Is Water Still For Thirst Quenching? How Advertising Influences the Cultural Meaning Transformation of Consumer Goods

Informações

Código: MKT2769
Divisão: MKT - Marketing
Tema de Interesse: MKT-B - Comportamento do Consumidor

Autores

Carlos Alberto Vargas Rossi, Vinícius Andrade Brei

Resumo

The meanings of goods in contemporary capitalist societies are the interplay of marketingprocesses over these goods. This paper is aimed at analyzing and discussing the influencingmechanisms associated with the advertising role, as well as the social consequences of thisinfluence. We aim to understand how advertising influences the cultural meaningtransformation of consumer goods. We studied the French bottled water market because it isone of the world’s most developed in terms of advertising investments and water brand imageconstruction. After collecting 357 advertising spots between 2006 and 2007 and filtering it,the final corpus of 63 advertisements was examined using discourse analysis methodology.We explored how these ads created meaning through the relationship between text, discourseand context. We identified nine different major categories of water meaning. Our conclusionsshow that advertising works as a potential meaning transfer tool by bringing together theculturally constituted world - like people’s concerns with environmental conservation,slimming as a synonym of beauty and sport practice as a way of health improvement – andbottled water brands. Water has become a cultural product like any other, overcoming the ideaof “taste for necessity” related with its original body hydration meaning.

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