|
|
Marketing for Competitive Advantage
Readings
M Louise Ripley MBA, PhD
You
Wouldn’t Want to Hear
– Ethics
in the Business Classroom: Gender, Race, but Please Not Class
Return to Course Syllabus |
 |
Presented
at Emerging Issues in Business and Technology Conference
Ethical, Environmental and Social Responsibility Track
November 9-11, 2000 – Myrtle Beach, South Carolina
Subsequently
published: Ripley,
M. Louise (2001) “You Wouldn't Want to Hear - Ethics in the Business
Classroom: Gender, Race, But Please Not Class.” Journal of
Contemporary Business Issues 8:2 (Fall): 84-92.
For
Dan Greeno, University of Toronto
My
thanks to the Consumer Behaviour classes of the Summer and Winter of 2000, at
Atkinson College, for their
skits that inspired this paper, to my Research Assistants Monica Ben and
Audrey Townsend, and to the patient staff of various magazine stands in
Toronto
Abstract
This
paper explores a teaching device for bringing alive the contentious issue
of social class, a controversial variable used in the practice of predicting
behavior by consumers in the market, and allowing for its discussion in a
university business class, utilizing commonly available popular magazines,
advertisements, and role-playing.
Introduction
Social class is a controversial enough variable in the practice of the
prediction of behavior by consumers in the market, but it is even more
contentious as a subject in a university business program, even in a large
cosmopolitan city. Some of the difficulties in using social class to predict
purchase behavior stem from researchers’ tendencies to ignore status
inconsistency, intergenerational mobility, and consumers’ tendencies to
identify with the class to which they aspire rather than that to which they
belong. (Solomon 1996, 442). Nevertheless, social scientists continue to
believe in the concept as at least a partial predictor of consumer behavior,
and its continuing presence in the literature means that we must find ways of
teaching about it in the classroom.
Teaching
About Social Class
Twenty
years ago when I first experimented with teaching ethics in a marketing class,
it was a disaster. I assigned a case about buying a car in which there was
some serious doubt about truth in advertising. Not only did not a single
student ever mention the issue of the highly suspect ad, but when I brought it
to their attention they were vehemently vociferous in informing me that this
was a marketing decision that was to be made on the basis of the maximization
of shareholders’ wealth and ethics had no part in it.
Fifteen
years ago, I tried again. I assigned a case about the decision to market
infant formula that had sparked the Nestlé boycott in the late 1970’s. The
group responsible for presenting on that evening did a full case study,
complete with a skit to dramatize the marketing strategy issues, a mock board
meeting to round out management’s discussion of the alternative strategies,
well-designed overheads to illuminate the financial implications, a logically
reasoned recommendation, and an ably led, forty-five minute classroom
discussion reviewing the marketing theory and practical implications of the
case. At the end of this time, because I had heard nothing mentioned about it,
I finally asked the students in the presenting group if they had addressed at
all the ethical issue inherent in the marketing of a product designed to
replace mother’s milk in countries where women had neither money nor clean
water to produce safe formula for their babies. Oh yes, they informed me; they
had spent many hours discussing this issue. But, they said, “We figured you
were a business professor and you wouldn’t want to hear about that.”
Since
that time, I have told the story about the Nestlé case in every marketing
class I teach, and informed my students orally and in writing that they are
“allowed” and encouraged to address ethical issues throughout the course.
I am happy to say that today, most students are eager to debate and there are
many valuable case studies available for use in examining ethical issues in
the marketing classroom.
The
Literature
Women
make up more than one third of our business classes, and men and women alike
are willing and often eager to discuss marketing issues relevant to female
consumers. There are literally hundreds of articles available in areas as
diverse as gender stereotyping in children’s television advertising (Browne
1998), the addictive qualities of advertising for women and girls (Kilbourne
1999), and the effect of sexist advertisements on women’s body
dissatisfaction (Lavine and Sweeney 1999). They range from practical
examinations of specific effects with insights for advertisers (Jones
Stanaland and Gelb 1998) to theoretical explorations of the issue (Kates and
Shaw-Garlock 1999, Stern 1999), and they range from journals strictly
dedicated to business such as Journal of Advertising (Browne 1998,
Stern 1999) to the social psychology journals (Levine et al 1999), to the arts
(Telford 1997). Several journals exist dedicated solely to the issue of women
and marketing (Marketing To Women 1999), and one is provided on
computer laser optical discs (About Women and Marketing 1997). A good
summary of articles from the 1970’s through the 1990’s can be found in
Shields (1997). There are also dozens of cases available on issues of women in
business, including entire books such as Helgesen (1990), Nichols (1994), and
O’Brien (1998).
