ABSTRACT
The advertising industry has long used fairy-tale narratives, motifs, images, and signs to promote its products and messages. Fairy tales’ recognizability and popularity make it possible for these stories to represent desire, hope, and perfection. The transformations which fairy tales so often project are a crucial tool within North American advertising rhetoric. As a form of mass communication, commercials seek to promote or sell messages, products, or services to their audiences—to bring to the foreground, or more accurately to create, their consumer audience’s desire for transformation. Although advertising promotes consumption, it also creates the conditions required for individuals to desire to consume, thus upholding the consumer capitalist system. Critical examinations of the content and methods of advertising yield insights into how fairy tales communicate meanings about and beyond the products themselves, engage with individual and collective desires, and drive consumerism and its underlying ideologies and behaviors.
