Celebration of Regional Typology in aContext of Contemporary Advertising

Elena AryshtaevaBFA Graphic DesignSenior thesisFall 2011

Each country, region city, and neighborhood has its ownunique culture and language. Some of the locals wereborn in the area and have the culture in their genes. Somepeople choose to come to a place because the localculture is close to their heart and soul.A culture is the ground and soul of a place; it’s a prideand celebration of uniqueness and otherness. It wasborn after a land was discovered and evolves with each

generation. Happiness and strife, the ght for life and jolly

holidays, struggle and victories, tears of happiness andsadness add layers to a life circle, creating something thatis so unique and different - local culture. Mass productionand industrialization brought a lot of changes intocommunities. It made life more convenient but weakenedlocal and regional cultures.New England, the South, the West, and theMidwest had great importance in United States historyuntil the twentieth century. The perception of regions andtheir relationship to each other changed in the last decadeof the nineteenth century.In 1893 Frederick Jackson Turner announced that the era

of American history when the West’s special signicance

as a distinctive region was over.

The standardizationof industrialism brought the sense of America as a

unied nation, but weakened the sense of uniquenessof American regions. Two wars in the rst half of the

twentieth century caused migration of American populationfrom one area to another. This process led to the greaterhomogenization and further nationalization. Events of the1960s and 1970s brought changes to the political andeconomic situation of the southern United States, whichwas traditionally a center of racial segregation but becamedesegregated under Civil Rights. After 1970 the racial

conict migrated from the south to northern and western

cities like Chicago, Detroit, Boston and Los Angeles.The West has gone through a lot of transformationsas well as the South. Pioneers collided with the NativeAmericans, and industrialization and the twentieth centurywars caused mass migrations. Both the South and Westhad to go though tremendous transformations caused by“technological modernization and post modernization withthe legacy of guilt by the white American heritage of racismand unrestricted exploitation of nature.” Culture-wise theseregions were once sources of otherness, uniquenessand romantic myths. Later literal exploration reevaluatedAmerican superiority and exposed multiple failures of theAmerican dream.

This process of regional redenition is in a

continuing process, which puts America in a conditionof uncertainty. This means that America’s regionaluniqueness is in spiritual crisis and in unstable condition.

The South and the West brought their unique avor, their

distinct myths and symbols to American culture. Now thesesymbols are being called by intellectual critics as “symbolsof the truth of America.”

Unfortunately, there is a disassociation between TVrepresentation of those symbols and real life in a modernsociety. The television used regional symbols in emerginginaccurate regional stereotypes.

The process of regional redenition is ever evolving andhas a strong impact on American culture and inuences

intellectual and cultural life.A big transformation of America’s capacity toproduce happened in 1910, when Henry Ford initiatedthe line production system for a maximum productioneconomy.

Mass production made production moreeconomical and spread far beyond the automobile industryover the next 10 years. To compete with other producersa manufacturer had to produce enough quantity of goods

in order to reduce the price. To be more protable mass

production needed to be more dynamic and biggermarkets. The expansion of the market required the

development of an “ideological bridge across traditionalsocial gaps-region, taste, need and class-which would

narrow prejudices in his favor

.” As the market wasgrowing, manufacturers started to realize the importanceof stimulating a buying power by focusing on the buyingpublic. The human impact or the consumer’s dollar and theopportunity to manipulate it became an important part ofan industrial development and advertising.Advertising became a powerful tool of massdistribution whose primary task was to respond to aconsumer’s needs and desires.

The tremendous growthof advertising as an industry happened in the 1920s.Advertising offered a market the ability to develop theconsumption of a product by creating consumers andexploring what made people respond. Industry wasevolving rapidly, leaving behind old style advertising

with its intuitive style. To create consumers efciently

the advertising industry had to develop universal notionsof what makes people respond, going beyond the‘horse sense’ psychology that had characterized theearlier industry. Such general conceptions of humaninstinct promised to provide ways of reaching a massaudience via a universal appeal. “Considering the taskof having to build a mass ad industry to attend to theneeds of mass production, the ad men welcomed thework of psychologists in the articulation of these generalconceptions.”

Such a great development allowedadvertising to achieve better results in growing the marketsby creating new consumers, which made preserving

diversity a very difcult task. It is almost impossible to

preserve diversity while creating new markets. The goalof advertising was to create the desires and new personalneeds in people. Advertising went through the evolutionfrom displaying the names of businesses and servicesabove door signs into a powerful system that involvesdeep social, psychological and economical research and

analysis, different media and great nancial resources.

Advertising developed into a magnifying lens that absorbs,

translates and produces a consumer’s reection. It reects

a society and its culture.E.B. Taylor called culture “a complex whole, whichincludes knowledge, beliefs, art, morals, law, custom, andany other capabilities and habits acquired by individuals as

members of a society”. Adamson Hoebel dened culture

as the “integrated sum total of learned behavioral traits thatare manifest and shared by members of society”. Culture

has also been dened as a “learned, shared, compelling,

interrelated set of symbols whose meaning provides a setof orientations for members of a society.”

Society is agroup of people within a certain community who share oneculture and aspect of communication between individualgroup members. The variation within a culture can beeven greater than between cultures. Each culture has itssubcultures — groups of people who share values, beliefs,life experiences, nationalities, religions, political views,race, and geographical location. People within subculturescan perform distinctive behavior and characteristic patternsbased on their subculture and at times they need thedominant culture as a point of reference. To communicateto certain cultures and subcultures, it is important tounderstand the cultural context and its language.The goal of advertising is to explore the culture andcultural language of a target audience.To convince audiences to purchase a productor service, advertisers must follow the public’s values.

Research showed that ads reecting local cultural values

are more persuasive. For example Pemco Insurancebrought the knowledge of regional self-identity to their

Northwest Proles ad campaign that received positive

feedback from critics and the Northwest community

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