ADVERTISING

Advertising is a form of communication that typically attempts to persuade potential customers to purchase or to consume more of a particular brand of product or service. “While now central to the contemporary global economy and the reproduction of global production networks, it is only quite recently that advertising has been more than a marginal influence on patterns of sales and production. The formation of modern advertising was intimately bound up with the emergence of new forms of monopoly capitalism around the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century as one element in corporate strategies to create, organize and where possible control markets, especially for mass produced consumer goods. Mass production necessitated mass consumption, and this in turn required a certain homogenization of consumer tastes for final products. At its limit, this involved seeking to create ‘world cultural convergence’, to homogenize consumer tastes and engineer a ‘convergence of lifestyle, culture and behaviours among consumer segments across the world’.” [1]