Appealing to the Image And the Text Life with a newborn baby is full of surprises and hopes. Mothers always want to give the best to babies, but, at some point, they worry about they cannot do this. New moms often face difficulty when it comes to raising their newborns – for example, in the past, if women could not provide breastfeeding, they would have to rely on the “wet nurse”, or their infants would starve. These new mothers were guilty about their babies lack nutrition without getting their own breast milk; some of them even consider they were bad mothers. But, of course, in modern society, someone already find out a solution, a way, to deal with this issue -- infant formula, a manufactured alternative to breast milk. The advertisement of Similac for Supplementation promises that their supplement formula can provide babies enough nutrition they needs. In other word, this ad publicizes that mothers will feel confident and creditable if their babies become Similac’s consumers. Nutrition is an absolutely perfect selling point because giving babies enough nurture is the most basic desire for mothers. Similac’s advertisers understand that the need to nurture is affiliative need for every family to have pleasant nurture time. Its ad not only propagates an effective product of feeding babies healthily, but also it shares a way of showing maternal love to babies.
Jib Fowles, in his book Mass Advertising as Social Forecast: A Method for Futures Research, argues that advertisers expose 500 ads daily to sell products through different channels while consumers have learned to sift useful and attractive messages after “walk around with a variety of unfulfilled urges and motives swirling in the bottom half of their minds” (14). Consumers only focus on the advertisements by appealing the specific needs to fulfill their private lack. Of the fifteen appeals that Fowles analyzes, the two appeals of “need to nurture” and “need for affiliation” are most relevant to Similac’s marketing strategy. This ad strongly exposes the need to nurture. Fowels presents an idea of nurture “to feed, help, support, console, protect, comfort, nurse, heal” (16). Indeed, women are willing to try any way to seek valid products for assist them to raise their infants because they understand that the process of nurture plays an important role of babies’ growth. Affiliation, from Fowles’ descriptive, appeal to obtain affection of another “when another generation is added to the pair” (16). Similac advertisers create warm family feelings to the potential consumers who desire to have close relationship with their babies. These two appeals connect together because both expose maternal love and find a way to nurture baby by establishing more love. Similac’s advertisers target their consumers by illustrating specific image to share warm family feeling and using written material to fulfill consumers’ nurture desires.
A visual imagery drives potential consumers to attract and memorize the advertisement. The advertisement of Similac for Supplementation shows the interaction between a mother and baby in black and white image. Its black background is particularly effective because it makes the two models in the advertisement are quite prominent -- the mom and baby’s faces are the brightest parts of the whole image. The advertisers set off a warm family feeling while the black and white photo of striking contrasts. In the advertising, the mom is holding her baby gently. Their faces are very close to each other. The baby is making face to the mother – she is looking at her mother’s eyes and holding out her small tone. The mother is responding a brilliant smile to her infant immediately. Her confident smile is telling every potential consumer that how happy she is after Similac’s supplement formula helps her draw close to her baby. In addition, no one can resist this little baby because her grimace is catchy enough to attract potential consumers. This advertisement focuses