Lab: Landscape
Sample Essay
Geography 300
Lab 4: Interpreting Visual Imagery
October 11, 2005
Sample Essay
* note how
The Ford Explorer was one of the most popular vehicles of the 1990s, made more famous after a series of “rollover” crashes in the 1990s killed dozens. Despite its unsafe reputation, the Explorer remains one of the mosts popular SUV models. One of the major reasons for its popularity surely lies in the effectiveness of Ford Motor Company’s marketing strategy. Ford has convinced consumers that this gas-guzzling, atmosphere destroying, death-trap of a road hog is a great vehicle to own. Ford's marketing campaign includes a website (http://www.fordvehicles.com/suvs/explorer/) that provides critical clues into the strategies Ford uses to lure potential customers. A key component of the success of the marketing campaign used by Ford is how the visual imagery they use sells the SUV by associating it with a freewheeling lifestyle that very few people are lucky enough to enjoy
The Explorer’s website features both practical information and psychological ploys to lure customers. Prospective buyers can examine important vehicle data, such as the Explorer's horsepower rating, luxury options and advanced safety features, including a reassuring new “Advance Trac” stability system to help keep you from finding yourself upside down on your way home from soccer practice. The centerpiece of the page however is the large photograph of an Explorer climbing a hillside, while trees and a creek seem to fade into the background. Just above this photo is a prominent link to a photo gallery, where more pictures of the Explorer "in action" combine to provide a more complete account of Ford’s marketing campaign.
The landscape in the background of the photos in the gallery are important clues to the psychological trick used by Ford to sell their SUV. Ford wants the viewer to believe that the Explorer is a rugged SUV - after all it did climb a steep hill in the first picture. Since the background is slightly blurred, we are led to think that perhaps this Explorer is actually moving, yet somehow miraculously has managed to only get its tire treads slightly dusty. The caption beneath the photo tells us that this is the Eddie Bauer Edition. Setting the tone for the others in the gallery, this photo depicts a clean, convenient escape to the outdoors for Explorer owners. Virtually every Explorer in the gallery is set in rugged outdoor locations, including mountainsides and coastal cliffs. Only one photo depicts the rugged Explorer in an urbane and mundane city, where Explorers actually are driven 99.9% of the time. People appear in none of the pictures, nor is there a hint that children might ride in such an intrepid explorer’s vehicle.
The most transparent message that Ford is trying to send is that this is a rugged SUV, capable of taking you into the wilderness, but the most important message they are sending is about your desires for something more than an SUV . Since Ford surely knows that very few people ever take their SUV up a mountain, or even off pavement, the importance of the implied message contained in the marketing campaign becomes magnified greatly. Rather than trying to sell a car that can go up a mountain, Ford tries to sell you an object that is associated with a highly desirable lifestyle. Marketers at Ford know that consumers do not generally want to drive up mountainsides. The same marketers do know that consumers intensely wish they could abandon their numerous responsibilities of everyday life, and that the great outdoors is a place commonly associated with that sort of freedom. They know that most car buyers are sick of buying groceries, commuting to work, slaving away for an inconsiderate boss, ferrying kids to lessons and practices, dueling with other drivers in crowded Wal-Mart parking lots and a thousand other daily hassles. This SUV is marketed as a means to escape your daily hassles for the great outdoors. . . . even if the trip is only psychological.
Ford seeks to exploit our desires for freedom by showing the Explorer in locations where prospective buyers love to imagine themselves, unshackled from daily burdens. Freedom is what Ford is really selling. One of the photos cleverly shows the Explorer driving up a paved mountain road….on the wrong side of the road, no less. Now that’s freedom! Ford hopes that by placing the Explorer in isolated wilderness settings, you will mistakenly imagine that their product can deliver the freedom that you so badly desire. What’s more, you can do it Eddie Bauer style! By co-branding the Explorer with Eddie Bauer, Ford taps into another mountain of lifestyle imagery that is likewise outdoorsy, but also somewhat exclusive in a white-middle-class-country-club way, that is both safe and effortless. The Eddie Bauer imagery mimics almost perfectly the squeaky clean Explorer atop the muddy mountain road. Nobody’s hair even gets messed up when they camp with Eddie Bauer gear. Freedom from daily burdens out in the wild, but without effort, mud or mosquitoes.
Close inspection of the imagery used to sell Explorers makes it easy to see that Ford is selling an imaginary lifestyle as much as they are selling a vehicle. The landscape is in the background effectively creates an association between their product and a highly desirable lifestyle; a life that offers effortless access to a stress-free, somewhat exclusive lifestyle. Buyers know they'll never drive their SUV up that mountain, but by purchasing a Ford Explorer they can purchase a bit of the fantasy for themselves and hope their neighbors will envy them for being rugged, outdoorsy, freewheeling and classy....just like a Ford Explorer.
