- Car Marketing Confers Power Onto the Consumer - Flickr
Through visual and linguistic techniques of persuasion, flattery, veiled threat, humor, or inspiration, automotive advertisers attempt to associate their products with conditions or qualities that are desirable to the consumer. In a world of increasingly pressing ecological problems, many of which are caused or exacerbated by cars, automotive manufacturers are utilizing green advertising in an attempt to convince the public of the essentially benign effect of cars on planetary systems.
Car Marketing Goes Green
Car companies are positioning themselves as part of, rather than a threat to, the environment. In their advertisements, cars are presented not only as harmless tools of travel and recreation, but as totems of individual freedom and interaction with the natural world.
Subhabrata Banerjee identifies two types of 'green' in automotive advertising: deep green, or alleviation ads, characterized by an appeal to the consumer's concern with nature and a presentation of the car as low-impact and kind to the earth, and shallow green, or domination ads, characterized by the use of nature as an inspiring backdrop with no substance, and typified by images of “tough trucks” dominating the landscape.
Domination advertising is only 'green' in the sense that images of nature are used. Julia Corbett writes that this is "the most prevalent use of the environment in advertising: when nature functions as a rhetorically useful backdrop or stage [Corbett, Enviropop, 2002].” Nature is presented as threatening rather than threatened, unpredictable, and something to be commanded by tough trucks and heavy equipment. By juxtaposing the vehicle with enormous and apparently timeless landscapes, advertisers attempt to confer the qualities of the landscape onto the car.
Appealing to Privilege
In a typical Land Rover ad, the vehicle sits surrounded by desert rock formations, the sun slanting in from the left into a dry riverbed with no apparent means of access. The vehicle's ability to access remote locales highlights its power. A connection is made in this advertisement between inaccessible landscapes and the elite nature of exclusive sectors of society. In the terminology of John Urry, the vehicle is the subject of a 'romantic' as opposed to a 'collective' gaze: "In the former, the emphasis is upon solitude, privacy, and a personal, semi-spiritual relationship with the object of the gaze."
While in the real world, the car serves as a vehicle, in the advertisement it is an icon of individual worth. It represents the unique and privileged position of the buyer. The text below the image reads "Gaining admittance isn't merely about having the right connections." The end of the text, where the Land Rover's $55,500 price tag is referred to as "a small price for admission", removes all doubt as to what market sector is being sought in this ad. The vehicle sits alone in the landscape just as the consumer sits alone at the top of the socio-economic pyramid.
Denial of Ecological Impact
Vehicles in car ads exist within a natural world that is completely unaffected by their presence. Mountains, clean air, and fragile desert landscapes surround the cars in pristine splendor. The message is that one can use these vehicles, on or off road, without concern for the environment, because they don't do any harm. While this is never stated in words, the visual imagery is far more subtle and effective than a slogan. The rich, perfectly lit contours of the natural landscape surround these vehicles in a loving way, naturalizing and welcoming them.
Utilizing viewers' nostalgic desire for an unblemished world, advertisers associate cars, paradoxically but convincingly within the context of the ad, with a pristine non-human environment. The choice of desert over other landscapes in car advertising is not random. Richard Olsen writes that "the desert is a frequent setting in SUV ads. This taps into long-standing connections between the desert and purification or spirituality...It is an ideal setting for self-denial that may lead to spiritual epiphanies [Olsen, Enviropop, 2002].”
When the vehicles in dominance ads are not sitting in unblemished perfection, they are roaring effortlessly up impossible grades. In a typical ad, a Toyota truck is zooming up a near-vertical dirt track, its driver obscured behind tinted windows, dramatic puffs of dirt in the air behind it but not a speck on the truck itself. Emblazoned across the image are the words "when your life path is more like a trajectory.”
The focus here is on fun, excitement, and self-fulfillment, with no consideration given to environmental issues. The direction of the vehicle is always up, never down, an expression of the cultural belief that privileges verticality, power, and progress. Nature is presented as a fun, yet easily defeated, challenge to technology, while technology is portrayed as an extension of the self: powerful, in control, and dominant.
Read more of Alan Foljambe's articles on automotive advertising:
- The Displacement of Nature
- Short Term Thinking and Nature as Optional
- Cars, Ads, and Individualism
- Making Friends With Nature
- A Narrowing of Options
- Cheerleader for Modernity
Sources
Banerjee, Subhabrata, Charles S. Gulas, and Easwar Iyer. “Shades of Green: A Multidimensional Analysis of Environmental Advertising,” Journal of Advertising Vol. 24, No. 2 (Summer 1995), p. 21-32.
Crawshaw, Carol and John Urry. “Tourism and the Photographic Eye.” Touring Cultures: Transformations of Travel and Theory. Rojek and Urry, Editors. London: Routledge, 1997, p. 176-95.
Greenpeace. The Environmental Impact of the Car: A Greenpeace Report. Washington, D.C.: Greenpeace, 1992.
Meister, Mark, and Phyllis M. Japp, Eds. Enviropop: Studies in Environmental Rhetoric and Popular Culture. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002.
Alan Foljambe - Alan Foljambe is a writer and art historian living in Kingston, Ontario. He holds a PhD in Art History from the University of Manchester. ...