Closely
related to gender issues are those of heterosexism, and students today are
also quite willing to examine issues in marketing to the gay community; the
work of Steven Kates (1998, 2000) has proven particularly useful in the
classroom for this purpose. The Journal of Homosexuality offers
academic work on the subject, including Dan Wardlaw’s “We’re Here, We’re
Queer, and We’re Going Shopping!” and Nancy Rudd’s “Excuse Me, Sir,
May I Help You and Your Boyfriend?” whose very titles provide some
indication of the openness of the approach on this topic.
Located
as we are in a large metropolitan area, we have a multicultural student body,
and discussions of how different races respond to and are portrayed in ads are
readily accepted and even brought forward by the students themselves. While
there is a need for more research on how visible minorities respond to
advertisers’ “racial accommodation,” there is nevertheless a fair body
of work on the effects of race, including how visible minorities respond to
messages (Grier and Brumbaugh 1999, Perkins Thomas and Taylor 2000), the
impact of cultural influences on interpretation of message (Holland and Gentry
1999, Green 1999, Bush Smith and Martin 1999), and issues of stereotyping
(Taylor 1997).
There
remains, however, one glaring area of stereotype, prejudice, and
discrimination in the teaching of marketing ethics that no one seems to want
to hear about, and that is the issue of social class. I started my own
doctoral studies years ago with a fierce interest in the subject, but soon was
dissuaded from tackling it because “no one in the management faculty worked
with it.” Only one professor encouraged my exploration of this topic, and I
read everything I could find on the issue, and did a number of papers on it
before finally allowing myself to be herded away from the topic and into a
more “proper” subject for a thesis. But my fascination with the issue of
class, nurtured by the work of Richard Coleman (1983), W. Lloyd Warner (1941,
1949), and particularly Lee Rainwater’s 1959 classic, Workingman’s Wife,
stayed with me.
When,
as business professors, we began to take seriously the need to address issues
of gender, race, and class in our teaching, I found it quite easy to generate
discussions on the issue of gender, fairly easy to get students to talk about
race, but I met strong resistance every time I tried to talk about social
class. There is no such thing in our country! We do not judge people by their
social status! That may happen in India with their caste system, but not here!
We are all equal! How dare you suggest that there is any prejudice based on
class here?! These are the kinds of comments I heard, vehement and vociferous,
any time I tried to bring up the issue of class. Sometimes students spoke up
in the lecture, but more often they came to me quietly at break, or at the end
of class, to tell me, sotto voce, as if I had uttered a terrible faux
pas, that I really should think carefully about saying such things in a
classroom in a country that does not discriminate among people on such a thing
as social class.
For
a while I gave it up; it just seemed too difficult a barrier to surmount. Then
I attended a workshop on using theatre in the classroom where a colleague told
us that he danced on the tabletop to get his students to listen to something
he solemnly believed they needed to hear. I put this together with one of my
favorite marketing teaching devices – the magazine, and came up with the
solution to my problem.
I accepted
the fact that class is a difficult issue. I admitted the fact that no
one wanted to talk about it. I acknowledged the fact that to even
mention social class was already to stereotype in a very unpleasant way
that no one seemed willing to do. Most of us expend a good deal of
effort in our classrooms avoiding stereotyping. We would never suggest
that all toilet cleaning is done by the little woman, that all blacks
own a Cadillac, or that all gay men drink to excess, and we talk openly
about the error of using these kinds of stereotypes in marketing and use
case studies to facilitate discussion of the issues without ever
worrying about being accused of thereby condoning sexism, racism, or
heterosexism. I found, however, that in trying to teach about classism
in a North American marketing classroom, even to mention social class
was to be seen somehow as approving of classism. The deeply imbedded
objections to even discussing the issue were going to be there no matter
how I dealt with the topic, and so I decided to approach it head-on, to
force the issue.
