Cannibalizing The Past For Associations

By Author: Jordon
Total Articles: 91
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The pervasive presence of claims that this or that product is "new" or, in the advertising cliche, "new and improved," tells us that advertisers regard new as a positive term. Indeed, they must. If we repaired small appliances rather than replacing them, if we faithfully repaired our cars instead of changing models, if we wore clothes until they became uncatchable, then sales of new appliances, cars, and clothes would drop precipitately-- and so would the advertising budgets Tag Heuer Replica of their manufacturers. Advertisers must persuade us that new are better if they are to survive in the manner to which they have become accustomed.

To wed us to the new, advertisers adopt the commercial equivalent of social Darwinism: change is improvement. Because we hold the distant past in nostalgic reverence, advertisers often argue for change in the name of recapturing something we have never experienced firsthand. This reverence for the mythic past is consistent with the cult of the new insofar as what is old-fashioned is identified not with our ...
... experienced past (if the new product isn't better, we stay with the old) but with a past that predates us. For example, Country Time, which is not lemonade, claims that it tastes just like good old fashioned lemonade. The key characters in the Country Time ad are old and speak of real lemonade-- the kind made by squeezing lemons-- as a memory from their youth, a time clearly beyond the recall of anyone under 80. The ad implies that Country Time is better than anything else available now. Of course, we can still buy and squeeze fresh lemons, but in the world created by the ad, that activity ceased at about the time the first Model T approached a highway.

In an ad for Xerox copiers, a monk miraculously made multiple copies of a rare manuscript faster than his superior imagined possible. The contrast between the ancient manuscript and the modern copies underlined our contentions that advertisers venerate newness and change and that they are committed to the sale of large quantities of mass-produced, identical products.

Before the advent of the printing press and its cousin the photocopying machine, monks and others copied books by hand. Treasured texts were beautifully written and ornamented by gold or illuminated letters, borders, and delicate illustrations. The process took years, but the result was often a magnificent work of art. Each manuscript was unique. Because the manuscripts were usually sacred texts, the monk's work was a labor of love and service to God. The painstaking labor of such monks made possible the transmission of learning during the Dark Ages; many classic texts survived because they were copied and hidden in cloisters. The monk, laboring by candlelight, quill in hand, evokes images of the quality and artistic value of the hand-lettered manuscript.

The ad for Xerox copiers would have us believe that the copier increased the speed with which the monk could produce manuscripts but did not diminish their quality. In place of a unique product, we now have a Tag Heuer Carrera Replica standardized product in as many units as we want. But the copier cannot produce the gold leaf of the original, the colors of the illuminated letters, or the intricate patterns drawn into the margins.

The copier can produce a readable copy of the text itself. Is this better? The ad implied that it is. By the end of the ad, the monk was no longer hand-copying manuscripts. Xerox copiers had made the monk who could produce a beautiful manuscript obsolete. The subtext of this ad told us that new are better than old, change brings improvement, uniqueness is neither necessary nor desirable, faster and more are better. Here, as in the ad for Country Time, the commercial identified the product with the kind of quality that you and I have not experienced directly. Such quality presumably existed only in the distant past.

Because our memory of the distant past is based on historical reconstruction, we have no primary experience with which to test claims about it. Yet the distant past is the source of powerful and evocative symbols. Advertisers cannibalize the past to link their products with those symbols. In the process, they desacralize the sacred and trivialize the historically significant.