Images Creating Concepts

There are a lot of techniques and ideas that advertising uses to get to people’s minds. One of the most popular and effective in these days is through images. “The visual is typically seen as the quintessence of advertising culture, and the term ‘image-based culture’ has come to mean visual dominance in culture”. Images are very important to actual society. An example of this is watching movies from forty years back, when special effects were simpler and movies were a lot slower. People used to have so much fun watching them. Now, the more visual effects and the faster the scenes go, the better the movie is. Image strategies relate images, social issues and in some cases symbols to the brand, and appeal psychologically to the consumers. The psychological appeal of advertising is showing in these days the great effects that it has created. Women with anorexia and bulimia, people with very low self esteem, and a culture obsessed with looks.

Advertising has created a culture of appearance. It has made people believe that everyone has to be perfect. Women, since they are very young, have the idea and goal in their heads that they need to have the perfect body shape and proportion to be beautiful. They have to obtain the softest skin, and when they start to grow older they have to definitely do something about age marks. It’s not known if beauty products were made because people wanted them, or if people want them just because the products are made. I found out that Chinese women have increased their status and independence, and are inspired by western brands, music and images. This is a good example of how advertising and the use of images can have such an impact in a culture, to the extreme of even changing traditional beliefs and values. The same influence and manipulation has been applied with teens, but children take the worse part. In the next blog entry I will discuss how advertising influences children.