The Magazines
I
went to my local convenience store and, just like the young teen with no money
who reads at the stand until the sales clerk comes over to complain, I browsed
and read and pored over the racks, looking for just the right magazines,
assuring the man behind the counter that truly, I was going to buy. I
eventually bought eighteen magazines, three each for each of the first six of
Coleman’s (1983) seven social classes. The clerk was delighted. It took me a
few courses to settle on the right magazines. Some just did not work. Some did
not contain ads that lent themselves to easy interpretation in short periods
of time. Some were not easily identified as targeted to any specific social
class. It became a little embarrassing sometimes when I gave out a magazine to
the working class group and several upper-middle-class students cried out, “Wait
a minute! I read that!!” Eventually I settled on:
Upper-Upper
- The New Yorker
Lower-Upper - Smart Money
Upper-Middle – Bon Appétit
Middle Class - Family Circle
Working Class - Woman’s Life
Lower But Not Lowest - True Story
For
the lowest class, those “visibly poverty-stricken, usually out of work,” I
bought nothing.
I
now bring these six magazines to my Consumer Behavior lecture on social class.
The “lecture” is one I do without notes because it comes from my heart and
my personal experience and out of the passion of my early doctoral years and
an unrequited love of the subject matter. I open the discussion by asking them
who they think is more likely to buy brand name products for the home like
Ivory dishwasher detergent and Tide laundry soap – the working-class wife,
or the upper-middle-class, educated, professional woman? My use of blunt
phrases like “working-class wife” suggests to them that they may speak
openly, and they begin to. I am supportive of any answer that comes at first,
to encourage discussion. Most of them usually believe that the working-class
wife will buy the no-name products because they are cheaper.
I
then tell them about my early doctoral days when I too believed this and how I
came to see the light after reading Lee Rainwater’s 1959 Workingman’s
Wife, all in one Sunday afternoon because like a good novel I could not
put it down, and how he and Richard Coleman debunked that myth. The
working-class woman tends to buy brand names more than does her
upper-middle-class sister, despite their higher cost, because she is not
secure enough in her self-confidence to take the risk of buying something for
her home that is not advertised on national television. The professional woman
of the upper-middle-class, on the other hand, has the education to figure out
the relative costs and the self-confidence to buy what is cheaper despite what
someone might think of seeing a no-name brand of detergent sitting on her
sink.
We
discuss as a group how we stereotype with class, much as we do with gender and
with race. We talk about how difficult it seems to be to address issues of
class, about how dangerous it seems to be to delve into the stereotypes
involved, partly because many of us come from working-class backgrounds
ourselves and when we come to university we mistakenly believe that everyone
else comes from the upper-middle-class, or only the upper classes as they once
did. We discuss the fact that we often feel we must hide and disguise our
backgrounds, and the fact that it can be easier to disguise class than gender
or race.
I
tell the students about my experiences teaching ethics in previous classrooms
and how students often became enraged that I would suggest that classes exist
in North America. I tell them that, whether or not we like it, there do appear
to be some class differences in our society, and what is even more important
as we study marketing, that marketers do indeed operate on an assumption that
there are differences among the classes and that these differences may well
affect what products people buy and what media they respond to. I tell them
that I have found that the only way to tackle the thorny issue of social class
is to tackle it head on, and then I introduce the evening’s work.
The
Classroom Exercise
I
divide the students into seven groups, each group to receive a magazine
targeted to a particular social class. They will spend a half hour, or
forty-five minutes, or ten minutes, depending on how long the lecture period
is, and come up with a skit which portrays the stereotypical view of their
assigned social class as used by marketers to target them in the magazines
provided.
This
will be a class exercise that will require a combination of critical thinking,
specific reference to the textbook’s summary of the work done in the field,
and creative thinking and theatrical role-playing on their part in the skits.
In order to warm them up and set an example, I crank up the dramatic
presentation as I hand out the magazines. Each oral description ends with a
specific challenge to the group, as I hand them their written instructions.
These descriptions borrow heavily from Coleman (1983). The covers of these
magazines, and a representative ad from each are duplicated in the Appendix.
| Group
1 is handed a copy of The New Yorker and told, “Congratulations, you
are members of the upper-upper class. You represent only 0.3% of society, but
you control a whole lot of the money. You are the “Capital S” of society,
and your main distinguishing feature is your inherited wealth. You can buy
whatever you want and you work only if you choose to do so.”
|
| Group
2 gets a copy of Smart Money and hears, “Congratulations, you are
members of the lower-upper class. Representing only 1.2% of society, you are
the newer social elite, mostly highly successful professionals. Many of you
are fabulously wealthy, but chances are you got your money the hard way, by
earning it, and you’re going to show the world that you have made it!”
