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Who are the Cultural Gatekeepers?

In our last blog post we discussed the idea of an ideal self. That is, advertisers are able to tell consumers what characteristics they ought to have. Today we are going to take this idea a step further and look at advertisers as “cultural gatekeepers.”

I was talking to my grandfather last week and I realized something very striking. My grandfather seemed to have a very intimate appreciation for our family ancestry, family traditions, and the cultural elements of our home country. That’s when it occurred to me. My grandfather learned these aspects of his culture in a very different way than I had learned mine.

Most of my grandfather’s learned cultural knowledge came from two sources: the generation of elders that preceded him, and his school system. However, a lot has changed since my grandfather’s time.

Today’s society is still somewhat influenced by the knowledge of our elders and to a shrinking extent, our school systems (see previous post). The major difference is that in today’s society the vast majority of our cultural identity is transmitted through the various forms of media. So much of what I know about the world has been sent to me via the internet, television broadcasting, and so on. However, the point I am attempting to make is that advertisers are the current dominant power in terms of cultural gate keeping.

Solomon et al suggest that “many judges or tastemakers influence the products that are eventually offered to consumers. These judges, or cultural gatekeepers, filter the overflow of information and materials intended for consumers.”

Simply put, advertisers are shaping our popular culture through the messages and the products that they send to us. Recall from our previous blog post that people often buy products for what they mean as opposed to what they do. We have learned to attach highly significant and profound meanings to products. Thus, we have learned to interpret our reality and our popular culture through products themselves. As stated by Dr. Michael Strangelove, “Advertising conventionalizes our conventions.”

This sentiment can be made clearer through an example. Suppose that Ian goes to the mall and sees the newest IPhone for sale. Ian becomes heart set on having the IPhone, so he spends all of the money in his bank account to get one. As Ian is unwrapping his new IPhone he begins to envision the reaction of his friend Jake when he sees the new gadget at school tomorrow. Ian knows he will be the coolest kid in school. Big advertising has told Ian exactly what it means to be “cool” or fashionable in the context of popular culture.

In my opinion, there is a problem with advertising being the dominant cultural gatekeeper. The main problem is that society begins to lose a lot of its cultural richness and diversity. If everyone is heavily influenced by the messages and product meanings that advertising creates, then what we are left with is a monoculture. It would be a culture where we all believe the same thing and share the same values that someone else has created for us. That seems a bit boring.

On the other hand, what would the world be without advertising? If we woke up in a world without advertising tomorrow I think we would all be fairly confused. We would be in a world where all businesses play fairly. Where people bought what they actually needed, not an imagined need. Businesses that depended upon advertising to exist would simply cease to be. Goodbye movies, professional sports, and our favourite T.V. shows. That also seems a bit boring.

I would really love to hear your thoughts on this piece. Are advertisers shaping not only an ideal individual but also an ideal society through advertising? Could we do away with advertising altogether? Does advertising contribute positively to our popular culture in any way? What do you think?

Works Cited:

Solomon, Zaichkowsky, Polegato,Consumer Behaviour: Buying, Having, and Being. 4 ed. Gary Bennett. Upper Saddle River: Pearson Education, 2008.

Belch, Belch, Guolla,Advertising and Promotion: An Integrated Marketing Communications Perspective. 3 ed. Joanna Cotton. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 2008.

Professor Michael Strangelove, “Advertising and Society Lectures“. (2011)

Posted by superprosays | July 8, 2011 | Categories: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

The Ideal Self: A Marketers Best Friend

“In South Korean shopping malls, teenage girls line up at photo machines that provide high-tech makeovers with options including glamour lighting, a hair blowing breeze, and virtual plastic surgery. At the Beauty Plus booth, for example, the fashion model wannabees can digitally trim jawlines, puff up lips, eliminate blemishes, and give themselves western style eyelids (this is the most popular option at the booths in Seoul).” (Solomon et al)

Many different products are bought because consumers are trying to augment, highlight, hide, change, or alter some aspect of who they are. It is an undeniable truth that a consumers feelings about themselves will shape what they buy.

Are you too fat? Buy diet pills. Not muscular enough? Try the protein shakes.

Of course, marketers know this and they use it to their full advantage. They do this through the corporate communication device known as advertising.

In advertising, messages are carefully constructed in order to define the image of an idealized self. That is, advertising has the power to affect how somebody thinks they ought to be. The opening example demonstrates the power that marketers have in shaping the ideal self. Advertising has explicitly told the female consumer what they ought to look like. Indeed, the ideal self is shaped by our culture, such as the people depicted in advertising, which serves as an achievement goal.

