Anda di halaman 1dari 10
 
www.seipub.org/ijps International Journal of Philosophy Study (IJPS) Volume 1 Issue 3, October 2013 32
Metaphysics of Advertising
 
Sharon Adetutu OMOTOSO
Department of Politics & International Relations Lead City University, Ibadan, Nigeria sharonomotoso@gmail.com
 Abstract 
 
From the Kantian perspective, advertising operates in the realm of ‘phenomena’ (things as they appear) as against the ‘noumena’ (things as they are). Advertising aims at influencing consumers’ purchase decisions, with an objective of appealing to man’s appetitive part so that sales of advertised products or services can be achieved. This paper undertakes a critical investigation on the implications of the metaphysics of advertising on human existence. From a metaphysician’s perspective, the paper questions the place of idealism in the materialistic world of advertising, the relationship between determinism and freewill in consumer’s purchasing pattern and the need for an existential turn in consumer behaviour. Using the critical and analytic methods of research, this paper argues that beyond psychological explanations, there are metaphysical explanations to issues in advertising practice. Seeing that consumers are usually left to bear the consequences of their actions, the paper maintains that consumers must begin to consider the existential effects of their purchase decisions through critical thinking and media literacy.
Keywords
 Advertising; Metaphysics; Determinism; Freewill; Human Existence
 
Introduction
Discussions in advertising have frequently revolved disciplines like ethics, psychology, law and economics, among others. One may therefore wonder what is to discuss in metaphysics of advertising or better still, what is metaphysical about advertising. There is also an assumption that if a philosopher is to discuss any profession, such discussion will either possibly be ethical or epistemological. However, one must not ignore the fact that there are inherent metaphysical issues in any reasoning. While most philosophical studies in advertising focus on the ethical perspective, Fadahunsi (2004:17) asserted that “metaphysics permeates into the fabrics of ethics too”, and stated that:
 
Behind every moral issue lies an element of metaphysics.  Moral concepts like ‘good’, ‘evil’, ‘bad’, ‘right’, ‘wrong’, ‘freedom’, ‘determination’ are all metaphysical
This paper is a modification of author’s PhD Thesis.
 
in nature by the virtue of their being non-empirical both by definitions and contents.
Also, Pears (1965:35-36) emphasised the relevance of metaphysics to morality as follows:
 Metaphysical systems have usually led to new moral insights; for to show the nature of reality was to show the place of man in nature, and therefore his duties and purposes, it was to show the way to his salvation, to the kind of knowledge that would set him free from his ordinary interests and preoccupation.
Thus, if philosophical discussions in professional spheres revolve primarily around ethics, it is the role of philosophers to bring the underlying metaphysical issues to the fore: by so doing, the philosopher performs his/her responsibility of scrutinising issues and highlighting its implications to human existence. This paper is divided into five sections. Section one is the introduction while section two is a critique of the advertising enterprise where both the significances and inadequacies of advertising are examined. Section three discusses the metaphysics of advertising by first presenting a metaphysical foundation of advertising and then the cosmological and ontological issues in advertising. In section four, which is an examination of metaphysics of advertising and human existence, the ideas of determinism, freewill and the place of man as a rational being in advertising discourse will  be considered. Section five is the last and concluding section.
A Critique of Advertising
Advertising is described as a tool of marketing communication; however, various definitions of advertising have evolved over time. For instance, the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising says: “advertising presets the most persuasive possible selling message to the right prospect for the product or service at the lowest possible cost.” (Jefkins, 1994:5). Similarly, Wells, Moriarty & Burnett (2006:5) defined advertising as “paid persuasive communication that uses non personal mass media as well as other forms of interactive communication to reach broad audiences
 
