In 1948, Moss Kendrix, a former New Deal public relations officer, founded a highly successful, Washington, D.C.-based public relations firm, the flagship client of which was the Coca-Cola Company. As the first black pitchman for Coca-Cola, Kendrix found his way into the rarefied world of white corporate America. His personal phone book also included the names of countless black celebrities, such as bandleader Duke Ellington, singer-actress Pearl Bailey, and boxer Joe Louis, with whom he had built relationships in the course of developing marketing campaigns for his numerous federal and corporate clients. Kendrix, along with Ebony publisher John H. Johnson and Life photographer Gordon Parks, recognized that, in the image-saturated world of postwar America, media in all its forms held greater significance for defining American citizenship than ever before. For these imagemakers, the visual representation of African Americans as good citizens was good business. In Represented, Brenna Wynn Greer explores how black entrepreneurs produced magazines, photographs, and advertising that forged a close association between blackness and Americanness. In particular, they popularized conceptions of African Americans as enthusiastic consumers, a status essential to postwar citizenship claims. But their media creations were complicated: subject to marketplace dictates, they often relied on gender, class, and family stereotypes. Demand for such representations came not only from corporate and government clients to fuel mass consumerism and attract support for national efforts, such as the fight against fascism, but also from African Americans who sought depictions of blackness to counter racist ideas that undermined their rights and their national belonging as citizens. The story of how black capitalists made the market work for racial progress on their way to making money reminds us that the path to civil rights involved commercial endeavors as well as social and political activism.

At the end of the twentieth century, Britain was a consumer society. Commerce, intoxicating and addictive, had almost entirely colonized modern life. People were immersed in, and ultimately defined by, promotional culture. The things they consumed had overtaken class, religion, geography, or occupation as the primary form of self-identity and self-expression. For much of the twentieth century all forms of brand communication- from political campaigning to product advertising- were based on the theory of rational appeals to rational consumers. There was only one problem with this theory: it was wrong. The Persuasion Industries: The Making of Modern Britain examines develops in marketing, advertising, public relations, and branding. It explores the role they played in the emergence of the consumer society. New ideas from fields of behavioural psychology and economics, together with internal developments such as planning, positioning, and corporate branding allowed persuasion to become the driving force within many commercial enterprises. Together these changes led to the emergence of an alternative emotional model of brand communication. A simple idea that proved so compelling it changed the world we live in.

Dance in TV advertisements has long been familiar to Americans as a silhouette dancing against a colored screen, exhibiting moves from air guitar to breakdance tricks, all in service of selling the latest Apple product. But as author Colleen T. Dunagan shows in Consuming Dance, the advertising industry used dance to market items long before iPods. In this book, Dunagan lays out a comprehensive history and analysis of dance commercials to demonstrate the ways in which the form articulates with, informs, and reflects U.S. culture. In doing so, she examines dance commercials as cultural products, looking at the ways in which dance engages with television, film, and advertising in the production of cultural meaning. Throughout the book, Dunagan interweaves semiotics, choreographic analysis, cultural studies, and critical theory in an examination of contemporary dance commercials while placing the analysis within a historical context. She draws upon connections between individual dance-commercials and the discursive and production histories to provide a thorough look into brand identity and advertising's role in constructing social identities.

The semiotics discipline - a hybrid of communication science and anthropology - accounts for the deep cultural codes that structure communication and sociality, endow things with value, move us through constructed space, and moderate our encounters with change. Doing Semiotics shows readers how to leverage these codes to solve business problems, foster innovation, and create meaningful experiences for consumers. In addition to the key principles and methods of applied semiotics, it introduces the basics of branding, strategic decision-making, and cross-cultural marketing management. Through practical exercises, examples, extended team projects, and evaluation criteria, this book guides students through the application of learning to all phases of semiotics-based projects for communications, brand equity management, design strategy, new product development, and public policy management. In addition to tools for sorting data and mapping cultural dimensions of a market, it includes useful interview protocols for use in focus groups, in-depth interviews, and ethnographic studies, as well as expert case studies that will enable readers to apply semiotics to consumer research.