|
| Group
3 receives a copy of Bon Appétit Week and is told, “You are
members of the upper-middle-class. Representing 12.5% of society, you are
university-educated, high-level managers and professionals. Your lifestyle
centres on private clubs, social causes, and the arts. You earn good money but
have little time, and you aspire to be like the upper class, even though you
realize you will probably never make it. You are the “country club” set.”
|
| Group
4 receives a copy of Family Circle and hears, “You are members of
the solid, dependable middle class. Where would the rest of society be without
you? Representing 32% of society, your class is the second largest in the
nation, and your membership consists of the average-paid white-collar worker
and the more affluent of the blue-collar workers. You live on the better side
of town, you try to do the right thing, and your lifestyle centers strongly on
the home and family. If the wife works, it’s most likely only part-time so
that she’ll be home in time to be there for the kids.”
|
| Group
5 sees Woman’s Life waved in front of them, and they are told, “You
are members of the working class. At 38% of society, you make up the largest
social class, and your membership includes the average-paid blue-collar
employee, that stereotypical “worker,” we read so much about in the
newspapers. The husband works, maybe as a truck driver or an auto mechanic,
but no matter what his job or income, they live the typical “working-class
lifestyle.” The wife most likely doesn’t work outside the home; you both
believe a woman’s place is in the home.”
|
|
Group
6 is handed a copy of True Story and told, “You are members of the
lower class, but you haven’t hit bottom yet. Hubby’s no welfare bum, he’s
still got a job, but you’re scraping by just above the poverty level. You
make up about 9% of the population and many people judge your behavior as “crude”
and “trashy.”
|
Group
7 – I have been pulling these magazines off a pile on the table at the front
of the classroom as I hand them to each group. When I come to this final group
and say, “Group 7,” I reach toward the now empty pile of magazines and I
grope about as if I have lost one. I look at the students and say, “Group 7,
you don’t get a magazine.” Sadly, this usually elicits general laughter. I
then tell them, “You are the dregs of society; representing about 7% of the
population, you are visibly poverty stricken, often destitute, without much
hope. You don’t get a magazine because marketers know you haven’t got two
nickels to rub together, and hence they don’t bother advertising to you.”
This
group gets a thank-you even before we start. I continue, “Thanks for taking
on this particularly difficult social class. It’s not one that any of us
like to think about much, but you’re still human beings, and we’d like to
hear what you have to say about all this marketing and conspicuous
consumption. You’re used to picking through other people’s leftovers for a
meal or a smoke or a three-day old newspaper to read, so perhaps you won’t
mind watching the other groups and picking out some of the products they talk
about and incorporating that into your presentation.”
Then
we divide into seven groups by counting off. I do this rather than revert to
the already-established project groups because I want fresh groups, randomly
brought together, with no past history. They go out into the hall, or off for
coffee, or into clusters of desks in the classroom if I am lucky to have a
classroom with moveable desks. I move from group to group, listening to them,
reassuring them, encouraging them to let go and dramatize, answering their
many questions about what it means to represent a whole group of people in one
six-minute skit, reassuring them that it is okay for tonight to speak in
stereotypes, that one of today’s objectives is to examine how we stereotype
as marketers, when it is useful and when it is not, whether it is profitable,
whether it is fair.
I
usually end up spending the most time with Group 7; it is the most difficult
presentation, structurally and emotionally. They have no magazine; they have
no ads; they have no money; they have no status at all. I do not ever have
anyone from this actual social class in my classroom; anyone in Group 7 must
particularly rely on imagination and theatrical empathy to portray something
they have all seen but none has experienced.
The
results of this classroom exercise are always fascinating, always fun, always
fruitful. I have never had it fail. We start with the upper-upper class, with
their New Yorker and its small and unostentatious ads for $300
fourteen-carat gold brooches and for a $20,000 ruby and diamond pendant for
the dog’s collar, but they are all in excellent taste, quiet and refined. We
glimpse their wealth and their almost blasé search for something new and
entertaining to do. They have a lot of money, and they spend money, but they
do it quietly with a few friends.