International Journal of Philosophy Study (IJPS) Volume 1 Issue 3, October 2013 www.seipub.org/ijps 33
 
and to connect an identified sponsor with a target audience.” In their own views, Aren & Schaefer (2007:4) described advertising as “the structured and composed non-personal communication of information, usually paid for and usually persuasive in nature, about products (goods, services and ideas) by identified sponsors through various media”. From the summation of these definitions, it may be deduced that modern definitions of advertising possess five basic components: firstly, it must be paid for (although some forms of advertisements like Public Service Announcements use donated space and time). Secondly, there must be an identified sponsor. Thirdly, the exercise must aim at influencing or persuading consumers to do something (or perform an action). Fourth, it must be targeted at a large audience of potential consumers. Fifth, advertisements may be done for tangible goods, products or intangible services, and the message must be conveyed through different kinds of mass media which are largely non-personal. Thus, for anything to qualify as an advertisement, it must meet these criteria. Since its emergence, advertising has played vital roles in human endeavour. These include: marketing roles whereby useful information about products and services are made available to consumers. Marketing provides information about what product, service or idea is available, where and at what price. This helps the advertisers to map out their pre-defined objectives. From economic perspectives, advertising aids economic growth on various grounds. First of all, it helps to expand markets for new products, thereby making room for increased demand, and ultimately, stimulating increase in production. Mohan (2006:7) explained that “a company which invests in research and development in order to develop new products has to depend greatly on advertising for establishing the market for these products”. Secondly, by offering choices to consumers, advertising helps promote competition thereby making market operations more efficient. Thirdly, advertising promotes an expanding economy by contributing to the nation’s Gross National Product (GNP), which is the market value of the output of goods and services produced by a nation’s economy. It provides revenue for government and the media and also encourages investment and technological improvements. Fourth, it creates job for an expanding labour force, as people from different disciplines are employed to carry out specific functions in the advertising industry. In its communication role, advertising serves the functions of building awareness for brands, creating  brand image, providing information and brand reminder, persuading people to make buying decisions, providing incentives to take action and, reinforcing past purchases and brand experiences. It also has the ability to aid message retention and recall  by consumers at point of purchase. While discussing ‘advertising as information’, Bergh & Katz (1999:86) attributed the role of providing information to the marketplace to advertising. They stated that;
Consumers are quite active, seeking new products and brands; they look to advertising for information and are more price sensitive, which forces advertisers to be more careful about how much they charge for their  products…. In doing so, advertising is really reflecting the value of brands and allowing consumers to make their own decisions….
Advertising’s societal role allows it to set agenda for people’s lifestyle in the society, and achieves this goal through the use of stereotypes (oversimplified standardized image of a person or group). This in a way contributes to consumers’ modes of life. Such contribution could be positive; endorsing the lifestyle of certain individual or groups, or negative; by creating feeling of inferiority and the need to conform to certain standards by other individuals or groups. Advertising can also be a motivating factor for people within a society to seek a better lifestyle and increase their purchasing power. Contrary to the above, critics have accused advertising of various inadequacies, among which are: advertising has been criticised as dishonest because it sometime aims at selling questionable products and services through deceptive means. Advertising is said to be deceptive when consumers are presented with certain ideas which in reality cannot be attributed to the advertised product or service. Lending credence to this point, Omonzejele, Isiguso & Otakpor (1998:48) maintained that;
No advert will tell in its message the side effects (drugs) or deficiencies of a product. There is no  perfection in human affairs. To this extent, no one expects an advert to be perfect, yet when an advert deliberately and intentionally conceals something negative about a product or service; it is guilty of the  fallacy of suppressing evidence.
However, Hastak & Mazis (2011) held that consumers will go beyond the provided information and make inferences based on the schema (Schema is that which provide consumers with default values, not clearly expressed but implied) Hastak & Mazis (2011:158)
 
