Advertising has to be mould the attitude of consumer, his or her behavior pattern. This is a difficult task. As here, advertising enters the area of human and social relations. It has to compete with the traditional home influences, religious institutions, the school, in creating a certain type of aspiration towards a different lifestyle. It creates new wants through built in obsolescence of existing products or services and by projecting changing fashion. Advertising then encourages emulation and competition among individuals. Thus, as the eminent American economist, John Kenneth Galbraith, has put it: "The pressure of emulation and competition is adornment and display has no clear terminal point"
This is how we have reached what we call today the 'consumer society'. The well known British economist, Joan Robinson, describes the consumer society thus: "There is an ever rising consumption of industrial products by the middle class farmers, small business, professionals, including personnel of techno-structure itself, and that part of the working class which has become absorbed into the system; the system has come to be known as the consumer society." ADvertising helps generate this process by "the management of those who buy good," to quote Galbraith.
to be continued...
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