THE IMPORTANCE OF BOUNDARY BLURRING IN THE PROMOTIONAL CULTURE
INTRODUCTION
Promotional culture is everywhere today. Look around and everything looks back at you like a marketing presentation designed to arouse public interest. Many authors say that most things in the modern world are advertisements and marketing schemes. Promotional culture as described by (2006) is the presence of a consumer culture where brands thrive and pervade much space of people’s lives. Cultures today are no longer created by people but by distant corporations with something to sell as well as something to tell.
As the modern world progresses, people and nations are becoming more and more commercial. Brands, fashion, products, entertainment, celebrities, and technology penetrate every lifestyle until it becomes embedded in one’s culture. Corporations in turn are encouraged by the warm and consistent accommodation that they attempt to force entry of the economic world into the cultural sphere through bombarding advertisement and commerciality (2006). The ultimate measures of successful existence are money and an excellent image. And there is a continuous effort to combine entertainment and marketing in one presentation in order to ensure consumer appreciation by hitting two birds with one stone. The end result is a mixed culture of branding and consumerism.
WHAT IS BOUNDARY BLURRING?
Boundary blurring is a concept of a new theory which proposes that boundaries can be represented by activities and offers new explanations of the conditions and mechanisms through which mutually beneficial activities blur inter-organizational boundaries. Boundary blurring theory refers to the individuals who perform such boundary-blurring activities like buyers, salespeople, strategic planners, accountants, service providers, and external consultants, as boundary-blurring people. The theory proposes mechanisms and conditions that help forge inter-organizational relationships so that, at the extreme, the organizations tend to work together as one coordinated unit on activities that are jointly important. Thus, BBT helps account for many of the widespread changes in business relationships in such arenas as supply-chain management, cooperative promotion, and joint buyer-seller category management programs (2006).
Boundary blurring in advertising and marketing is more of a persuasion strategy that combines advertising efforts, information dissemination, news delivery and entertainment into one coherent material for the purpose of a more characteristic promotional material. Today’s marketing process is complex with the diverse consumers and globalization of media. Business-to-consumer advertisers learned that one of the best ways to reach their customers is by marketing in the places where their needs for leisure or entertainment as well as information and news are collectively met ( 2004). This phenomenon gave rise to new media terms like advertorial (advertisement and editorial in the print media) and infomercial (information and commercial on television) (2005).
THE IMPORTANCE OF BOUNDARY BLURRING TO PROMOTIONAL CULTURE
The 1990s and year 2000s are marked by the emergence of technologies, globalization, and fluctuating economies. The proliferation of cable television, satellite receivers, video-cassette recorders, and electronic mass media has transformed communications and uplifted advertising into a global concern (1998). Advertising is a component of corporate communications and marketing campaign strategies that aspires to disseminate product, service and value information to the market to encourage them to buy the product, avail of the service and establish loyalty with the company. The diverse consumers and modern lifestyles made advertisers realize that traditional approaches to advertising would not make the message get across the market. Today, innovations such as staged encounters in public places, giveaways of products such as cars that are covered with brand messages and interactive advertising where the viewer can respond to become part of the advertising message are widespread. The concept of preparing and presenting a total communications package evolved from the idea that a cohesive media package would be more effective than a series of independent shots, which might send out conflicting messages. Television networks, cable operators, movie producers, magazine and newspaper editors and other media people are experimenting with ways to reach people with specialized media and creative messages. Advertisers have found that they key to effective televised commercials lies in making the pitch both entertaining and credible (1998). Leisure time is invaded by commercials and advertisements. Everything is branded to establish distinction and even news programs are sometimes presented side by side with advertising gimmicks. (1998) cited that most experts predict that as commercials become larger and more entertaining, there will come a time when it would be difficult to tell the difference between an advertisement and a program.