www.seipub.org/ijps International Journal of Philosophy Study (IJPS) Volume 1 Issue 3, October 2013 34
adds that
 for instance, if there are no specific disclosures on the label of a food product regarding safety, consumers will rely on their “food safety” schema to infer that the  food is safe for consumption like all other foods.
Thus, the foregoing shows that a pattern of reasoning is expected from consumers, which will help them fish out hidden facts and interpret implied claims. Furthermore, attempts to strip advertising of untruthfulness have led to its regulation by different  bodies in most parts of the world. For instance, advertising in Nigeria is regulated by the Advertising Practitioners’ Council of Nigeria (APCON), established by Decree Number 55 of 1988, also, the Advertising Standards Panel (ASP) of APCON vets and approves advertisements before exposure. These regulations over the years have greatly reduced cases of deceit and untruthfulness in Nigeria’s advertising industry. Advertising is also criticised for corrupting morals and encouraging materialism by lauding false values. Critics argue that it often debases its target market whenever it passes messages intended for them to other members of the society. For instance, advertisements of contraceptives which consistently get exposed to youths and children rather than to the married and matured members of the society debase its primary target. In the same vein, exposure to such advertisement has a high tendency of promoting promiscuity among youths, thereby degenerating moral values. In their attempts at defending advertising from this criticism, Toynbee & Bernbach (1974:423) argued that “advertising is neither moral nor immoral” and that it is the purpose for which advertising is used that can be qualified as good or  bad. Toynbee & Bernbach’s position is construed as amoralism as it places the end above the means thereby bringing advertising back to a consequentialist platform. From an economist’s viewpoint, advertising is criticised for encouraging sheer waste of scarce resources by promoting impulse buying; that is, making people buy things they do not need. In economics, it has been observed that advertising  boosts market monopoly and profit monopoly, since only large organizations can maintain the cost of consistent advertising. They argued further that advertising increases the unit cost of products, since the cost of advertising is added to production cost. By this, consumers are made to pay higher than they would have paid in the absence of advertising. Another economic position which is contrary to these is that advertising can create lower prices; once it performs its function of stimulating desire and increasing demands; sufficient demand can pave way for lower prices to consumers. Osunbiyi identified the depersonalising and distasteful effect of advertising when he stated that it encourages mass production, which in turn results in the development of consumerist culture. This implies that the individual is reduced into the crowd because “the aim is to supply large numbers of identical products to large numbers of identical people. There is no room for those individual desires and tastes different from the norms” Osunbiyi (1991:67). In reaction, advocates of advertising argue that depersonalisation is not supported by practical experience because products usually are designed to meet consumers’ needs and that these consumers differ in intellect and cultural interests. This is one major essence of market and product segmentation. Distastefulness manifests when advertisements are exposed to intrude into the personal interest of the audience, viewer or reader. A counter argument to this is that the consumer cannot be served only with that which pleases him/her; rather, that which an advertisement passes across is also information which if not useful today, can be of utmost usefulness in future. In the same vein, it has been argued that advertising has diabolical tendencies because it uses sinister techniques; suggesting possible harm that awaits a non-conforming consumer, thereby immensely persuading consumers to buy the advertised products. In response, Nicosia (1974) maintained that consumers are not sheep who loyally do as they are told. This means that consumers are believed to be rational humans who would critically consider the use of any product or service before purchasing. Having considered the critique of advertising, it may be inferred that their effects on man and society are all-encompassing as it touches the economic, social, mental and psychological aspects of human life. This perhaps is what informs scholars’ multi-disciplinary contributions to advertising studies which has  benefited from fields like Economics, Philosophy, Sociology, Theology and so on. Examples of such scholarly contributions are: R.D. Irwin, (
The Economic effect of Advertising,
1942
),
F.P Bishop (
The Ethics of  Advertising,
 1949), Francis, X. Quin, (
Ethics, Advertising and Responsibility, 1963)
 , Julian Simon(
Issues in the

Puaskan Keingintahuan Anda

Segala yang ingin Anda baca.
Kapan pun. Di mana pun. Perangkat apa pun.
Tanpa Komitmen. Batalkan kapan saja.
576648e32a3d8b82ca71961b7a986505