A
great advantage of this exercise is that often a reclusive student will
suddenly come alive. The last time we did this, we got to see a normally
reticent mature young man portray the seven-year-old son whose mother wants to
take him and a couple of his close friends to Paris for his next birthday to
eat cotton candy at the Eiffel Tower, but “Mommy, Mommy, I’ve been to
Paris twice already,” and finally he asks the servant, played with quiet and
dour dignity by a fresh-faced bubbly cheerful young woman who is usually the
life of the discussion in lectures, if she will please drive him to the West
Wing and she nods stiffly and properly, knowing well her place in this
household. We are left with a very definite feeling that these people know who
they are and what their role in society is, and although they like to spend
money on important things like a child’s birthday party or a piece of
jewellery for the teenage daughter’s coming-out party, they have no need to
flaunt their great wealth. They are a very comfortable family, and we feel
this watching them at their dinner table.
The
lower-upper class group comes next. We will work our way down the social
ladder and I make this clear as we sum up each presentation and our feelings
about it, and head to the next one. We are open and blatant about the classism
inherent in the exercise and in the ads. The lower-upper class is fixated on
money and on displaying the fact that they have it. Their magazine, Smart
Money, centers on money and how to manage what you have made. The ads are
large and ostentatious and often for products that will show off the fact that
one has arrived. The business owner in the skit last time sat at the
conference table asking his Vice Presidents what they thought about
celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of his founding of the firm with a
trip on the company yacht, soon to be bought, and a gold watch for each of the
seven officers. We leave this comfortable group knowing that they have a lot
of money and can do pretty much anything they want, but sensing their concern
that others see them doing the proper thing and realize that they have arrived
in the circle of the elite.
The
upper middle class couple is looking for a new car. It has to be a Lexus; the
wife’s brother got the bulk of the money from dad’s estate and now drives
a Lexus and she’s darned if she will show up in anything less, and she has
seen an ad for one in Bon Appétit. The husband is a little more
money conscious. They both work, and there is a fair amount of money in the
household, but they spend a lot too, on the conveniences that one needs when
no one is at home during the day – meals out in restaurants, two cars,
birthday parties planned by a paid consultant, and all the latest appliances
to shorten the time it takes to do the necessary household chores. We feel a
bit more tension in this group, the knowledge that they are not really upper
class, the desire to be seen as intelligent and self-assured in their purchase
decisions. They speak openly of their plans to save for their children’s
university education, and for their own retirement.
The
middle class, “the solid, dependable middle-class” they remind us, is
getting ready for school and work in the morning, the mother making pancakes
and the father telling the boys to behave while they squabble over who gets to
use the family’s one computer. The wife has a new recipe from Family
Circle that she wants to try out tonight so she checks it with her
husband first before he leaves for work in the family’s six-year-old car.
She has also seen an an ad in Family Circle for a new self-monitoring
water filter and since they have the new baby, she asks her husband if maybe
they should get one to try to be sure their water is as pure as it can be.
For
the working class, times are tough. They have never been particularly fond of
strange new things and they tend to stay pretty close to home, taking a
vacation at a nearby rented lake cottage rather than travelling afar, so it is
not too much of a hardship, but still, they would like to have a few more of
the material things in life. This does not mean that they envy the higher
classes in any way. The discussion around the kitchen table, a working class
wife and her next-door neighbor (the husbands are at work) are having coffee,
centers on how hard it must be for the middle class who is always trying to
pretend they are something they are not. They are looking at the magazine, Woman’s
Life that she borrowed from her mother. She can afford to buy a magazine,
but every penny saved helps and she often borrows magazines from her mom’s
when she visits, as she always does, two, three times a week. Mom often sits
for the kids; this family depends on each other for support, and orients
itself toward the community, not the outside world. The kids are the single
most important thing in this woman’s life, followed closely by her husband,
whose rules and ways she follows absolutely, even if she does occasionally
make a little fun of him when she’s with her girlfriends. These women know
their lot in life; they are not unhappy, but they know their place. These
women, who try to please their husbands and who have borne children, are drawn
by a whole page of ads for a product that reduces stretch marks, one that
guarantees a sexier bust-line, and another for growing waist-length hair.
The
lower-but-not-lowest presenting group happens to have only women, and the
women are all we see in these families – two housewives getting together in
the apartment building where they live in assisted housing, to pore over one’s
copy of the romance magazine, True Story. They too are talking about
jewellery, just like the New Yorker family, but instead of $300, their
price range is $3.95 and she’s not sure she can afford to send away for it.
She’s impressed when another friend from the neighborhood shows up with an
excellent buy on a new dress from the discount store, twenty dollars, which is
a lot, but it’s pretty and feminine and will make her husband look twice, so
it was worth it. She loves the story in the magazine by the woman who says,
“My husband says my fat is sexy.” These women are very family oriented;
although we never see the men, we hear about them in every single sentence,
from “I’ll check with Donny tonight,” to “What am I going to get John
for Valentine’s Day,” to “just give him a beer and he’ll be happy!”
