Implications of the advertising phenomenon in the configuration of contemporary urban space. Case in study: Chapultepec Area, Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico

Abstract

In the contemporary city, the advertising phenomenon, understood as the deployment of strategies, images, campaigns, phrases, messages and other persuasive devices with the aim of selling or making known messages or products, has been occupying a relevant position in the way which the cities of our days are conceived. The advertising phenomenon practically involves many of the circumstances that define characteristics of the places and people that inhabit urban spaces contained in the cities. Although commercial activity is part of the basic functioning of society in general, this type of actions have had to adapt to the dynamism of a market of consumption and consumerism that is driven precisely by the implementation of strategies and actions of the advertising order, both to small and large-scale, that seek to generate the validity of brands, products and services offered to a mass of citizens identified as consumers, through advertising speech whose fundamental interest is to generate emotional imbalances in individuals for the purpose of driving changes in their consumption behavior. To comply with the above, necessarily requires a place that serves as a support for the deployment of campaigns, advertisements and promotions of the advertising phenomenon. In the case of cities such as Guadalajara, the existence and transcendence of certain urban spaces is due to a use that the inhabitants themselves provide in relation to their interests and objectives. This relevance that the same citizen grants, is also identified as a business opportunity for companies seeking to meet their economic needs, which are linked directly with their own permanence in the commercial field. This document identifies some of the most important implications that the advertising phenomenon generates in an urban space representative of the city of Guadalajara: the Chapultepec Zone. To do so, a methodology is used that includes a commercial survey of the area, analysis of the opinions of pedestrians in the study area, social network users, as well as contributions from previous studies linked to commercial growth. In the final part of the document there are a series of reflections that show a common thread: the mercantile criterion above all things.