ifkad articles

Subversive Marketing and the Conscious Consumers

Juan Antonio Vargas Barraza, Luis Uriel Hernández Ramírez, Antonio Jesús Vizcaíno

Subversive advertising – or just subvertising, a word made by the words “subvert” and “advertising” (San Nicolas Romero, 2004) – deals with the lack of ethics in modern advertising and how has impacted young people, modifying the purchasing intentions and the refusal to continue shopping brands related with non-ethical practices (Aouina et al., 2011). Subvertising becomes the mean to generate awareness that allows clarifying the full range of practices of companies that use advertising. So people can display a model of respect for human rights, the environment, and freedom of expression and open a small way of alternative thoughts (Cortés, 2009). The study enables the hypothesis that there is greater resistance to continue consuming the products of a particular brand if the youth persons are exposed to a longer time of subvertising. An exploratory and descriptive research based on a pretest and post-test experiment shows the reaction of viewers to the subvertising, this allows determine the relationship between young people and these content. Exploratory study is generally used when the research question is not clear or when the available literature does not seem clear enough or directly related to the object of study (Aouina et al., 2011) or when the objective is to examine a issue or problem little studied, of which you have many questions (Hernandez Sampieri et al., 2007). An experiment where the impact of publicity against the impact of subvertising is important because we can determine whether exposure to the latter modifies the perception that young people have for brand advertising, letting know more about this phenomenon and how is evaluated for those affected by it. Joseph D. Rumbo (2002) found that young consumers goes against postmodernism, which is due to the saturation of advertising culture, having the feeling of be more and more invaded by the hyper-reality, a fantasy created by manufacturers to encourage to consume and marketers from large firms stimulate this with advertising (Firat & Venkatesh, 1995, p. 251), which for young people is not entirely true, because what companies want to show is different from what reality is.

IN: Proceedings IFKAD 2016 – Towards a New Architecture of Knowledge: Big Data, Culture and Creativity
PP: 163-177