Research Paper Rationale

1. My argument has finally been narrowed down to celebrity advertising, in clothing ads. I will focus on The Gap specifically, to examine the correlation between a famous celebrity or famous model promoting their products as opposed to an average model who is not very well-known. I am interested to see if the public audience responds differently to one advertising technique more than another. I will take ads put out by The Gap throughout the past few decades, in addition to looking at the ads that they are currently using to promote their products. I will also do some background research about the advertising industry in general, to get a feel for their techniques and how they go about capturing their audience. I am interested to see what they feel it takes to get a consumer’s attention and how they trick the public into thinking that they need to buy a certain product.

2. Given my research thus far, I think I will find a correlation between celebrities and product sales. It seems as though once a person (be it a model, actresses, actor, singer, whatever) has established themselves and their name in the public’s eye, they become role models. People want to be like them, and will do whatever it takes in order to so. Buying a pair of jeans that a certain celebrity advertises will make a consumer feel more sophisticated, and almost better than everyone else, just because of what they are wearing. A celebrity endorsing a product makes puts it on a higher level; if a high-class celebrity likes a product (a pair of jeans, or even a shirt) being sold at the Gap, then the consumer is on a high-class level if they, too, purchase it.

3. I have been lucky in finding very informative resources for my research. The website that most specifically relates itself to my topic is http://www.bwgreyscale.com/ads/. This site houses an archive of actual Gap advertisements, with a mixture of celebrity-endorsed ads and regular model ads. They are pretty much the basis of my research, and will contribute a good amount of observable information. Additionally, I have acquired three books: “Advertising and the Mind of the Consumer,” by Max Sutherland, “Social Communication in Advertising: Consumption in the Meditated Marketplace,” by William Leiss, Stephen Kline, Sut Jhully, and Jacqueline Botterill. The last is “Ads, Fads, and Consumer Culture,” by Arthur Asa Berger. All of these texts give a comprehensive overview of the advertising industry in general, and how they respond to the public. Each one of these books goes into great detail, deconstructing advertisements for what they are verses what they are trying to say, and how these influence the consumer. They also include important terminology relevant to the advertising world, and give techniques to successfully sell a product based on consumer appeal. I feel that these resources will give me the basic and general information that I need to successfully back up my point about the Gap advertisements themselves.

4. While I have established my topic and my goal for my research, there are still a few things that are not yet completely clear. I need to ensure that I have enough information to completely back up my points, hopefully more statistical information or sales information that pertain particularly to the Gap. I am also interesting in examining their sales verses how much money they spend in advertising. While this is obviously a multi-billion dollar industry, I cannot help but wonder if it is truly worth it. Hiring celebrities to endorse a product would make the cost of advertising go up even more, and I am interested to see how that evens out, and if it is monetarily worth it.