Then & Now | How Western advertising sold Chinese a lifestyle illusion

Modern advertising is designed to convince otherwise sensible people to want products and services they don’t need; essential items, after all, sell themselves with little or no marketing. Successful advertising techniques construct an imagined world of glamour, luxury and social status that – much like the fantasy realm of cinema – can be accessed by the simple expedient of having enough money to pay the entry fee.

Advertising saturates our daily lives. Neon signs, roadside hoardings, posters on public transport, fliers, informa­tion traded from internet searches, maga­zine-style newspaper colour supplements where the editorial content offers only the thinnest anchor for the adverts that paid for it in the first place – the list of media that exhort us to purchase this, do that, or become the other is never ending.

Campaigns often play on socioeconomic insecurities and – yes – ethnic and nation­al inferiority complexes. European “princesses” in fairy-tale castles touting products destined squarely for the Chinese market make this point clear.

In this sense, Hong Kong’s rampant embrace of Western consumerism is ultimately a form of cultur­al Americanisation – or a focus-group concocted entrée to a carefully coiffed and manicured, faux-French or fantasy-Italian lifestyle. Local property advertising takes this approach to its ultimate extreme.