In stark contrast, the actual self is our appraisal of ourselves as we currently are. Advertising often depicts the actual self as weak, uncool, or ugly. Needless to say, the actual self often leaves a lot to be desired. Through these wildly altered depictions of the actual self, advertising creates a discrepancy with the ideal self.

With this is mind it is clear that marketers can profitably leverage the gap between the two selves. Products are often purchased because the consumer believes that having the product can make them more like a version of the idealized self. For example, teenage girls dressing themselves with the latest fashions, or a high school basketball player buying Michael Jordan basketball shoes to make himself a better player.

However, this does leave us with a bit of a moral conundrum. Is it right for advertising to exploit the consumer in this way? In my opinion, there is something perverted about advertising’s effect on our subjectivity. People have a hard enough time as it is trying to determine the type of person that they want to be. Advertising’s depiction of the idealized person we should strive to be is shallow and unrealistic.

And really, the proof is in the pudding. If advertising is the disease it has some pretty ugly symptoms. Girls are starving themselves half to death to look like the models they see in beauty magazines. Men are being shown progressively more violent images form an early age, which is leading to more adulthood aggression (especially towards women).

Although the evidence suggests that advertising is largely guilty of portraying an unachievable standard of who we should strive be, there is an argument to be made the other way. Maybe it is time for consumers to start taking in advertising messages with a grain of salt. Instead of putting the blame solely on the shoulders of big marketing, why don’t we take some responsibility for how we interpret our culture? We know this is a growing problem yet we haven’t done a lot to stop it from happening.

Please take some time to share your thoughts on this topic. Do you agree that advertising portrays an idealized self? How has the ideal self effected our interpretation of gender roles? What can be done to protect our subjectivity?

Works Cited:

Solomon, Zaichkowsky, Polegato,Consumer Behaviour: Buying, Having, and Being. 4 ed. Gary Bennett. Upper Saddle River: Pearson Education, 2008.

Posted by superprosays | July 6, 2011 | Categories: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Another Mundane Week in the Life of a Hedonistic Capitalism-Binded Citizen

I wake up Monday, a full week of hard work and cordiality ahead of me. Anxiously awaiting Friday night, I look at my clock to see it’s 6:47 AM on Monday morning. A reality appears; there’s much standing between me and that party I so desperately want to attend this Friday (which coincidentally is Canada Day this time around).

I dress in my finest business casual wear: my new pair of dress pants, new dress/shirt tie combo, and new pair of shoes, coincidentally purchased on special in the Rideau Center during my leisure time the previous weekend. A $300 touch. Well, there goes most of my pay for last week’s mandatory Monday-Friday slave-drive. Making sure to leave my apartment for 7:20AM sharp, I embark on my trip towards the bank of which I work.

A long day passes, and my innate craving for a release bestows me. However, knowing I must repeat the near-daily routine that I had undergone that morning, I know I must stay in and get a good rest for a productive work-day tomorrow.

Linse. Rather. Repeat.

Finally, Friday has come. The masses are out in the downtown core, and seemingly everyone is taking this chance to get a few drinks into them; a release from the tough week most of us have had. Ottawa turns into a total party scene, where many, many capitalist-abiders give into their hedonistic tendencies, albeit for one day.

These guys were there. It was fun.

I am sure we can all relate to this scenario, or those similar in nature. The capitalist system requires us to be extraordinarily controlled individuals. We wake up by routine every morning, and undergo our daily ritual, often ending in our arrival at the workplace. We can’t wait for our release, which unfortunately is days of discipline away. Once we do get our chance, we resort to our hedonistic tendencies, whichever way we see fit. Some enjoy bar/club nights, while some enjoy anything from a night playing board games to long walks on the beach (dreamy, eh? C’mon ladies…).

How is it that you spend your leisure time? Well, that is totally dependent on your social class and your age demographic. Teens may be found at their local youth center playing pool, skateboarding, and hanging out with friends. Post-secondary students, such as myself, may be found at the local pub/club, drinking their faces off, and feeling like a million bucks the next morning. As one gets older and gains career employment, one becomes part of a richer culture while surrounding oneself with individuals from higher income brackets. These individuals, those that many post-secondary students aspire to be, may spend their leisure time at events including, but not limited to, cocktail parties. As the illustration below conveniently offers, you often drink a conservative amount while wearing business attire, developing social networks. At every age, an individual has different activities that take up one’s leisure-time activities.

