Message Framing ~ NZ panadol ad

[Momtezuma Tuatara]

What "collective will" is this advertisement trying to tap into? What is the message framing here, in this NZ Panadol ad?

http://i45.photobucket.com/albums/f71/Angladrion/Panadol.jpg

[MinorityView]

Health oriented, thoughtful person, meditative positioning (note hands), hand-written thoughts (diary entry perhaps), independent thinker, makes up own mind.

Which of course is all nonsense. Real independent thinkers don't wander around looking for brand-name drugs to insert into their healthy bods.

What is panadol, anyway?

[MinorityView]

This reminded me of a library column I wrote a while back, so I'm going to drop it into this post:

We’re all familiar with the concept of product placement in movies. A character is swigging a soft drink: and the logo on the can is clearly visible. The soft drink company paid a substantial amount of money for that moment of product visibility. Is this advertising, or something else?
I’ve begun to wonder about product placement in books. You are happily reading along in a popular new novel and suddenly notice that an amazing number of objects are "branded." The cars, kitchen appliances, clothes, medications, music, household cleaners may have particular brand names attached. Are authors getting paid to mention stuff by brand name or is there something else going on?
Leap back to the Victorian age. I recently read Great Expectations, by Dickens and I’m currently wending my way through Middlemarch by George Eliot. Both books have a lot to say about social status, money, ownership and self awareness. But all of these topics are covered without the authors ever mentioning any product by brand.
I’m wondering (and I’d love feedback on this), if the use of brand name products in books is necessary for revealing important human qualities of particular characters. Does it work as a literary device? What are the possible shortfalls? What are the advantages?
Two stories. Many years ago a good friend of mine was living in rural Missouri. She and her husband had purchased a house and were remodeling it. They were temporarily dependent on an outhouse. My friend was from an affluent Philadelphia family, a musician, had a degree in classics and was not the roughing it sort. I asked her how she was managing. "I buy the most luxurious toilet paper available," she said.
A friend of mine in Chicago was preparing for the arrival of a baby. She was telling me about shopping for cloth diapers at one of the fancier department stores in downtown Chicago. I pointed out that a couple of blocks away was a popular discount store that also carried cloth diapers at one-third the price and similar quality. Nope, she had to have the ones from the expensive store because she was unable to bring herself to enter the discount store.
Both of these stories tell a lot about the personalities and background of the two ladies. Would the stories tell more if I mentioned the brand name of the toilet paper and the names of the two stores? Brands are very important to the companies that market them. They spend a lot of money trying to convince us that the choice of one product over another actually expresses something important in our character and our life. Are we really what we buy? Should literature reflect this great truth?

[Momtezuma Tuatara]

Health oriented, thoughtful person, meditative positioning (note hands), hand-written thoughts (diary entry perhaps), independent thinker, makes up own mind.

Which of course is all nonsense. Real independent thinkers don't wander around looking for brand-name drugs to insert into their healthy bods.

What is panadol, anyway?

it's acetaminophen - ? tylenol to you?

Great blog too :D

[MinorityView]

Thank you! A local author actually responded to that particular column when he came to talk at our library. It made him uncomfortable, because he had used a brand name for a lawyer's suits in one of his novels...

Tylenol? A person is expressing individuality by using a brand-name painkiller?

Urgh.

[Mr. Beyondtheory]

I get the feeling there is some sneaky NLP stuff going on here. My knowledge of Neuro-linguistics is rudimentary, but I would say the marketers, and the transnational Pharmaceutical manufacturer of tylenol/panadol are trying to "get on side" with middle-class individualists, creative types, who like to think they are on the edge a bit, a bit bohemian.

So the message is panadol is groovy, it's hip, it's safe because even hip middle class people take it.

The weasel words are "it's my choice", and "some decisions are hard to make, but in the end you have to do what's right". My choice and what's right are emotive phases that bypass critical thinking.

Stalin thought he was doing what was "right" by killing millions of dissidents, critics, kulaks, etc. of his regime.

"My choice" is an interesting anchoring phrase. It is suggesting there has been criticism of taking panadol, there has been this idea of feeling compelled to take panadol/tylenol, of just doing it because everyone else does. But in fact it is simply an individuals free choice. There is no manipulation at all (Big big lie).

NLPers can sometimes use a weasel phrase like "It is just like when", and then they use this to weave a fantasy in the person's mind. So a guy is chatting up a girl, and he wants to put her in a friendly, sexually available mind zone.

He starts talking about a film he saw, about a great dancer. he says how it transported him, how it blew him a way, and then starts the NLP magic saying, "it's just like when you are on holiday at the beach, and you are lying on the warm soft sand. You just feel so good, and you run into the surf and feel the warm waves embrace your body, making you go up and then down, and you dive beneath the blue water and come up again and then dive down again, and you're so happy and safe feeling because everything feels just right.":D

You can probably spot some of the suggestive words I've used. Anyway, the panadol ad is doing something similar. It's is a kind of mind seduction.

[Quickening]

You've dissected that ad pretty good Beyondtheory. Lots of loaded words and phrases in that ad!