OUGD401: Essay Improvements (3rd Person & Unsupported Points)

From the feedback I received on my draft essay submission, there was one or two pieces of unsupported opinions and even though the points I had made linked into the underlying point of the essay, it was weak simply because it was unsupported. Along with that I made several claims that were made within the 1st person, this is something that had to be changed into 3rd person as the whole point of the essay is to come from an objective view point as opposed to subjective. This is how I think I ended up with some unsupported points as I had too much of my own opinion in there as opposed to structured and evidenced claims.

In light of this, I watched BBC's documentary from 2005 'The Century of the Self' which focuses on the work of psychoanalysts Sigmund and Anna Freud and also Edward Bernays. Within the first part of the documentary a point was made about the psychology behind consumers and the products they purchased which fit in well with the point I had made, but not supported. The point I made was mainly about how brands can control consumers without us even knowing by using clever tricks and techniques within their advertising and packaging of the product making people desire more things than what they actually need, ultimately influencing them into buying more products.

Revised Essay Point with Support

Within The Century of the Self (2005), it discussed how it was discovered by Edward Bernays, who took his uncle’s idea, Sigmund Freud, of human being manipulative mind’s and ‘showed big name corporations how they could make people want things they didn’t need, by linking mass produced goods to their unconscious desires’ which ties in well with the main underlying point of the whole argument, that brands can control us. Even Paul Mazer of the Lehmen Brothers in the 1920’s (2005, The Century of the Self) stated that ‘they must shift America from a needs, to a desires culture and for this to happen, people need to be trained to desire to want new things even though the old hadn’t been consumed yet.’