Communication of Love in the Consumer Society

Abstract

The current text highlights the fact that, although consumer society is mainly based on exchange values, love remains a symbolic good with a significant presence in commercial communication and social responsibility campaigns. It is not love as such, with its spiritual or religious weight in traditional narratives, but rather its instrumentalization that is important. Love can be used as a communication tool in advertising rhetoric or be the content of advertising stories. Despite this, the communication of love in advertising language does not diminish its spiritual force, but instead creates a background of diffused spirituality implicit in the meanings present in advertising discourse. The love stories instrumentalized in commercial communication and social responsibility discourses can appeal to dimensions of symbolic consciousness that humans can develop in constructing new mythologies specific to consumer society. The celebration of love invoked in commercial communication strives for a persuasive register that values all that is significant in terms of the human condition.