Session Alignment

Some critics of advertising have assumed that the creation of false needs in consumers is the principal mechanism underlying what these critics regard as its manipulative and hegemonic power .

Central to this type of critique are the writings of political theorist Herbert Marcuse , who maintained that modern people succumb to oppression by believing themselves satisfied in spite of their living in an objectively unsatisfying world .

This process occurs because in mass market culture the powerful psychological techniques of advertising create “ needs ” that are false and whose satisfaction thus contributes , not to the genuine well - being of consumers , but rather to the profit—and thereby the disproportionate power— of corporations .

Marcuse supposed that we all have certain real needs , both physical and psychological .

Advertising appropriates these needs for its own purposes , forging psychological associations between them and consumer items .