Advertising and Smoking

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Recommended: • The Effect of Advertisement on Consumer Behavior

Advertising is the most profitable market that thrives with aggressive manipulation. Radio, magazines and TV are dangerous past-times that wash away our good intentions with subliminal messages spread thick like peanut butter. Suddenly we question the healthier approach to living we have been striving for. Why? Advertising. How is it that we are so easily influenced? Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs teaches advertisers the weaknesses in all of us, making it very easy to grab our attention and influence our buying behavior. As Stuart Hirschberg wrote in The Rhetoric of Advertising, “ads can be effective if they appeal to the needs, values, and beliefs of the audience” (Hirschberg 102). Advertisements promise a more fulfilling life (Hirschberg 104), but in actuality they create an ominous void that no product can fill. We become self-absorbed, materialistic, never satisfied, pretentions and ironically insecure individuals. It is too bad that our vain tendencies trumps our desire to become positive, self-assured, and healthy individuals.
Advertisers create ads for products that people would otherwise ignore. They excel at creating the illusion that your life is incomplete and in order to find peace and contentment the addition of their product in your life is necessary. For example, Camel and Natural American Spirits Cigarettes promote the use of tobacco, a known carcinogen that is responsible for almost half a million preventable deaths a year. “Each year, an estimated 443,000 people die prematurely from smoking or exposure to secondhand smoke, and another 8.6 million live with a serious illness caused by smoking.” (Tobacco Use). Needless to say, most people would not want to purchase such products. However, with innovative and cunnin...

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...olumes. The text at the end of the ad just reassures you that you are making a responsible decision in choosing the Natural American Spirit brand of smokes.
Advertisement agencies that promote the sale of cigarettes do not give room for you to think of others and how the cigarettes are toxic to the earth and its inhabitants. Cigarette ads choose to zero in on human insecurities and say without saying with images and words what you’ve been dying to hear all along. It’s about you and what you want. The answer lies in the puff of a cigarette.

Works Cited

Hirschberg, Stuart. "The Rhetoric of Advertising." Understanding Rhetoric. A Graphic Guide to Writing. The Basics. Visual Rhetoric. Readings. Ed. Dore Ripley. Pleasant Hill: DVC, 2013. 102-106. Print.
Tobacco Use. 16 11 2012. Web. 4 5 2014. .

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