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Essay about The Power of Advertising

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Advertising has been defined as the most powerful, persuasive, and manipulative tool that firms have to control consumers all over the world. It is a form of communication that typically attempts to persuade potential customers to purchase or to consume more of a particular brand of product or service. Its impacts created on the society throughout the years has been amazing, especially in this technology age. Influencing people’s habits, creating false needs, distorting the values and priorities of our society with sexism and feminism, advertising has become a poison snake ready to hunt his prey. However, on the other hand, advertising has had a positive effect as a help of the economy and society. In the business market, the main and …show more content…

The problem of such purchasing is that the natural satisfaction of needs is replaced by the artificial. A good example is the marketing of milk products in the Third World. In the 1970s the multinational food company Nestle advertised powdered milk for babies as an alternative to breast feeding in countries such as Kenya. The attractiveness of the product was enhanced by the positive image of development, modernity and technology that businessman projected to mothers. In this case, however, the results were tragic, because the product required sanitary conditions that were not available in those times. Therefore, many infants who were fed in this way faced illness and even death. Far from offering a diversity of choices for the satisfaction of needs, advertisement offers only one message: “purchase a commodity.” Since advertising must create new demand, it must also continually produce unsatisfied costumers. Those customers are more likely to look for products to fulfill their happiness, even though they do not reach that point. Mander writes that “the goal of all advertising is discontent,…an internal scarcity of contentment.” Advertising plays on our fears, insecurities, and anxieties, always reminding us that our lives could be better only if we buy this or that. The purpose is to make us slaves of commercials, and as slaves, do as they please. This is the reason for its existences,

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