I am going to use Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to compare two different adverts. The first car advert is from the 1950’s and then the second car advert will be from the early 21st century. I am going to use a list of typography, slogans, lighting, images etc to compare the two adverts. Summarise Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and Explain How This Model Might Be Useful to a Study of Advertising Abraham Maslow was a social theorist of the 1950’s who developed the hierarchy of needs. He developed the model to show how humans are motivated by their unsatisfied needs.
The pyramid is split up into two different sections. The basic needs and the higher needs. The basic needs consist of physiological and safety and the higher needs consist of social, self-esteem and self-actualisation. You can not move up the pyramid until you have fulfilled the two basic needs. As you go up the pyramid life should become happier because of the amount of needs that you have fulfilled. The first basic need is physiological, the need for food, water, shelter, etc. An example is the vital water advert which is showing you that you need water to survive.
The second basic need is safety, the need to be secure and free from danger. For example a fire alarm advert is showing that you if you don’t have a fire alarm then you will not be safe. Also showing that you have not fulfilled the basic needs. In the higher needs social is the first, the need to have friends and be accepted by others. For example the WKD advert where it shows that people are drinking and socialising together. The second higher need is self-esteem, the need to have competence, self-confidence and respect from others. For example the shampoo adverts where it shows if you wash your hair then your hair will look great giving you self-confidence.
The third and last higher need is self-actualisation, the need to develop all one’s potential to the full. For example where celebrities give money to charities because they have fulfilled all of the needs and they want to help other people fulfil the needs. In A Detailed Textual Analysis, Compare the Techniques, Presentation and Physiological Used To Sell the Products in Your Two Chosen Adverts The type of product is motor cars. The brand name is the ‘Ford Motor Cars Limited’. The advert was made post world war two in the year 1954.
My first impressions of the advert was that it was looked a rather a not very eye catching advert because there was absolutely no colour and no big bold writing. Another one of the things that struck me when I first looked at it was that there was a lot of text on it for an advert. I didn’t think that this would be very effective on the advert because big text catches people’s eyes not small text that people can’t read.
There is no colour on the ad probably because at that time to print say five hundred of those adverts would be very expensive so they probably just printed one or two in colour and then printed the rest in black and white. The typography that they used is sans-serif and they have also used serif. For example the ‘FORD’ is in a serif font and the brand name ‘Ford Motor Cars Limited’ is in a sans-serif font. I think that they have used this because the use of serif is generally more effective in logos, and the rand name has used sans-serif to make it clearer to the audience to see what the brand name is.
On the advert there is no lighting on the cars or even on the page because all of the pictures have been hand drawn. The use of images seems that the more expensive cars show more of the car and the least expensive cars don’t show hardly any of the cars. I think that they have done this because they are trying to convince you to buy the most expensive car. There are no models advertising the cars probably because at that time the people making the advert did not think that models would not attract customers because they are family cars.