There are two major parallel challenges facing managers and leaders: first, how to adapt to global changes in markets, competition and supply, and second, how to grow a business while observing recognisably sustainable practices. Companies must now align their values with customers who increasingly seek people-friendly and planet-friendly products and services. Using sustainable marketing techniques to create value ultimately leads to improved customer satisfaction, better professional relationships and increased effectiveness. With marketing planning absent from the current textbook offering, this book provides practical insights, tools and frameworks to help readers produce tactically and strategically appropriate marketing plans. Showing how to embed sustainability in these strategies and reflecting on the historical and current criticisms aimed at marketing, students will be shown how to implement changes while being encouraged to reflect on why they are needed. Full of tools and frameworks to improve comprehension, including chapter-by-chapter learning outcomes, summaries, exercises, applied activities and mini case studies, it bridges the gap between theory and practice effectively and accessibly. Finally, PowerPoint lecture slides and Multiple Choice Questions sections are provided for each chapter as electronic resources. Presenting contemporary themes and challenges at the cutting edge of business research and practice, this book should be core reading for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students of sustainable marketing, marketing planning and marketing strategy, as well as professionals seeking to improve the competitive advantage of their organisations.

Selected by Choice Magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title Originally published in 1998. Drawing on both documentary and pictorial evidence, Pamela Walker Laird explores the modernization of American advertising to 1920. She links its rise and transformation to changes that affected American society and business alike, including the rise of professional specialization and the communications revolution that new technologies made possible. Laird finds a fundamental shift in the kinds of people who created advertisements and their relationships to the firms that advertised. Advertising evolved from the work of informing customers (telling people what manufacturers had to sell) to creating consumers (persuading people that they needed to buy). Through this story, Laird shows how and why-in the intense competitions for both markets and cultural authority-the creators of advertisements laid claim to "progress" and used it to legitimate their places in American business and culture.

This major practical handbook bridges the gap between strategy and design, presenting a step-by-step design process with a strategic approach and extensive methods for innovation, strategy development, design methodology and problem solving. It is an effective guide to planning and implementing design projects to ensure strategic anchoring of the process and outcome. Built around a six-part phase structure that represents the design process, covering initial preparations and project briefing, research and analysis, targets and strategy, concept development, prototyping and modelling, production and delivery, it is a must-have resource for professionals and students. Readers can easily dip in and out of sections, using the phase structure as a navigation tool. Unlike other books on the market, Design and Strategy addresses the design process from the perspective of both the company and the designer. For businesses, it highlights the value of design as a strategic tool for positioning, competition and innovation. For the designer, it teaches how to create solutions that are strategically anchored and deliver successful outcomes for businesses, resulting in appreciative clients. It includes over 250 illustrations and diagrams, tables, and text boxes showing how to move through each stage with clear visualisation and explanation. This book encourages all designers in product design and manufacturing, service design, communication design, branding, and advertising, to think beyond shape and colour to see design through the lens of strategy, process and problem solving, and all business managers, innovators and developers, to see the value in strategic design outcomes.

In global consumer culture, brands structure an economy of symbolic exchange that gives value to the meanings consumers attach to the brand name, logo, and product category. Brand meaning is not just a value added to the financial value of goods, but has material impact on financial markets themselves. Strong brands leverage consumer investments in the cultural myths, social networks, and ineffable experiences they associate with marketing signs and rituals. Creating Value: The Theory and Practice of Marketing Semiotic Research is a guide to managing these investments by managing the cultural codes that define value in a market or consumer segment. The book extends the discussion beyond the basics of semiotics to post-structural debates related to ethnographic performance, multicultural consumer identity, the digitalized consumer, and heterotopic experiences of consumer space. The book invites readers to challenge the current thinking on topics ranging from cultural branding and brand rhetoric to digital media management and service site design. It also emphasizes the role of product category codes and cultural trends in the production of perceived value. Creating Value explains theory in language that is accessible to academics and students, as well as research practitioners and marketers. By applying semiotics to the everyday world of the marketplace, the book makes sense of the semiotics discipline, which is often mystified by technical jargon and hair-splitting debate in the academic literature. The book also provides practitioners and professors with a practical guide to the methods used in semiotic research across the marketing mix.