The
lowest of the low, the real lower-lower class, is always the one that moves me
the most. The class usually reacts strongly to their presentation, and they
set the tone as we move into the post-exercise discussion. I have never had a
group let me down on this one. This time, they stand, four of them, at the
front of the room, holding placards that read,
| I
don’t need to eat cotton candy in Paris; I need a hot meal.
|
|
I don’t need a gold watch; I need a place to sleep.
|
|
I don’t need a new car; I need a token to get to an interview for a job I
know I’ll never get.
|
|
I make you uncomfortable when you see me.
|
They stand there and then they flip their placards over and we read, one word
on each placard as they stand in their row, “DO/ YOU/ SEE/ ME?” and it is
a little difficult for me to break the silence and get the summing-up started
because I have tears in my eyes.
Summing
Up
This
exercise is not for everyone; you have to have a real commitment to address
the issues. More than just a willingness, you have to possess a driving desire
to do it, because it can be tough in many ways. You have to know your students
well to know how far you can push them. You have to be comfortable enough to
let your own background speak because if the professor happens to be from a
family other than the traditional old-style elite academic class, this can
break ice that otherwise might remain forever frozen. You have to hand over a
lot to the students. This is a class for which I arrive with no notes. I carry
only the magazines and the written instruction slips; where we go with the
discussion depends entirely on what the groups produce. You have to trust your
students. It takes some guts to stand up before a group of business students
and insist that they will look at an issue that makes most of them very
uncomfortable. You have to trust their willingness to take the stage and
perform, but I have never had a group ever that did not warm up to the fun of
performing a role on stage. You also must trust their willingness to take the
assignment seriously. I have never yet had a single person in any one of my
classrooms abuse the exercise in any way, but I can imagine it could happen.
An insensitive group could make any of these social class families look like
idiots, and an unfeeling group could ruin the whole approach if they were to
take the lower-lowers in a direction of offensive slapstick comedy.
It
helps if you have a small class where you know your students well, but I have
done this exercise successfully in a class as large as eighty. It helps if you
do it later in the course, more than half way through, after the first exam is
past, and they are comfortable with you and your classroom style, and you know
something about them and can call on them by name. It is really nice if you
can count off quickly beforehand and fix it so that a student who you know to
be open and emotive will end up in Group 7, but I only got to do this once,
when I had the privilege to teach the course with only twelve students.
Teaching
ethics in a business classroom is never easy and it appears particularly
difficult to raise issues of social class. We rely on our students to bring a
lot to the classroom, but they still tend to look to us for “permission”
to talk about the difficult issues that no one wants to address. You
must be prepared for challenging questions. The last time I did this a student
asked how I could justify marketers spending their time developing ads for
people who cannot buy anything. From this evolved a discussion of the
realities of business, that indeed one cannot spend the firm’s money to
develop an ad to sell a car to the homeless, but that faced with the realities
of human suffering and in the interest of human compassion, perhaps that
marketer could donate professional expertise and time to an organization
working to help the homeless.
As
the gap between the haves and the have-nots grows wider in this country, we
face an increasingly strong obligation to consider issues of social justice in
our classrooms. Gender, race and class, and their ensuing problems of
prejudice and stereotyping are prominent among those issues. Most of us have
managed the job of generating discussion of issues of gender and race in
business. I hope that this description of a classroom exercise to bring alive
the issue of social class will ensure that your students never say to you, “I
thought you wouldn’t want to hear about it."
References
About
Women and Marketing
(1997) Stamford, Connecticut: Softline Information, Inc., monthly computer
laser optical disc serial, as of August 1997.
Browne,
Beverly A. (1998) “Gender Stereotypes in Advertising on Children’s
Television in the 1990’s: A Cross-
National Analysis.” The Journal of
Advertising 27 (1 Spring): 83-96.
Bush,
Alan J., Rachel Smith, and Craig Martin (1999)“The Influence of Consumer
Socialization Variables
on Attitude Toward Advertising: A Comparison of
African-Americans and Caucasians.” Journal
of Advertising
28(3 Fall): 13-24.
Coleman,
Richard P. (1983) “The Continuing Significance of Social Class to Marketing.”
Journal of Consumer
Research 10 (December): 265-80.
