Marketing hedonics: Toward a psychoanalysis of advertising response

Abstract

The author advances a psychoanalytic theory of advertising response to theorize the intersection of brand positioning, the semiotics of gender, and consumer desire in advertising discourse. Researchers traditionally focus on the iconic representation of desire in advertising imagery. However, by drawing upon Lacan's theory of scopophelia, the author focuses on the dialectical implication of the spectator/consumer's psychic drives in the visual semiotics of advertising discourse. The consumer identifies with the brand discourse primarily by means of projective identification with the voyeuristic gaze of the camera referenced in the image, and only secondarily because of perceived parallels between consumer lifestyle and the content of the advertisement. By way of illustration, the author analyzes the positioning of consumer desire in homoerotic advertising for Calvin Klein and Dolce & Gabbana, which draws upon resistance discourses in contemporary art to hold the consumer in a passion play of alternative sexualities and subject positions. Though these campaigns deconstruct the conventional binary opposition of male voyeur/female object of the gaze, they have contributed to the broad popularity of these brands because the brand discourse – logo, product placement, and rhetoric – restores a conventional logic to these advertisements that would have been censored from the worlds of popular culture and fine art.

Keywords:

• psychoanalysis
• advertising response
• psychic drives
• brand semiotics
• consumer desire
• eroticism
• gender theory
• luxury advertising
• marketing hedonics
• projective identification

Notes

^1. In a case study for the J. Walter Thompson Company in Chicago, the author proved a correlation between the strength of consumer response and visual codes for spectator engagement in an advertising campaign for Kraft Singles. The agency ran an independent Link™ test that corroborated findings from the semiotic analysis, for example, that emotional response is strongest at those junctures in advertising discourse when the consumer is prompted to fill in the voids left by references off-frame. (J. Walter Thompson 2003)