Cultural Diary - Week 11

I have chosen to look at Adidas which is one of the top famous shoe, clothing and Apparel Company. Adidas also is the second largest budget for sponsorships among sports gear companies and therefore to study the strategy of Adidas can help to understand how they affect the consumer culture.

By tying its products to successful Adidas uses celebrities in it adverts to create an image and impression that the shoes or the clothes play a role in the success of the sportsperson. Thus they are creating a way of connection between the consumer and the celebrity which is sometime very risky for the reputation of the company because if the sportsperson or celebrity makes a mistake in any field, it directly harms the reputation of company as well.

The good reputation of Adidas and other famous sports companies among consumers can also pass a positive message to consumers which can help to refine their culture.

For example:

“Nike aims to change the negative perception of hoodies, which it admits are identified with criminal behaviour and young louts.”

“England soccer star Rio Ferdinand has been enlisted by Nike in an advertising campaign aimed at changing the negative image of hoodies.”

Reference link: http://www.clickliverpool.com/culture/culture/122188-can-nike-change-the-image-of-the-hoodie-in-liverpool.html

Olympic Games is an event which has an strong impact on many culture and Adidas and other sport companies play important roles to sponsor these events and also to show themselves as part of consumer culture.

Famous celebrities plays important role to promote these companies for example David Beckham. 

In the link below David Beckham shows off his new Adidas shoes at a store in Milan which whose that fandom is also paying important role to expand consumer culture.

http://www.zimbio.com/photos/David+Beckham/David+Beckham+Presenting+New+Shoe+Adidas+Store/zVJzhrpuc-D

Reading Response to "The Consumer Society and Advertising" by Paul Long and Tim Wall

The key points that I have found in the readings are:

“The history of consumption and advertising are intimately and perhaps innately tied together.”

“The industrial revolution brought with it a drive to consume and thus challenged all of thus previously necessary virtues.”

“Many ecenomists argue that consumers are rational and purchase products on the basis of functional decision making to further their own interests (miller, 1995).”

“Consumption is, in this case, a stage in the process of communication, that is, an act of deciphering, decoding, which presupposes practical or explicit mastery of a cipher or code.(Bourdieu, 1984: 2).”

“Baudrillard argues that mass media and, of course, advertising in Particular have greatly enhanced and generalised what he calls a process of ‘simulation’. “

“In consumer society, advertising agencies thus represent expertise in reading trends, fashions, signs and other codes.”

“Brands are much more than product identifiers, then: they are a way of being.”

“Bauman observes that the avid, never ending search for new and improved recipes for lives is also a variety of shopping.”

“Advertising can be thought as a form of communication designed to generate awareness of products, services and organisations.”

“Marketing refers to the process of identifying consumer needs and thus producing products and services.”

“Public relations (PR) refer to the management of communication between organisations and publics.”

“Culture jamming is the disturbance of the cultural logic of branding.”

“Culture jamming intends to throw a spanner into circuits of culture and what its practitioners believe to be the predominance of advertising and corporate culture in defining that we are what we purchase and the identities that are created and sold to us by advertisers.”

Reading Response to "Understanding Celebrity Culture" by Su Holmes and Sean Redmond

The key points that I have found in the readings are:

“Adulation, identification and emulation are key motifs in the study of celebrity culture. The desire for fame, stardom, or celebrification stems from a need to be wanted in a society where being famous appears t offer enormous material, economic, social and pshysic rewards (gamson, 1994; rojek, 2001; turner, 2004).”

“Nick couldry (2000, 2003) argues that, in the modern world, being famous gives one access to a social space that sits at the centre of meaning generation and belonging.”

“According to Kobena mercer, ‘in political terms, identities are in crisis because traditional structures of membership and belonging inscribed in relations of class, party and nation-state have been called into question’ (1994: 4).”

“Fandom is often a creative enterprise, involving the production of artwork, fiction and dedicated websites.”

“The body of the star or celebrity is key to this search for the ‘truth’ about the star or celebrity.”

“The body of the star or celebrity either functions to reproduce dominant culture’s patriarchal, racial and heterosexual gaze, or it allows transgressive, oppositional and queer feelings and fantasies to emerge.”

“Braudy argues that we ‘live in a society bound together by the talk of fame’ (1986: 1).”

“Framing celebrity is a text which is capitalizing on the popular, as well as the academic, interest in contemporary celebrity.”

“Dyer famously argued for the analyses of stars in the realm of representation and ideology. Stars could b understood as ‘signs’- read as ‘texts’ and ‘images’ – and investigated using the tools of semiotics (barker, 2003: 6).”

“Couldry argues that the media constructs and maintains a symbolic hierarchy between media/ordinary worlds, in which the media is presented as the privileged “frame” through which we access the reality that matters to us as social beings’ (2004: 58).”

“The term celebrity has various uses in academia. It can function to indicate how the media contexts of fame are now less specific, with individual celebrities rarely restricted to a single media form (Bonner, 2005: 65).”