In Ch. 11, Pop Culture Professor Murray makes the following
statement:
I’m sorry you didn’t bring the kids. I want to get to know small kids. I tell my students they’re already too old to
figure importantly in the making of society.
Minute by minute, they’re beginning to diverge from each other. “Even as we sit here,” I tell them, “you are
spinning out from the core, becoming less recognizable as a group, less
targetable by advertisers and mass-producers of culture. Kids are a true universal. But you’re well beyond that, already
beginning to drift, to feel estranged from the products you consume. Who are they designed for? What is your place in the marketing scheme? Once you’re out of school, it is only a
matter of time before you experience the vast loneliness and dissatisfaction of
consumers who have lost their group identity.”
Then I tap my pencil on the table to indicate time passing
ominously. (49-50)
Murray says that young children are placed in a group where they have no distinction from each other. Children can still be targeted as a group because they have not grown or learned enough to be that dissimilar from each other. You can see this to be true because as children we pretty much watched the same things, played with the same toys, and did the same activities. When children grow into adults, they have their own opinions and become targeted based on what those opinions are. It becomes harder to target them because they grow to like different things and can't just be placed in a general category. At the end, Murray talks about how consumers become dissatisfied because they have lost their group identity. People often talk about how everything was better when they were kids. They have become unsatisfied and are no longer targeted as a group. Murray wants to talk to the children because they are all generally the same. Once they grow older, they lose the group identity they had as children. They begin to specify their interests and wonder what interests them. Advertisers can no longer just target that one group of kids and instead have to target individual groups.
ReplyDeleteI can understand and interpret the argument but believe the argument to be a grand misdiagnosis. This would imply that children have no personality and that every child has the exact same likes and dislikes. While it can be said that the child represents the stem cell of human personalities children also are their own people and vary in form quite drastically. My nephew fits the argument if you only compare his TV to other boys his age but he is far louder than I was and scared of flashing things to boot. My neighbor and I loved Pokémon but the kid down the street was into wrestling. What Murray claims is that children do not show unique personalities but many believe children develop personality before the age of three. I believe what Murray sees as us becoming "estranged from the products you consume" is actually just a developing affinity through trial and error. Kids who like their Sock Em Boppers get into MMA, where the ones that really loved their Pokémon cards now play magic the gathering. The only reason kids can be targeted as a group is because generally kids have the optimism to try new things with the assumption that they will be fun. They have yet to experience many products but this does not mean that they all share a group identity. I wager that one could go to any playground and find the signature clicks that accompany and represent, "consumers who have lost their group identity."
ReplyDeleteWhy do we consume? Why does the average American feel the need to buy more and more, often beyond their means? This excerpt attempts to provide an answer to these questions. Murray states that as time passes we are “spinning out from the core” as consumers. At birth we all start at the same point, we consume the exact same things, diapers, baby food, baby clothes etc. There is not significant variation on these things. As we age, our mind develops and we gain other interests. Also, as we age, buying power shifts from our caretaker’s to ourselves. This great shift occurs at right about the college years of the average American, late teens and early 20s. This shift is also significant as it marks the end of your last general category you will be placed in, “teenager”. Corporations can easily market towards toddlers, pre-teens, teenagers, etc., by lumping them into groups and advertising to the whole. At those ages, our consumption is influenced by two things, what our parents buy us and what is “cool”, which is dictated by social stigmas. Once we have crossed into our 20s and beyond, we no longer fall neatly into a demographic. As we age, we gain further distant from any demographic, and a result we have the urge to consume in order to find identity with our fellow shoppers. We replace an age demographic, such as teenager, with a product demographic, such as Apple (computers, ipods, ipads) costumer. Using Apple as an example, this is evident. They doubled in computer market share from 2007 to 2011, not buy creating an inherently better product at a better value, but by creating a stronger brand. (I’m going to cite my own experience as a Computer Science major to make this claim). Consumer saw the opportunity to identify with the Apple brand and as a result flock like sheep towards it. This phenomena, however is shaped in our youth. We our overwhelmed with our group identity and take it for granted, courtesy of the media. Once it’s lost, we experience the subconscious need to reclaim it, in the form of what is commonly described as brand loyalty.
ReplyDeleteSean Roddy