Khakis Tell Quite the Story

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Recommended: Analysis on advertisements

In the 1997 article Listening to Khakis, published in the New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell effectively paints a vivid picture of the thought and science that goes into advertising campaigns. Gladwell begins his paper by focusing on the Dockers’ advertising campaign for their line of adult male khaki pants, which he labels as extremely successful. This campaign was the first line of successful fashion advertisements aimed directly toward adult males (Gladwell, 1997). This campaign was cunningly simple and showed only males wearing the pants being advertised with the background noise filled with men having a casual conversation (Gladwell, 1997). This tactic was used because studies showed that Dockers’ target market felt an absence in adult male friendships. (Gladwell, 1997). The simplicity of the advertisements was accentuated as to not to deter possible customers by creating a fashion based ad because, based on Gladwell’s multiple interviews of advertising experts, males shy away from being viewed as fashion forward or “trying to hard” (Gladwell, 1997).

Wanting to test this theory, Gladwell analyzed multiple other advertising campaigns based on the same concept; men respond well to the idea of accidentally looking fashionable or falling into the currents trends. While analyzing other advertisements provided Gladwell’s theory of the Dockers’ campaign more plausible, due to the fact that the multiple advertisements were not addressed in the introduction to the paper, to the close reader the paper seems unfocused and full of tangents. Gladwell analyzed the Dockers’ campaign in paragraphs 1-14, 29-37, while the other paragraphs were focused on advertisements ranging from other male fashion campaigns to bottled water advertiseme...

... middle of paper ...

... his overwhelming amount of evidence showing his belief in the success of simple ad campaigns targeting adult males.

Overall, his claim that males respond best to simple, seemingly straight-forward advertisements was well thought out and supported through sufficient evidence. Gladwell successfully provided the proper amount of evidence supporting his claim and had he showed opposing views or views of the consumer it only would have added to an already successful paper. This essay is a perfect example of the importance of a thorough introduction to provide the reader with a concise synopsis of what the paper intends to covers. Had Gladwell excelled in both areas he neglected, this would be an extremely interesting, thought-provoking look into the world of advertising.

Works Cited

Gladwell, M. (1997). The New Yorker. Listening to Khakis. July 28, 1997. Pg. 54.

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