Few expressions of globalization are as visible, widespread and pervasive as the worldwide proliferation of internationally traded consumer goods. Advertising is not only a useful index to measure globalization, but also a catalyst to increasing interconnections between economies and cultures. This book presents a comparative analysis of multicultural advertising through an empirical study of advertisements in two geographically diverse commercial regions-Europe and India. Showing that there has been a significant increase i multicultural images, symbols, and texts in advertisements across consumer goods-for the 'elite' as well as the 'less elite' -this book argues that there is a growing congruence of values among different cultures. It suggests that in spite of our differences, we are moving, at least in the corporate world, toward a larger unity.

How Silicon Valley, the dark net, and digital culture have affected our relationship to knowledge, history, language, aesthetics, reading, and truth. In October 2013, twenty-nine-year-old Ross William Ulbricht was arrested at the Glen Park Public Branch Library in San Francisco, accused of being the "Dread Pirate Roberts" and mastermind of a dark net drug marketplace known as Silk Road. Ulbricht was an ardent libertarian who believed Silk Road-described by the New York Times as "the largest, most sophisticated criminal enterprise the internet has ever seen"-was battling the forces of big government. He was convicted two years later of money laundering, computer hacking, and conspiracy to traffic narcotics and sentenced to life in prison. Art historian Pamela Lee reads this event as a fairy tale of disruption rather than an isolated episode in the history of the dark net, Silicon Valley, and the relationship between public libraries and digital culture. Lee argues that the notion of "disruptive" technology in contemporary culture has radically affected our relationship to knowledge, history, language, aesthetics, reading, and truth. Against the backdrop of her account of Ulbricht and his exploits, Lee provides original readings of five women artists-Gretchen Bender, Cecile B. Evans, Josephine Pryde, Carissa Rodriguez, and Martine Syms-who weigh in, either explicitly or inadvertently, on the nature of contemporary media and technology. Written as a work of experimental art criticism, The Glen Park Library is both a homage to the Bay Area and an excoriation of the ethos of Silicon Valley. As with all fairy tales, the book's ultimate subjects are much greater, however, and Lee casts a critical eye on collisions between privacy and publicity, knowledge and information, and the past and future that are enabled by the technocratic worldview.

Most anti-smoking campaigns inadvertently encourage people to smoke. The scent of melons helps sell electronic products. Subliminal advertising may have been banned, but it's being used all the time. Product placement in films rarely works. Many multi-million pound advertising campaigns are a complete waste of time. These are just a few of the findings of Martin Lindstrom's groundbreaking study of what really makes consumers tick. Convinced that there is a gulf between what we believe influences us and what actually does, he set up a highly ambitious research project that employed the very latest in brain-scanning technology and called on the services of some 2000 volunteers. Buyology shares the fruits of this research, revealing for the first time what actually goes on inside our heads when we see an advertisement, hear a marketing slogan, taste two rival brands of drink, or watch a programme sponsored by a major company. The conclusions are both startling and groundbreaking, showing the extent to which we deceive ourselves when we think we are making considered decisions, and revealing factors as varied as childhood memories and religious belief that come together to influence our decisions and shape our tastes.

