Follow it in the Papers: Advertising Strategies and Tactics.

After a long study session rehashing Klein and Juffer until they could be rehashed no more, I remembered I still had to do one of these pesky things. Well, I'm kind of sick of talking about reclaiming the streets and boycotting clothes made in south american sweatshops, so I'm going to talk a little bit about strategies on the other end of Klein's party line: I'm going to talk about Advertising strategies.

If you look at advertisements for different companies, you'll notice that the ads have a slightly different flavor depending on who the target market is. Changing these flavors is a strategy, a over arching idea that dominates how a someone (or an army, or a marketing department, for that matter) does things. Each different flavor is a different string in the strategy, and on each string there are many different tactics, specific actions, words, or layouts that can draw your attention to one thing or another within the ad.

In my education class, we just finished a unit on how as teachers we can help students who live in poverty, and as part of this unit, we got a bunch of handouts on how people from different places on the socio-economic ladder deal with different situations. This information is actually really applicable to advertising.

For people living in poverty, possessions are People. If you have people, you're set, because obviously, stuff costs money, and money is something they don't have.

For the middle class, possessions are Stuff. real, tangible things we can use every day.

For the Wealthy, possessions are one of a kind objects, legacies and pedigrees. No one else has what they have. It's very elitist.

This shows a lot in high fashion advertising. When Dolce and Gabbana roll out their new fall collection (and we use the word collection because it implies that it has taken a lot of time to put together, it is beyond pricing, and it all has a common theme) they like to show it off as no one has shown it off before!

High Fashion advertising fetishizes the clothes, showing them off in outlandish situations so that we look past what the models are doing to look at what they're wearing while doing it. (This is why D&G ads are really fun to look at, for me, anyway)


The wealthy, with food, care about Presentation, how it looks, because obviously there's not a problem getting it or a problem with the quality of the food. These ads are all about Presentation. How does it look? This is what adbusters is making fun of when they put out faux CK ads that look like this:

The ads fetishize clothes, and normal human beings...well, they fetishize other things. Adbusters are trying to look past the clothes aspect into what the advertisement is also selling: Ideal body image.

Let's look at a different advertisement, one from say, JC Penny's. Much more middle class audience.

See, less about the image of the clothes and more of...well, just the clothes and what you as the consumer are going to be doing in them: Having fun. All the models in the JC Penney ad are smiling, not doing that fakey 'mysterious' look that you see on the models in the couture ad. The middle class doesn't care about image, they care about quality, not quantity, as the impoverished tend to care about, or presentation, as the wealthy care about.

Here's where I'd show you an advertisement geared towards poor folks, but that's right, they don't make those!

That's another marketing strategy: put money where it pays.