Different groups party in different ways. NHL players during a Hall of Fame cocktail party.

Furthermore, the capitalist system requires its citizens to be functioning members of society, which implies that we not only need to work our fair share of hours to make money, but we must spend the money we made on products the advertising giant has instructed us that we need. None of us are exempt from this societal demand. In my story, it is imperative that I come to work in business casual clothes, looking very clean. In order to obtain these clothes, either I or someone close to me would have had to have made money at work in order to purchase these clothes.

A drawback of the system is that while we spend so much of our money, and work so often, we have very little of either time or money. We cannot necessarily afford vacations, and burnout can occur. This does not usually happen, but suffice to say that the system requires us to be the best citizens we can be, often putting financial and societal interests above individual.

In the end, we are all the same: heavily controlled, functioning members of the prevalent system today, capitalism.

Are you comfortable with this? Are you different than the rest of us? Feel free to analyze your day in the comments section, and discuss ways in which you either conform or deviate from this trend. Is this a healthy way for society to operate?
How do you like to spend your leisure time? To what extent do you agree with the above statement, that different ages enjoy different leisure activities? Feel free to share your stories in the comments box!

Making an Informed Post-Secondary Education Choice: The Devaluation of the Bachelor’s Degree

By now, many BA students on North American campuses are learning to face a harsh reality – their Bachelor degrees are not nearly as useful as our primary (family, friends) or secondary (advertisers, school bodies) influencers would have us believe.

As recently as our parents’ generation, the acquisition of a university (or more broadly, any post-secondary) degree was the launching pad tomorrow’s elite required as a launch board into their prospective careers. Education was cheaper than it is today, and was reserved for society’s elite thinkers.

How useful is one of these? Well, that depends on what it says on the paper...BA? MA? Big difference.

Joshua Jordison’s YouTube video *posted below* uncovers that in 1972 (the rough years our parents may have been attending post-secondary institutions), a mere 12% of the population completed a post-secondary program, acquiring a degree. By the year 2002, that stat jumped to 27%, a 225% increase over that period. This has many harmful effects on this generation’s “elite” equivalent thinkers.

This trend has been explained in multiple places as a process of academic inflation, which encapsulates an increase in the amount of college degrees earned in relation to the number of jobs available, causing an immediate decline in self-marketing power. In essence, this means that we cannot market ourselves as successfully as our predecessors could by simply boasting a BA or college degree. We are required to do more, to spend more money and a greater portion of our lives acquiring more advanced degrees in order to academically ‘distance ourselves from the pack’.

Based on the above data, we must ask ourselves: why are we spending all of this time and money on a degree that doesn’t break us apart from our counterparts? Well, the answer is quite simple – if we do not complete a bachelor’s degree, we cannot move to those degrees that WILL differentiate us from the pack, such as an MA or PhD. Without the BA, the individual is seemingly done for. There are notable exceptions (see Mark Zuckerberg, Adolf Hitler *ha!*), but it is generally felt that without a BA, we have failed as an individual. The proverbial glass ceiling is more and more apparent, the less education an individual boasts. The odds are definitely set against those who do not, at the very least, acquire a BA or college degree. Why is this?

Well, part of the reason was uncovered at the beginning of this post – our primary and secondary social actors pressure us to succeed in acquiring said degree. Our friends and family want only the best for us, which often entails going as far into school as is possible, to set ourselves up for success. That much seems tremendously obvious. However, the secondary social actors, such as marketers and advertisers of the post-secondary product, may be the ones pushing degrees on society’s young adults to fulfill this life requirement.

Post-secondary institutions are oft-regarded as profit-motivated institutions in contemporary society. Was it always this way? Were motivations always based on these profit-oriented interests? It’s hard to say for certain, but I would suppose not. It seems the primary motivation of the university brass is to pack as many students into huge, newly-renovated classrooms, thus increasing profit margins. The logic is simple: 1 prof – 200 students is a lot cheaper for the university to cover than is 1 prof-30 student classrooms. This has it’s drawbacks as well, but it is out of the scope of this post. There are other problems as well, unfortunately, due to this trend.

Enrollment inflation is the key antagonist in this harsh reality. A necessary condition of filling massive classrooms to be conducted by one teacher is that the student population must be there, or at least paying for the course, to support it. The institution turns profits due to the inflated tuition rates students pay. What seems to be the best way to turn a mass-profit, on behalf of the institution? BRING IN MORE!!! In order to turn profits, post-secondary organizations have accepted mass amounts of students. An obvious problem exists here – are you lowering the standard of what makes a university student when you accept mass numbers of individuals? The likely answer here is ‘yes’.