Green,
Corliss L. (1999) “Ethnic Evaluations of Advertising: Interaction Effects of
Strength of Ethnic
Identification, Media Placement, and Degree of Racial Composition.” Journal of Advertising
28(1 Spring): 49
-64.
Grier,
Sonya A. and Anne M. Brumbaugh (1999) “Noticing Cultural Differences: Ad
Meanings Created By
Target and Non-Target Markets.” Journal
of Advertising
28 (1 Spring): 79-93
Helgesen,
Sally (1990) The Female Advantage: Women’s Ways of Leadership. New
York: Doubleday
Currency.
Holland,
Jonna and James W. Gentry (1999) “Ethnic Consumer Reaction to Targeted
Marketing: A Theory
of Intercultural Accommodation.” Journal
of Advertising 28
(1 Spring): 65-77.
Jones,
Marilyn Y., Andrea J.S. Stanaland, and Betsy D. Gelb (1998) “Beefcake and
Cheesecake: Insights for
Advertisers.” 27 (2 – Summer).
Kates, Steven (2000) “Out of the Closet and Out on the Street!: Gay Men
and Their Brand Relationships.”
Psychology and Marketing 17(6):493-513.
Kates, Steven (1998) Twenty Million New Customers: Understanding Gay Men's
Consumer Behavior. New
York: Harrington Park Press.
Kates, Steven and Glenda Shaw-Garlock (1999) “The Ever Entangling Web: A
Study of Ideologies and
Discourses in Advertising to Women.” Journal of
Advertising 28 (2 Summer).
Kilbourne, Jean (1999) “Deadly Persuasion: Why Women and Girls Must Fight
the Addictive Power of
Advertising.” Library Journal (October 15).
Lavine, Howard and Donna Sweeney (1999) “Depicting Women as Sex Objects in
Television Advertising:
Effects on Body Dissatisfaction.” Personality and
Social Psychology Bulletin 25 (8 – August): 1049, 10.
Marketing
to Women (1999) New York:
EPM Communications, monthly serial as of May 1999.
O’Brien,
Virginia (1998) Success On Our Own Terms: Tales of Extraordinary, Ordinary
Business Women. New
York: John Wiley.
Perkins, Lesley A., Kecia M. Thomas, and Gail A. Taylor (2000) “Advertising
and Recruitment: Marketing to
Minorities.” Psychology and Marketing
(March).
Rainwater, Lee, Richard P. Coleman, and Gerald Handel (1959) Workingman’s
Wife: Her Personality, World,
and Life Style. New York: Oceana Publications: 238 pages.
Rudd, Nancy A. (1996) “Excuse Me, Sir, May I Help You and Your Boyfriend?”
in Gays, Lesbians, and
Consumer Behaviour: Theory, Practice, and Research Issues in Marketing.
New York: Haworth Press.
Shields, Vickie (1997) “Selling The Sex That Sells: Mapping the Evolution of
Gender Advertising.”
Communications Yearbook 20:71.
Solomon, Michael (1996) Consumer Behavior: Buying, Having, and Being
Third Edition. New York: Allyn and
Bacon.
Stern, Barbara B. (1999) “Gender and Multicultural Issues in Advertising:
Stages on the Research Highway.”
Journal of Advertising 28 (1 – Spring).
Taylor,
Charles R. and Barbara B. Stern (1997) “Asian-Americans: Television
Advertising and the "Model
Minority Stereotype.” Journal
of Advertising
28 (26 Summer) 47-61.
Telford,
Anne (1997) “Sex(ism) in Advertising – Sex Sells, But What Are We Buying?”
Communication Arts 39
(5): 84.
Wardlow, Daniel L. (1996) “We’re Here, We’re Queer, and We’re Going
Shopping!” in Gays, Lesbians, and
Consumer Behaviour: Theory, Practice, and Research Issues in Marketing.
New York: Haworth Press.
Warner, W. Lloyd (1941) The Social Life of a Modern Community. New
Haven, Connecticut: Yale University
Press.
Warner, W. Lloyd, Marchia Meeker, and Kenneth Eells (1949) Social Class in
America: A Manual of
Procedure for the Measurement of Social Status. Chicago: Science
Research Associates: 274 pages.
Appendix:
The Magazines and The Ads
|
Upper Upper Class:
|
|
Lower
Upper Class:
|
|
Upper
Middle Class:
|
|
Middle
Class:
|
|
Working
Class:
|
|
Lower
Class:
|
|
|
