One of advertising's great success stories of recent times is the selling of Sport Utility Vehicles. Ten years ago, you bought a Jeep if you lived in Colorado or were going through a mid-life crisis. Since then, a cultural re-configuration of SUVs has taken place, and now our suburbs are jammed solid with them.
Have ad campaigns convinced the American public that SUVs are the best cars for getting to the mall or picking up groceries? Not at all. Have the people who bought SUVs suddenly taken up off-roading on their weekends (that is, after they've brought home the milk and eggs)? There is no evidence of this, especially when all the SUVs we see are in the suburbs, shiny and clean.
In fact, SUVs are the most hazardous things on the road. They are top-heavy, prone to roll over in accidents, too large and too heavy to manuever out of the way of trouble, brake more slowly, are ecologically and economically unsound, and according to Ford Motor Company, they bring in $12,000 profit apiece.
Yet the qualities of the product hawked in ads have nothing to do with anything the typical 25-40 year old middle class owner uses it for. Is advertising so powerful that it can persuade many of us to buy these absurd, well-nigh suicidal things?
Of course not. The ads focus on different forms of freedom. In one, a bald man in a suit sticks toy traffic signs into a toy city with a malignant grin. Suddenly an intrepid middle manager appears in his Wrangler/Jimmy/Pathfinder, and the bald man is transmogrified in that instant into a giant boss! Quick, Middle Management Man, flee the evil giant vice president! And of course, in his Cherokee/Samurai/Wagoneer, it's child's play. The v.p. is too big and clumsy, and too old and repressed, to catch the younger, fitter, sexier, hairier hero.
The latest is for the Kia Sportage (Kia's motto: "Please Please Please Please purchase any Korean product"). A young couple leaves the Kia lot with their brand-new SUV, and they have enough money left over to go to the closely similar sporting goods store to buy lots of 30-something toys. They leave the store with their Sportage piled impossibly high with camping equipment and other nonsense, including an inflated plastic owl. They travel over a dirt road and then through a highway tunnel (watch that continuity!), which knocks the owl off the top of the stack of stuff. We now know these people are stupid as well as rich. They pitch camp, but as the dusk yawns on, they need a little lantern light to see their way from the new car to the tent. No problem, as Mr. Young Person plugs in a million-watt stadium lighting system, which immediately shorts out, plunging them into darkness. So what's the message? The Kia is a warrant to be irresponsible.
One common misconception about advertising is that it tries to sell one product against another product, that commercials are part of the system of production and competition. Ads for SUVs prove that this is untrue: none of the ads compares products. In the wide world of SUVs, competition is unnecessary. With plenty of sales to go around, these ads serve a higher purpose - to mythologize cars as the ultimate means of autonomy. This is an easy concept to sell when it comes to these hulking behemoths, since we naturally associate large size with a greater degree of freedom. And the big clue is the name of one of these impressive sellers: the Suburban.
The auto manufacturers probably only got lucky on this one, but still, you have to admire their deep understanding of suburbanites. Mid-level white collar workers are hemmed in on all sides. They have high mortgages, high-stress jobs that they absolutely must keep to maintain those mortgages, responsibilities to keep up with the social status symbols of their rank (and their kids' rank), and they are apparently forced to live in ghettoes with one another, placed at the most inconvenient distance from their places of work, and thus requiring them to spend almost all of their adult lives working, driving to and from work, and driving around in the blighted suburban ghetto landscape, from hideous strip to hideous strip of shopping centers.
The SUV gives them a way to overcome all this, and transforms them instantly into bullies. Yes, size does make a difference. Pick up an SUV today, and you too need never behave intelligently again!