When even ordinary everyday objects are placed in a mythic context or imbued with an archetypal association, then that lowly object or humble service takes on mythic qualities and proportions. The product becomes godlike. Maybe, without realizing it, I bought my Olympus camera to record my precious memories and moments because the abode of the gods will ensure my pictures come out perfectly and beautifully. In the book Kinds of Power , James Hillman explains why the co-opting of these mythic images and personages serve to transform the mundane, the banal, the everyday into something greater, grander or extraordinarily sublime. According to Hillman, advertising is the domain of Peitho, the Greek goddess of persuasion.
Advertisers recognize that different products and different audiences call for different rhetorics.
You do not sell secondhand cars and bargain mattresses the same way you advertise perfumes or douches or cruises to the Caribbean. There are styles of persuasion, styles of rhetorical disguises. In a recent magazine ad, the aforementioned overseas hotel company used a glorious photograph of a nude Asian woman, her tapering alabaster backside depicted in Romanesque repose, amid chiseled statues of great western thinkers and artists. This hotel not only offers serenity in London, the Far East and the USA, but they cater to you, a special elite clientele. If you get all seven right, you've been shopping with the gods and goddesses.