Throughout this small capsule of blog topics I’ve investigated
two groups that seem to be polar opposites of each other. As the social
anthropologist I’ve attempted to give insight into each of the distinct target
markets I have chosen. I’ve explained the differences between the two and how
each of these groups benefits the advertising world in different ways. In
today’s social anthropology blog I delve into a massive topic that could spawn
hundreds of blogs devoted to it. Today I attempt to explore the differences in
consumer advertising versus business advertising. More specifically, I’m
interested in the success of emotional advertising. Does a corporations’
attempt at do gooder ad campaigns actually work in swaying public opinion?
Consumer advertising is clearly very different from business
advertising, even on the surface level. Consumer advertising usually works to
sell a single product, or line of products. The consumer knows who makes the
product, but they do not know much about the corporation itself. The
corporation remains faceless because the focus is on the actual product. For
example, you see a commercial for whitening toothpaste. You know the toothpaste
is made by Crest because they keep telling you over and over in the commercial.
They do this so you can remember the toothpaste you want from the commercial is
a Crest tube and do not confuse it with the similar Colgate whitening
toothpaste. I’m an Arm and Hammer toothpaste fan myself, but both of these
companies make a decent product. Anyway, after the commercial you may remember
the product and the company that makes the product, but you often know little
to nothing about the actual company. What are the company’s values? What is
this company’s history? It doesn’t matter, just buy this toothpaste. Consumer
advertising is all about selling an item to a consumer. The company itself is
not really that important.
Business advertising on the other hand, works to sell the
actual corporation to the consumer. It sounds more abstract because it is.
They’re trying to sell you on the company itself, not on the company’s
products. The specific product advertising may come before or after this type
of advertising. Businesses normally advertise the corporation after a giant
catastrophe or PR disaster. British Petroleum is a recent example of this.
After a disastrous oil spill they spent billions cleaning up not only the
actual mess they had made, but the ruined relationships with consumers. For
many months after the spill there was advertising geared towards showing how
they were decent people. It wasn’t enough that they had to clean up their mess,
they wanted people to know they were cleaning up the mess.
Does this type of cover-our-ass advertising really work?
It’s hard to say. The advertising may have worked or the whole thing may have
just been healed by time. The backlash for BP was bad for a while, but as most
high school students who have been the victim of gossip know, it eventually
goes away. People continue to buy gasoline at BP, regardless of the immoral
things they have done in the past. Sometimes companies will hype themselves in
advertising without a major scandal. Last summer I started seeing commercials
for Dow chemical corporation. Many people would have no idea what this company
even does. They manufacture chemicals used by other companies in many items that
we interact with everyday- cleaning products, shampoos, food preservatives,
plastics, etc. Dow’s advertising was geared toward reminding people that they
use science to make innovations that help our day-to-day lives. But Dow
chemicals does not sell to consumers directly, they sell hundreds of gallons of
chemicals to other businesses that use them in their products. Consumers would
use these chemicals indirectly but they would never purchase a thousand gallons
of propylene glycol for themselves.
So why was Dow suddenly promoting themselves to a
small-scale consumer market? I believe
the answer is that they wanted to cover their ass, but in a more subtle way
than BP. In recent years, there has been a huge push for “green” products.
There has been a public backlash against chemicals. According to the consumer
chemicals are bad, cancerous, and the public no longer wants them. Plastics are
evil and environmentally toxic. Chemical companies were becoming as vilified as
other industries. Dow began this campaign to remind consumers that perhaps
chemicals weren’t so horrible after all. Dow didn’t have a major scandal on
their hands, but in this case self-promoting advertising was used to try and
change a consumer’s mind about an entire industry.
The success of businesses promoting themselves (rather than
specific products) through advertising still remains to be seen. It probably
doesn’t help a ton, but it can’t hurt either. Maybe if the company has a couple
advertising dollars left in the budget at the end of the year and no new
products to roll out it would be beneficial to remind consumers that they’re
buying from a trustworthy, ethical, company.
In the past few weeks I have explored target markets that we
are all pretty familiar with. I thank my few readers for becoming engaged in
this series. In the future, I plan on getting deeper into target markets and
furthering my blog career as the Social Anthropologist.
