement. When neo-Nazis in Germany, Holland and Belgium chose the English sports brand Lonsdale as their emblematic outfit, the brand had an image problem. The extremists like the products for their connection to fighting (Lonsdale is a traditional provider of boxing gear) and the brand because it contains the first four letters of the German Nazi party’s name, NSDAP. Lonsdale countered their problem by design, challenging the racist ideologies of this market segment by launching the campaign ‘Lonsdale Loves All Colours’, supporting a black African football team and publicly endorsing such ‘liberal’ causes as AIDS prevention. Cultural references may be hidden in the design, but they are in the deepest sense of the word catalysts for cultural connectivity: they can trigger the awareness of the cultural meaning of the design’s message and context. They connect different levels of information. They add information to other information. In short, the cultural references designers implant into their designs turn disparate data into meaningful information. When German design icon Gunter Rambow uses a Coca Cola bottle for his poster announcing the theatre play ‘Der Liebestrank’, the image is not merely an illustration (who would ever take Coca Cola for a love potion?), but a cultural critique. Even without knowing what the play is about, one can tell the image is meant ironically: love as a cheap and commercialized consumer product, ubiquitous and bland like the world’s most popular drink next to water. And Rambow's image for the classic opera ‘Die Entführung aus dem Serail’ is of course an aptly seductive interpretation of Mozart's erotic allusions, but in our days it can't be seen without also reading a commentary in it on current debates about Islam, chadors and sexual permissiveness versus repression. All such designs have one thing in common: they are more than answers to questions posed by clients, they try to do more than seduce consumers. All communication design obviously needs to answer specific questions and ‘solve a client’s problem’, but it can do so much more than that. At best, the design actively demonstrates how it is embedded in the ways people experience their lives, how they communicate and express themselves. This way, designs can act as catalysts for cultural connectivity and communication design becomes an active force in visual culture. |