Objects are all around us - and images of objects, advertisements for objects. Things are no longer merely purely physical or economic entities: within the visual economy of advertising, they are inescapably moral. Any object, regardless of its nature, can for at least a moment aspire to be "good," can become not just an object of value but a complex of possible happiness, a moral source of perfection for any one of us. Our relation to things, Coccia, argues in this provocative book, is what makes us human, and the object world must be conceived as an ultimate artifact in order for it to be the site of what the philosophical tradition has considered "the good." Thinking a radical political praxis against a facile materialist critique of things, Coccia shows how objects become the medium through which a city enunciates its ethos, making available an ethical life to those who live among them. When we acknowledge that our notion of "the good" resides within a world of things, we must grant that in advertising, humans have revealed themselves as organisms that are ethically inseparable from the very things they produce, exchange, and desire. In the advertising imaginary, to be human is to be a moral cyborgs whose existence attains ethical perfection only via the universe of things. The necessary alienation which commodities cause and express is moral rather than economic or social; we need our own products not just to survive biologically or to improve the physical conditions of our existence, but to live morally. Ultimately, Coccia's provocative book offers a radically political rethinking of the power of images. The problem of contemporary politics is not the anesthetization of words but the excess power we invest in them. Within images, we already live in another form of political life, which has very little to do with the one invented and formalized by the ancient and modern legal tradition. All we need to do is to recognize it. Advertising and fashion are just the primitive, sometimes grotesque, but ultimately irrepressible prefiguration of the new politics to come.

For many decades the Railways Department's design studios, Railways Studio, was New Zealand's 'go-to' advertiser. Its tourism and product ads appear on railway-station hoardings and billboards throughout the land, and it developed some of New Zealand's most iconic graphic images. This big, beautiful book brings this treasure trove of design together for the first time.

3000. That's the number of marketing messages the average American confronts on a daily basis from TV commercials, magazine and newspaper print ads, radio commercials, pop-up ads on gaming apps, to pre-roll on YouTube videos and native advertising on mobile news apps. These commercial messages are so pervasive that we cannot help but be affected by perpetual come-ons to keeping buying. Over the last decade, advertising has become more devious, more digital, and more deceptive, with an increasing number of ads designed to appear to the untrained eye to be editorial content. It's easy to see why. As we have become smarter at avoiding ads, advertisers have become smarter about disguising them. Mara Einstein exposes how our shopping, political and even dating preferences are unwittingly formed by brand images and the mythologies embedded in them. Advertising: What Everyone Needs to Know (R) helps us combat the effects of manipulative advertising, and enables the reader to understand how marketing industries work in the digital age, particularly in their uses and abuses of Big Data. Most importantly, it awakens us to advertising's subtle and not so subtle impact on our lives-both as individuals and as a global society. What ideas and information are being communicated to us-and to what end?

Presenting a range of perspectives on advertising in a global society, this Second Edition of Controversies in Contemporary Advertising examines economic, political, social, and ethical perspectives and covers a number of topics including stereotyping, controversial products, consumer culture, and new technology. The book is divided equally between macro and micro issues, providing a balanced portrait of the role advertising has in society today. Author Kim Bartel Sheehan's work recognizes the plurality of opinions towards advertising, allowing the reader to form and analyze their own judgments. It encourages readers to obtain a critical perspective on advertising issues.

How advertising works is not a question that has a simple answer. Advertising is a diverse entity and different campaigns work (or fail to work) in a plethora of different ways. Most advertising persuades people to buy things, but how? And who does it aim to persuade? And how are these decisions made? In this Very Short Introduction Winston Fletcher, an expert with extensive knowledge of advertising from the inside, aims to answer these questions, and in doing so, dispels some of the myths and misunderstandings surrounding the industry. The book contains a short history of advertising and an explanation of how the industry works, and how each of the parties (the advertisers , the media and the agencies) are involved. It considers the extensive spectrum of advertisers and their individual needs. It also looks at the financial side of advertising and asks how advertisers know if they have been successful, or whether the money they have spent has in fact been wasted. Fletcher concludes with a discussion about the controversial and unacceptable areas of advertising such as advertising products to children and advertising products such as cigarettes and alcohol. He also discusses the benefits of advertising and what the future may hold for the industry. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.