Hi, Luschen. I come back with the IELTS topic. This essay took me more than 1 hour to finish @@
Topic: Today, the high sales of popular consumer goods reflect the power of advertising and not the real needs of the society in which they are sold. To what extent do you agree or disagree?
That the elevated revenue in primary commodities usually conveys the influence of advertising is an often debate. In my opinion, I do agree with the statement for a couple of reasons.
Advertising manipulates people without their knowledge. Firstly, many companies design an appealing advertisement of their product to draw as much attentions as possible. Even sometimes manufacturers exaggerate about their invention. Secondly, apart from informing about characteristics and features of the product, they are always willing to operate many practices to affect their clients’ mental process. For instance, they take advantage of sale-off events, resulting in an urge to purchase in consumers’ making-decision process. Finally, an advertisement aims to persuade people that buying a product will make them look fashionable by following the latest trend.
It goes without saying that advertisers focus on selling a brand image instead of real needs of the population. For many of them, a beneficial management strategy is concentrating in elevating the value of their name and logo, which is worth a thousand hundreds of dollars. In addition, they use glamorous, successful people to show that consumers’ future is more likely to soar if they expend the similar product with celebrities. For example, fitness equipment producers invite sport stars with an attractive and gorgeous body to stimulate an innate desire of good looks.
In conclusion, the genuine demand from citizens could be influenced by advertising without them even knowing about it. Companies build a simple yet comprehensive advertising system only to increase their profit.
Hi Lemin, I thought your content in this essay was pretty good, though some more detailed examples would make your arguments more convincing.The ones you have are good, but it is always better to have more. Your writing was generally pretty clear, though you do have some odd sounding phrases and some word choices that could be improved. Of course, you also have to work on your speed! Overall, I would rate this a band 6.
You know, looking at your essay again, I have to agree with your friend. I am sorry I did not look at the prompt as closely as I should have. You have addressed a topic like “advertising misleads consumers” or “advertising is usually not honest”. Though really the prompt is focused on whether high sales of goods are due to advertising or instead due to the needs of consumers. I think this is a more challenging topic. It is hard to differentiate the effect of ads from the effect of innovative new products. One could say that 200 years ago, money was primarily spent on food and housing. Now there are so many more categories of products, but is this due to advertising or innovation? And how much can a person buy anyway? Would advertising inspire a person to buy two cars instead of one, or just to choose one make of car over another? On the other hand, in cultures like America, so much is thrown away, so much food and consumer items end up in landfills and we send our discarded clothing to third world countries. Surely this overconsumption is in some way encouraged by advertising? I don’t really know the answers, but I think these are the types of questions that the writers of the essay question may have in mind.
Overall, I would rate this a band 6.