Sociology in Marketing - Assignment Example

Social class refers to the way people get grouped depending on their wealth, influence and social respect. This, therefore, means that the social class can be based on the objective of classification, how people think of others and the reputation that an individual claims or deserves.
This is different from income in that a person may have high-income levels and yet his or her reputation is low within the society. Therefore, a person’s income is just one of the factors that can determine social class but it is not the social class itself.

1. Achieved and Ascribed Status
An achieved status refers to the status that is acquired through struggle and merit. This could be the status related to educational status or research achievements. It is therefore related to skills, abilities and efforts. On the other hand, an ascribed status is considered to be beyond the person’s control. This is based, therefore on attributes of a person that are fixed and natural. The classes related to sex, race and deformity are ascribed rather than acquired.

2. Income and Social Class
Income is just one of the factors likely to be considered in describing social class. However earning more money does not always lead to a change in social class (Wood, 2012). This is because influence, success and the impact that a person has in society are always stronger indicators of social class than income. Therefore, a person may be earning a lot of money but his or her reputation and influence remain the same.

3. “Old Money” versus “Nouveau Riche Consumers
Rich consumers can be grouped as old money or nouveau depending on how they display their wealth. For old money-rich consumers, their wealth remains unseen. They are rich but do not care to display conspicuous consumption in any way. The Nouveau, on the other hand, are those rich consumers who display their spending and consumption with the motive of getting a reputation and a social class upgrade (Wood, 2012). They have symbolic self-completion such as flashy cars to display their wealth.
4. Problems in Measuring Social Class

In most contexts, the term social class is controversial. This means that different people have different definitions of social class. The implication of this, therefore, is that among different people, measuring social class will be different. The problems also arise from the fact that what people consider important indicators of social class differences. For some, income rather than influence or reputation is important (Wood, 2012). This means that among different groups of people, a single person may be considered to belong to different social classes depending on what seems important to the group of people. Read More