A survey in Britain as reported by (2001) suggested that there are four kinds of response to advertising from the British population. The first group, the Enthusiasts are advertising-friendly. This obliging group of citizens, about 35% of those surveyed can not live without advertising. They often prefer advertisements and commercials to the editorial and programming that surrounds them, love to be intrigued by advertising approaches and generally want to get involved. Acquiescents (21%) are the cautious bunch. They are confused by anything that is overly creative and feel threatened by the avalanche of direct mail, but broadly speaking, also like advertising. The threats to advertisers are the Cynics (22%) who resent advertising’s intrusive nature and trust only the mildest specialist advertisements. The last group is the Ambivalents who have no interest in advertising, ignore it, and take the fatalistic view that one way or another the clever advertising thing will get to them anyway (). The result of the survey is helpful for advertisers as it provides a glimpse of market preference. Advertising needs to be dynamic and should be impeccably designed to create a unique mark to the consumers. Boundary blurring is crucial if advertising is to become a hit. It should carry with it both entertainment and information in order to address the varied needs of consumers. The modern advertising approach as reported by Giroux (1994) does not overlook the all-pervasive power of representations, texts, commercials and images in producing identities and shaping the relationship between the self and society in an increasingly commodified world making boundaries between images and reality become indistinguishable.
Advertising communication is not always conducted through the mass media nor is it always focused on the “education” and mobilization of the general public alone. This is increasingly accomplished through the so-called new media, those that utilize the Internet and the World Wide Web to reach the intended audiences. The Internet and the Web provide opportunities for both the broadcasting and the narrowcasting, or targeting of messages, and the transmission of data and multimedia materials, all with a measure of interactivity that is absent in more traditional media (2001). Advertising according to (2001) is the most widely disseminated form of public address. A study of advertising media in the new public spaces of Asian cities, the subways of Beijing, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Taipei, suggests that public appeals to local, national and most importantly, transnational identities, may even be possible in areas such as subway stations. Advertisers believe that subway stations are prominent commercial media venues that present many opportunities to make daily appeals to millions of people. Subway trains are major transportation systems in the four cities and the number of people going about the stations on a daily basis is a great attraction for corporations and the government alike for their campaign and advertising purposes. Corporations and local governments are clearly using advertisements to ask young, educated and primarily female urbanites in Asia’s global cities to share an imagined community of consumption (2003).
More specifically, the rearticulation and new intersection of advertising and commerce, and the politics and representational pedagogy can be seen in the emergence of Benetton as one of the leading manufacturers and retailers of contemporary clothing. Benetton is important not only because of its marketing success, but also because it has taken a bold stance in attempting to use advertising as a forum to address highly charged social and political issues. In the first instance, Benetton has appropriated for its advertising campaign actual news photos of social events that portray various calamities of our time. These include pictures of a duck covered with thick oil, a bloodied mafia murder victim, depictions of child labor, and a terrorist car bombing. As part of a representation of politics, Benetton struggles to reposition itself less as a producer of commodities and market retailer than as a corporate voice for a particular definition of public morality, consensus, coherence, and community. This has been more recently revealed in an advertising campaign which depicts Senator Luciano Benetton posing nude with an accompanying text urging people of wealth to give away their “old” clothes to charity. Benetton justifies the advertisement by arguing that “business” has to go on for everybody. Rich people should buy new stuff and be pleased that others can profit from (their old clothes).” Justice in this case is appropriated in order both to regulate the production of consumerism and to legitimate it (1994).
On the other hand, voluntary associations have continuously been active in the public sphere and continue to have success in placing certain issues firmly on the public agenda. The utilization of celebrities was seen to be significant in positioning both the organization and the campaigns. The right personality was regarded as a way to increase the credibility of organizational practices and values. Celebrities are opening up new approaches to communication and how to reach an audience which organizations could not do. Bono, a world-famous rock musician was recruited by a coalition of NGOs to campaign for debt relief for developing countries. British rock icon Bob Geldof performed in 1985 to raise funds for the starving people in Africa. This resulted to the recognition of the voluntary associations as important movers in the diversification of the manner of speaking about personal, social and political life (2004). The rationale behind the scheme of the voluntary associations in using the advertising charm of celebrities was to present their cause to the world consumers and advance the notion that “people respond and are influenced by people”. Advertising has indeed become not only the most universally recognized art form but also today’s dominant culture ( 2001).
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