When it comes to English 101, there are days I feel as bored as my students look. I know composition is dull. It’s not like comma splices and MLA citations exactly put a spring in my step. I do like teaching rhetorical analysis, though. For the last two weeks, we’ve been analyzing the way commercials manipulate our emotions in order to sell us their product. More fascinating, we’ve also discussed how commercials have evolved from merely selling a product to more subtly selling lifestyles, behaviors, and values.
In her essay “The Economic Citizenship of Gourmet Coffee,” Paula Mathieu analyzes the way Starbucks uses a strategic vocabulary that borrows from the European connoisseur tradition to sell us the idea that their coffee is a transcendent, refined experience. By using a bizarre hybrid of scientific terms to describe the making of their coffee (which is brewed at “optimum temperatures”) and wine- tasting terms (“brimy” or “earthy” or “mellow”) to describe the flavors of their espresso, they promise consumers a sensual pleasure delivered with pharmaceutical exactitude. The sizes are not small, medium, and large, but tall, grande, and venti. The workers are “baristas”; terms like “doppio” and “con panna” are also Italian. Because you have to memorize and use the particular lexicon of the Starbucks menu, requesting coffee, size, and otherwise in a particular order, the company’s success relies a great deal on “in-crowd appeal.” Just by opening your mouth at the counter you identify yourself as an insider or an outsider. At my undergrad university, a Starbucks cup was as much a symbol of fashion and class as a Vera Wang purse.
Of course, we shouldn’t just abuse Starbucks. Many companies succeed in creating a perceived need for their product or in making us identify with a certain company/product for the prestige it transfers. We all know commercials have come a long way. They rarely rely on logic to sell their product, choosing instead to manipulate our emotions and desires, teaching us to think we “need” a product to maintain the lifestyle we are supposedly entitled to.
Just compare a car commercial from the 1950s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUB4s-9lwjo to an ad for a car produced this year http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkEw1rsBUak
The question is no longer which car is most efficient/ safe/dependable. (Look around. Very few of us buy cars for their gas mileage, despite the many economic and environmental incentives.)
No: as Kate Welch so seductively purrs: “The question in today’s luxury game is not whether your car has available features…the question is: when you turn your car on, does it return the favor?”
I've had my current car for seven years now. My question is: "When I turn my car on, does it not require any car payments?" I'd rather have "free" than "favor." Uncle Mark
Posted by: Mark Pierce | October 24, 2008 at 01:21 PM
I've had my current car for seven years now. My question is: "When I turn my car on, does it not require any car payments?" I'd rather have "free" than "favor." Uncle Mark
Posted by: Mark Pierce | October 24, 2008 at 01:21 PM