Since the beginning of media and advertising, marketers have employed subtle tactics to attract a more diverse customer base. In Jib Fowles essay, “Advertising's Fifteen Basic Appeals”, he discusses the fifteen appeals advertisers use to engage the consumer’s interest in buying their products. These different advertising techniques are directed towards a target audience; including males, females, elders, and teenagers. However, in some cases, the Carls Jr ad being analyzed has multiple audiences; primarily the male and female audiences. The male audience is more influenced by the sex appeal in the ad (i.e., the use of a model and suggestive wording), meanwhile the female audience is more influenced by the desire for attention and acceptance.
In Advertisements R Us by Melissa Rubin, she analyzes how advertisements appeal to its audience and how it reflects our society. Rubin describes a specific Coca-Cola ad from the 1950’s that contains a “Sprite Boy”, a large -Cola Coca vending machine, a variety of men, ranging from the working class to members of the army, and the occasional female. She states that this advertisement was very stereotypical of society during that decade and targeted the same demographic: white, working-class males- the same demographic that the Coca-Cola factories employed.
Mervyn's Mervyn's, the well-known retailer of the late 90's, found commonly in malls, went bankrupt in the year 2008. This business was originally founded on July 29th, 1949. The original owner was Mervin G. Morris, who started his company with only $25,000 and two employees. It is obvious where the title of the stores was derived from- his name. The only difference is that Mervyn's is spelt with a 'y' instead of an 'I', and that's merely because he was told it would be better for marketing.
In the excerpt from M.T. Anderson’s Feed, the author shows how deceiving stores can be. The way employees are, and how they attempt to make their products fit into each individual person’s life, can become deceitful. Consumerism is a movement to protect consumers against useless, inferior, or dangerous products, misleading advertising, and unfair pricing. UBIK and Feed give good examples of Consumerism, although the excerpt from Feed does an outstanding job of showing examples of consumerism while getting straight to the point. In UBIK, the author has ads for a product as the beginning of each chapter.
In “What We Are to Advertisers” and “Men’s Men and Women’s Women” both Twitchell and Craig reveal how advertisers utilize stereotypes to manipulate and persuade consumers into purchasing their products. Companies label their audience and advertise to them accordingly. Using reliable sources such as Stanford Research Institute, companies are able to use the data to their advantage to help market their products to a specific demographic. Craig and Twitchell give examples of this ploy in action by revealing how companies use “positioning” to advertise the same product to two demographics to earn more profit. Craig delves more into the advertisers ' plan by exposing the science behind commercials.
Nevertheless, the interviewees frown upon being labelled as someone that values luxury over reasonable spending. Hence, they expressed their emphasis on the importance of needs over wants, and that practicality should triumph over extravagance. They see “limited” consumption as a form of self discipline, where excessive spending was only justifiable when it is spent on the family and invested in the children. If
Consumerism in relation to women is blatantly sexist in that it produces an ideology that female consumers are constantly purchasing extravagant items because they are incapable of spending money rationally. The theory continues to suggest that female consumers are searching to enhance their femininity to appeal to the binary gender
Therefore, living a highly prioritised lifestyle means one does not have time to think about the importance of what they are buying, and this leads to more sales. Buying things in large quantities is an ideal example of buying what we want rather than what we need because we feel like it fills the gaping hole of true happiness. Andrew Barker, author of an article titled ‘consumerism’ states that ‘Healthy, happy people don’t feel like they need much they don’t already have.’ This has effectively become a problem as our money is feeding these hungry giants, who deceive us into thinking their services are for our benefit.
Mark Spitz states that “he was crestfallen when he ate at another location for the first time” and he recognized the “same stuff on the wall” (189). This moment is crucial because it emphasizes how even the most precious and sentimental aspects of our life are a result of consumer culture. Many aspects cleverly crafted to appear as a one-of-a-kind product or experience actually result in a slightly customizable template. Similarly, Sorensen explains consumerism as “the capacity to realize and replicate itself by borrowing against the guaranteed promise of the future as the site of more of the same and of endlessness of reproduction without difference” (562-3). Whitehead further supports this idea by illuminating the reproduction of a one-of-a-kind
University of the People Written assignment unit 5 PHIL 1404: Ethics and Social Responsibility. 6 th March 2024 Introduction Ethical shopping has become more popular in today's worldwide economy as people look for goods that are consistent with their beliefs. The fair trade movement has gained prominence as a leader in moral business practices, especially when it comes to coffee, with the goal of enhancing the lot of farmers in poor nations. The discussion examines the effect of fair trade on the economy.
The narrator of Shop Til ' You Drop states, "we 're no longer defined by the work that we do, but by the objects we consume. Industrial society has morphed into the consumer society. " Consumer culture is a form of capitalism in which the economy is focused on the selling of consumer goods and the spending of consumer money. Consumer culture is a culture that is displayed in the United States which affects most individuals lives, more specifically the idea of the American Dream. The evolution of consumer culture has been flourishing since the 1900 's and this increasing importance of consumerism in the United States has challenged the core values and beliefs of what the American Dream is and how best it is to achieve it.
During the 1950’s, the typical American women was a housewife without career aspirations as Betty Friedan described in The Feminine Mystique. Many women “pitied their poor frustrated mothers, who dreamed of having a career” (Friedan 2). This mindset made other women desire being housewives. Even though Friedan called for the end of gender roles, many women still disagreed with her and stood by Barbara Welter’s virtues from the “Cult of True Womanhood”. Despite being shown a better way of life, they still believed all women should be submissive and domestic.
Many people believe that consumerism is limited to technology, but boy oh boy are they wrong! In this day and age consumerism has no limit! Technology, clothes, cars, beauty standards, even food. We are so caught up in, “Living the American dream,” and the whole, “You’re only young once so you might as well,” that we fall into America’s pile of debt. We spend so much money on unnecessary things that we cannot afford to buy our necessary life essentials such as, I don’t know, groceries?
Commentary Essay on Shopping and Other Spiritual Adventures in America Today The American people are focusing more on materialistic items, people are shopping for pleasure more than necessity. This article comments on how people are shopping to release stress or to gain pleasure. Even though the article was written in 1984, it is still pertinent to modern time. In Shopping and Other Spiritual Adventures in America Today by Phyllis Rose, varied sentence length, different point of views, and anaphora are utilized to prove that society is becoming consumed in materialism.
Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism defines the dangers of a capitalist society that is controlled a by a small group of bourgeoisie owners that seek profit through a narrow selection of products. More so, consumers are often unaware of the dangers of these products and the addictive properties of a commodity that dominate their lives. In this manner, a sociological analysis of Karl Marx’s commodity fetishism has been analyzed within the problematic issues of an American consumer
