Blank Advertising

Brands and their advertisements have a big influence on our decisions on what we choose to consume and I think it's their selling techniques for the products that are a big reason why we're so susceptible to these. As proven by Chovanová, Korshunov and Babčanová, suitable forms of marketing activities as a whole can create a positive brand associations and start a purchase action of positively seen brands (2015).

One thought of mine was to strip advertisements down to their core components; the brand and their product, no slogans or catchphrases, catchy jingles or anything along those lines. At it's most basic level, an advertisement is for a company to showcase a new or already existing product to the audience. It would be interesting to see if ads had the same effect on people wanting to buy a product, if they didn't have a lot of the techniques they use today. Those being things such as bright attractive colours, a big logo being displayed or high impact photography/illustrations etc.

An example of this most recently would be the new law for smoking packaging to be consistent across the board with none of the company's branding at all. The reason behind this was to cut the number of people taking up smoking by making it less appealing to children and young people. According to Cancer Research, two-thirds of smokers start before the age of 18 – the beginning of an addiction which will kill up to two in three long-term smokers. So by removing the attractive packaging it becomes more of a deterrent when the packages now only contain dull consistent branding with only health warnings displayed.

Before

After new law

Young people smoking is an issue and after speaking to a couple of friends who have been smoking since mid-teens it's obvious that a lot of the reason for smoking was down to wanting to look cool through the act of smoking itself but also the cigarette packages. These packages were considered something physical to appreciate because of their style, and functionality, a friend of mine said he used to buy the Benson & Hedges cigarette packets purely because of how cool it would look to push the cigarettes out from the side and drop one into your hand.

All of this ultimately sparked off an idea for me to potentially try and create some form of universally consistent 'branding' for all products of any brand within the advertisements. This would create more of a level playing field for the brands in the hope of deterring people from buying a product purely down to it's enticing advertisement. The idea at this point is to use a consistent layout and typeface for all products, whether it was food, clothes, cosmetics etc. Having maybe the product(s) isolated in the centre on show with the name of the company in the bottom right hand corner could be an structure for the ads.

Sources:

Chovanová, Korshunov, Babčanová 2015. 'Impact of Brand on Consumer Behaviour'. Available at: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2212567115016767