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Consumer Culture and Advertising Communication

Author: ZhangYu
Tutor: NiNing
School: Renmin University of China
Course: Communication
Keywords: advertisement consumer culture symbol coding decoding
CLC: G206
Type: Master's thesis
Year: 2005
Downloads: 1616
Quote: 6
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Abstract

As China’s reform progresses, the country has experienced profound changes and is emerging as a consumer society. The restructuring of society and economy has significantly affected social culture and related mechanism. With the development of reform and market economy, advertising is playing a more and more important role in China’s society, and the role is also changing as the society is developing. Advertisement was considered shopping guidance for people’s convenience when it came back to Chinese mainland in 1979. However, it has flooded people’s daily life today and people eventually become dubious about the information it provides. No matter people have time or not, or will or will not, advertisement forces people to read, and compel them, to some extent, accept the information it expresses even without realizing it. Advertisements guide people’s shopping, stimulate people’s demand, control people’s feelings, and even change people’s thoughts and lifestyle. Little by little, people find they are swamped and dominated by advertisements. It is necessary to understand the way advertising works in order to overthrow its domination. By the method of semeiotics, this article gives an analysis on advertising, not only aimed to discover the text mode of advertisement, but also to explore the incentives behind the text, understand the relationship between the economic incentives of advertisement and social culture, and unveil the truth of advertisement. As a methodology of social science, semeiotics is a good tool for the interpretation of real life as well as people’s mentality. That’s the reason why the article uses this perspective. The article has four chapters. Chapter 1 analyzes the social background, consumer society and consumer culture. It describes the characteristics of a consumer society: in such a society, due to overproduction, consumption and consumption behavior overtake production to take a dominant position in the society; and consumption comes forth with new characteristics and makes an impact on the system of social status. Further analysis concludes the two trends of the consumer society: nonphysical goods take a bigger and bigger share in consumption, and the production of symbol system and visual images makes a more and more significant impact on controlling consumer preference and consumer style. It not only results in changes of economy, but also causes a comprehensive transformation of culture. Based on the analysis of social background, the chapter continues to analyze the practical characteristics of consumer culture. From a structural perspective, it points out a social status mechanism different from the past in which people use the goods they consume as a label to distinguish the classes within the society. In the meantime, modern media also alters the way consumer culture is produced and circulated. To some extent, consumer culture can be seen as the synonym of media culture. Chapter 2 talks about related knowledge of semeiotics including the meaning of symbol, the social mechanism in which symbol works, three research fields of semeiotics, and basic factors of human symbol behavior: coding and decoding. The chapter also talks about the relationship between symbol, consumer culture and advertisement: symbol connects goods to culture in consumer society and creates a new method to differentiate similar goods; consumer culture influences every aspect of people’s life through mass media and consequently guides people’s consumer behavior; advertisements, as the identifiers of goods and producers, take the role of coding, and have become the most significant and representative behavior in the consumer society. Chapter 3 talks about how advertisement codes and decodes, and analyzes how advertisement influences culture. The chapter gives four points: first, advertisements attach importance to emotional expression in coding; second, advertisements mix “denotation” and “connotation” and thus attach uncertain cultural characters to goods; third, the cultural influence of

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