The Academy of National Economy under the Government of the Russian Federation Faculty of Real Estate Management Advertising and anthropology

Written by:

3^rd year student

Sorokin Roman

Moscow 2013

Contents

I. Introduction .………………………………………………………………….3

II. Anthropological features in advertising ………………………………...…….5

2.1 The anthropological study of Sri Lanka..………………………….......….5

2.2 Japanese advertising campaign …………………………….………….….6

III. Client relations and the negotiated meanings of advertising………...………..11

3.1 The importance of negotiations and workshops……..…………………....11

3.2 The uncertain world of advertising today…..………………………..…...13

3.3 Metaphors of war..……………………………………………..………....14

IV. Ethnography is more than a method.……………………………..………..….17

4.1 Ethnography and anthropology………………………………...………....17

4.2 Drugs and the self…………………………………………………...…….18

V. Conclusion ...……………………………………………………………..…...20

VI. References ……………………………………………………………..……..22

1. Introduction

Some international marketers have predicted a final convergence of culturally different markets into a one-world culture that would facilitate globally standardized marketing activities. This, however, has turned out to be an illusion—too many non-cultural hard factors and cultural soft factors still exist or arise as constraints on international marketing that have to be dealt with continuously, utilizing various strategies of adaptation or localization.

For more than three decades, international and cross-cultural marketing research has focused on the standardization versus adaptation debate, which has resulted in the popular classification of culture-free and culture-bound products. Thus, for example, non-durable consumer goods like food would be regarded as strongly culture-bound products and therefore as difficult to standardize, while durable high-interest and high-tech or digital products as well as industrial goods, would be regarded as essentially culture-free products and consequently as easy to standardize . With respect to industrial goods and international technology transfers, however, newer studies reveal that the latter notion needs to be revised.

These technical systems, like culture-bound products, are subject to cultural influences to a large degree. Advertising may be one of the most important marketing tools available to corporate sector today but it is certainly not the most ethical one. The reason advertising has come under attack from various sections of the society is because of the images it projects and the way they ultimately affect all of us. Anthropologies carefully analyze advertising campaigns and techniques, they notice that advertising is intricately connected with the principle of consumption. Consumers would buy anything that advertisements say is good for them including culture and values.

Marketers consider issues that are of interest to both advertisers and anthropologists. Although the ways information are ultimately employed by these two groups of researchers in studying collectivities of people may be different, there are striking similarities in methods, motivations and aims that we might pause to consider here. These similarities include such varied facets as comparison, interpretation, methodology, and the natures of the audiences studied, as well as of the professional worlds in which these groups operate. Both advertising executives and anthropologists (the latter often in strange surroundings) try to make sense of what does not immediately make sense, and pass on their understandings to others.

Before carrying marketer’s research in the field, both advertisers and anthropologists need to learn about those whom they are going to study problems and aims is akin to an anthropologist reading around a particular subject before conducting fieldwork. It is this background knowledge that permits both groups to formulate hypotheses – about the nature of exchange, about values or consumption practices – which marketers then test in the field by talking to people who are labeled informants or consumers. They constantly seek new ways to answer age-old questions, and therefore are open to new descriptive theories about the nature of human behavior. Ideally, they compare their findings with those of previous studies.