Dolce & Gabbana under fire for comments on family

[CatherineM]

The purpose of advertising is to sell a product. Their views have made the mainstream because they are famous. That doesn't validate or disprove their opinions. 

I had had lots of gay clients 25+ years ago. At least back then they didn't want a traditional marriage and family. More than one told me that why would they want to marry when over half end in divorce. The only kids were those born to people before they came out. I'm not sure what happened to change all that. 

I guess they felt to get accepted by the mainstream they had to join it. D and G are both Italians I think. They probably grew up in traditional families. It's kind of like being raised on butter. You know the real stuff when you taste it, and imitation substitutes just aren't the same no matter how many people settle for it. 

[Era Might]

The purpose of advertising is to sell a product. Their views have made the mainstream because they are famous. That doesn't validate or disprove their opinions. 

There is no product being sold in the D&G ads. Or rather, I think there is, but the product is the people themselves. D&G does not produce clothing, it produces people who wear its clothing (in other words, it is selling the idea of the D&G brand, not this or that piece of clothing).

​The product is really irrelevant in advertising. I was listening to the recent Adobe Summit and the main speaker talked about this subject, about how the distinction between "product" and "marketing" has been abolished, because your product is itself the marketing, it is not a static product but a part of a larger digital system that gathers data and directs its own marketing.

Even in traditional selling, good salesmen sold the benefits, not the product. Advertising is about selling ideas (the very things you used to be burned at the stake for). Brands are not interested in selling a product, because that's just a one-time transaction. They want to sell their brand as a social institution. The physical product (if there is even a physical product) is not much. With smartphones, for example, the margins on the hardware business are tight and cutthroat. What you have to sell is not a physical smartphone, but an idea of what a smartphone is, an idea around which people will reshape their lives (whether it's music as a digital practice, social media as a normal part of human relationships, etc.).

Products are not just generic economic units. They are in an economic sense...it doesn't matter what the product is, an economist just wants to calculate the numbers around X, whether it's a widget or a piece of technology doesn't matter, the economist only measures its economic properties. But for brands and advertising, a "product" is not just a manufactured thing, it is an idea, and that is what they sell. Every piece of advertising is selling you some version of reality. To sell a smartphone you have to sell people on the idea of a world of smartphones...because if they don't buy into that idea, and the practical social and personal adaptations that make the idea possible, then your smartphone is useless. If you go to a primitive village and sell them an iPhone for a bunch of gold bars, you haven't accomplished anything, because you haven't sold them on the idea that will lead them to abandon their primitive life and adopt the ideas on which the smartphone exists and operates.

Then there are other "products" that are not physical, but more like services...these, too, are trying to sell you on a sociological and psychological vision, because to sell a service you have to sell someone on the need for a service, and from the outset you are selling them on the idea that they are a person in need, and that to fill that need, they need someone else, that they are incapable of filling their own needs (and these needs, in many cases, have been created by other people selling other ideas).

Taking this back to the OP, I wouldn't take anything these people say seriously. Marketing and advertising is a system built on manipulation, it is not philosophy. Marketers ultimately don't care whether you have 10 kids or are a gay couple, they can find a way to fit their product around your terms, but also then reshape your terms around their product (that's literally what marketing is, creating the reality around what is, not what should be).

[CatherineM]

Glad I never had to take marketing. That made my head hurt. 

[Era Might]

Glad I never had to take marketing. That made my head hurt. 

​lol. It's actually a fascinating area from a philosophical/humanities perspective, because so much is based on human behavior and crosses with so many disciplines (sociology, psychology, etc.). But in a professional sense, marketing is not about understanding human behavior, but understanding how to manipulate it. Marketers are interested in human behavior so that they can integrate it into their business processes, not so that they can understand mankind. That's where I lose interest in marketing, and where it just becomes a bunch of self-serving babble.

[Credo in Deum]

Marketing is fishing for people. Gotta catch em all!

[Cherie]

Those ads are so unrealistic, they make me anxious to look at them. That woman, particularly at her size and healthful glow, giving birth to six kids in, what, six or seven years? Hahahahaha. NOPE.

Although, now that I think of it, there is a well-known Catholic blogger wife who is pretty, thin, and stylish and is having #5 before her oldest turns 5. 

Back to the treadmill for me!

Edited March 18, 2015 by Cherie

[Not The Philosopher]

How dare people try to market and sell me their bread and wine, turning the matter of the most holy Eucharist into a bourgeois foodie fantasy. How dare that carpenter rent out a place in the church bulletin to advertise his skills; he is defaming the Lord's own humble trade. These people are tearing down civilization as we know it.

[CrossCuT]

Who cares what they think anyway.

[Ash Wednesday]

Madonna and Elton John care. Serious business.