Historically, American car advertisements have shown automobiles in natural settings—on winding roads that cut through rugged mountain passes or across shimmering wheat fields—but rarely on congested city streets or in other urban settings where most driving actually occurs. Instead, the car—an example of advanced technology—merges seamlessly into the natural world.

This type of advertising exemplifies the association principle, a persuasive technique used in most consumer ads that associates a product with a positive cultural value or image even if it has little connection to the product. For example, many ads displayed visual symbols of American patriotism in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in an attempt to associate products and companies with national pride. In trying “to convince us that there’s an innate relationship between a brand name and an attitude,”¹⁸ advertising may associate products with nationalism, happy families, success at school or work, natural scenery, freedom, or humor.

One of the more controversial uses of the association principle has been the linkage of products to stereotyped caricatures of women. In numerous instances, women have been portrayed either as sex objects or as clueless housewives who, during many a daytime TV commercial, needed the powerful off-screen voice of a male narrator to instruct them in their own kitchens (see “Case Study: Idiots and Objects: Stereotyping in Advertising”).

Another popular use of the association principle is to claim that products are “real” and “natural”—possibly the most familiar adjectives associated with advertising. For example, Coke sells itself as “the real thing,” and the cosmetics industry offers synthetic products that promise to make women look “natural.” The adjectives real and natural saturate American ads, yet almost always describe processed or synthetic goods. “Green” marketing has a similar problem, as it is associated with goods and services that aren’t always environmentally friendly.

Philip Morris’s Marlboro brand has used the association principle to completely transform its product image. In the 1920s, Marlboro began as a fashionable women’s cigarette. Back then, the company’s ads equated smoking with a sense of freedom, attempting to appeal to women who had just won the right to vote. Marlboro, though, did poorly as a women’s product, and new campaigns in the 1950s and 1960s transformed the brand into a man’s cigarette. Powerful images of active, rugged men dominated the ads. Often, Marlboro associated its product with nature: an image of a lone cowboy roping a calf, building a fence, or riding over a snow-covered landscape. In 2013, the branding consultancy BrandZ (a division of WPP) named Marlboro the world’s eighth “most global brand,” having an estimated worth of $69.4 billion. (Apple, Google, IBM, McDonald’s, and Coca-Cola were the Top 5 rated brands.)

Disassociation as an Advertising Strategy

As a response to corporate mergers and public skepticism toward impersonal and large companies, a disassociation corollary emerged in advertising. The nation’s largest winery, Gallo, pioneered the idea in the 1980s by establishing a dummy corporation, Bartles & Jaymes, to sell jug wine and wine coolers, thereby avoiding the use of the Gallo corporate image in ads and on its bottles. The ads featured Frank and Ed, two low-key, grandfatherly types, as “co-owners” and ad spokesmen. On the one hand, the ad was “a way to connect with younger consumers who yearn for products that are handmade, quirky, and authentic.”¹⁹ On the other hand, this technique, by concealing the Gallo tie-in, also allowed the wine giant to disassociate from the negative publicity of the 1970s—a period when labor leader Cesar Chavez organized migrant workers in a long boycott of Gallo.

In the 1990s, General Motors used the disassociation strategy. Reeling from a declining corporate reputation, GM tried to package the Saturn as “a small-town enterprise, run by folks not terribly unlike Frank and Ed” who provide caring, personal service.²⁰ In 2009, however, GM shut down its struggling Saturn brand during the economic recession. As an ad strategy, disassociation often links new brands in a product line to eccentric or simple regional places rather than to images conjured up by big cities and multinational conglomerates.