Furthermore, professors are pressured by many different actors to meet certain class averages in their lecture rooms. This often results in grade inflation. Problem here? Many of those students who are not ‘made out for university’ achieve decent marks, while putting no work in. University now is what high school was then, to our parents. It is a harsh, expensive reality that we all must accept and plan for.

Does this look familiar? You aren't the only one receiving this (perhaps) inflated grade!

Higher enrollment rates matched with grade inflation trends mean more students acquire the BA, not because we are smarter, but because society, and especially post-secondary institutions, want us to pay the money to earn the ‘hallowed’ distinction. More individuals acquiring BA’s without proper expertise inevitably leads to the devaluation of the BA; an unfortunate reality that any mature student needs to consider when planning for the future.

Anyways, we must regard all of this information when choosing our post-secondary paths. I will now bore you with mine. I am completing the last class of my university career, achieving a BA Major in Communications, Minor in Business Administration. I have endured four years of expanded, impersonalized learning, and am extremely excited to be starting a new degree at Algonquin College for Sports Business Management in September. My logic? The BA I am set to acquire, while general in scope, will be insufficient. A college degree speciailizing me in one area, I feel is as useful as the acquisition of a MA. It just takes a bit less time, is slightly less expensive, and fits my career goals slightly better. That’s just me though.

I am interested to hear about the career paths you have all set for yourselves. Accordingly, I will leave you with this set of questions:

Is it smart to leave yourself with a mere BA degree?
To what extent do you feel the university degree is being devalued? Are you concerned?
What is your strategy in your post-secondary studies (MA, BA, BA/college diploma)…why did you choose this strategy? Feel free to include your strategy and justifications below!

I also recommend you look at the changes incurred throughout society due to the post-secondary enrollment rate trend (re: marriage rates, maturity effects, etc.)

Examining Sexism and Gender Roles in Advertising

Greetings loyal subscribers! Here is a magazine cover that might appeal to the male perspective! It may seem like an obscure insert in this blog, but according to numerous sources, this is the way women are portrayed in the marketplace and it is helping to capitalism to expand at an alarming rate.

If you live on the planet Earth and either own a television, or have ventured though a metropolitan area, you have no doubt been exposed to ads that promote female bodies to sell products of capitalism. This aspect has been the topic of many works of literature in recent decades. Rosaland Gill is a professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at the Centre for Culture, Media and Creative Industries at King’s College. She claims that there are three main objects in advertising of female sexual agency: the young, heterosexually desiring ‘midriff’, the vengeful woman, and the ‘hot lesbian’.

The midriff has often been found in advertising in order to promote a consistently sexually available female. These advertisements are easy to spot and critique from a feminist point of view (or simply with an open mind). The issue is with the ads that aim to portray a pro-feminine perspective, such as the ad below. These “pro-woman” ads that speak to a new type of woman who is proud of being an individual, and is not subject to the ideals and desires of men. The Nike ad below portrays a young women (and her midriff) along with the statement “Here I Am”. The “I” is made by the young woman herself, probably in an attempt to send a message to all women that they can be strong individuals who are separate from the mould imposed by male society. However, the young woman in the ad is attractive and is baring her midriff, which still suggests that even as an individual…she is ready for sex.

Below, you can see an advertisement that has three individuals. The two females obviously draw most of the attention here, but the most important character is arguably the guy in the background. He represents a male society obsessed with the prospect of a pair of hot lesbians. This fixation is present in many ads for numerous products, and also in popular movies such as American Pie 2. At the end of the day, it’s just another fixation with an ideal that does not exist in the real world. This stands as further proof that advertisements promote the hyper-reality.

In an article by Sut Jhally, professor of Communication at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, it is claimed that at the end of the day, a little objectification is alright and even beneficial to women in a sense. Some women who have chosen to let the hair on their legs grow often feel unattractive. The fact is that every individual in the world takes pride in looking good, and thus, feeling good.

If we want the media to abandon its seemingly objective tactics that could be perceived as anti-feminist, we probably shouldn’t hold our collective breath. Advertisements that titillate viewers are more successful than those that fail to catch the attention of viewers at all.

Posted by superprosays | June 28, 2011 | Categories: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

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Superprosays goes into depth when analyzing the relationship between advertising and dominant patterns of perception, belief, and consumer behaviour.

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– The Management

Posted by superprosays | June 20, 2011 | Categories: Uncategorized | Leave a comment