Text 20

1. Advertising is advocacy. It is concerned with motivating people. However, before you can motivate people you have to understand them. Thus a proper understanding of people is essential to the advertising man and woman, as indeed it is to politicians, entertainers, salesman, personnel managers and all whose task it is to influence other human beings.

2. To talk about understanding people is easy enough. To achieve it is quite another matter. As any personnel manager knows, human beings embody a wide range of needs and impulses, sometimes exasperatingly so. In their work these needs and impulses cannot be satisfied by money alone. People seek other things besides salaries and wages. They want individual identity. They want the importance of the job they do, and thus of themselves, to be fully recognized. They want status and commensurate privileges which demonstrate possession of it. They set great store by the human face of their working conditions in terms of how accessible management is, how reasonable it is in its dealings with employees, how enlightened it is in consultation and communication, how fair the system of promotions and, not least, how friendly their colleagues are. A job therefore is more than something which provides the employee’s bread and butter. It is an integral part of life and under the right conditions it should be the source of wide-ranging satisfactions.

3. Note the word “satisfactions”. People seek satisfactions not things. This concept is particularly important in marketing and advertising; it is based on the recognition that people do not buy products, they buy satisfactions. Take face powder as an example. Any chemist can make it. It is not difficult to formulate it or to mix. The result could be plainly packaged and offered for sale fairly cheaply. As a number of retail chemists have discovered few women are interested. To provide satisfaction, face powder has to be attractively packaged and presented. It has to have an inviting scent. It has to carry an aura of glamour. In short, the woman seeks not a box of powder as such but the promise of beauty – and the promise is absent when the proposition is boiled down to something mere utility. The same principle operates in everything we buy. A car is not a piece of machinery or even solely a means of transport. It is a satisfaction wherein we express our desire for freedom to go wherever we please and to demonstrate to others our capacity to do so.

4. Quite clearly, therefore, if we are in the advertising business we have to reach a disciplined understanding of human motivation. In our everyday lives as individuals we might get by with the kind of pragmatic understanding of people that is restricted to those we deal with, our relatives, friends, colleagues etc. In advertising we require a more systematic and broadly based knowledge of motivation.

From: Eric McGregor. Advertising.

Preparing the Text

A. Studying the language

1. “entertainer” (1): give the Russian equivalent.

2. “their” (2): Which word does it refer to?

3. “commensurate” (2): find a suitable substitute.

B. Studying the contents

1. What is the example of face powder supposed to illustrate?

2. How does the author try to show that “human beings embody a wide range of needs and impulses” (2)?

C. Studying the text: questions and stimuli

1. What is the thesis the author tries to justify in this text?

2. Sum up the arguments of the text using certain key-words as a starting point:

a). What is the purpose of advertising? – purpose of advertising; (key-word: “motivating people” (1) )

b). How can people be motivated? – methods employed; (key-word: “advocacy” (1) )

c). What are these motives? – people’s motives; (key-words; “needs and impulses” (2), “status and commensurate privileges” (2) )

d). Can you think of other needs and impulses advertisements might appeal to?

D. Points for comment and discussion

According to the author a car is “a satisfaction wherein we express our desire for freedom to go wherever we please and to demonstrate to others our capacity to do so” (3). What other needs might cars satisfy?