How is Magazine Publishing Part of the Consumer Culture - Literature review Example

March 21, 2006 How is Magazine Publishing Part of the Consumer Culture? The advent of media culture in the latter part of the twentieth century saw the emergence of magazine publishing as a powerful force in consumer culture. In his book, Magazine-made America, David Abrahamson noted that magazines are not only self-contained artifacts, but important products and catalysts of the social and economic realities of their times. It must be noted that in the period of rapid cultural transformation of the Western society, where television and radio were yet to find their mark, it was the publishing industry - magazine, newspaper, periodicals and books – which cultivated the influence that media is to wield over consumer culture. A study on the complexities of setting up or launching a magazine can provide a substantive insight as to how it figures in the consumer culture equation. But first, we need to define consumer culture and its aspects to establish their relationship. Consumerism Consumer culture or sometimes referred to as the culture of consumption or consumerism is said to be identified with the Western culture and capitalism. It was Karl Marx who described consumer culture, though critically, as the tendency of people to identify strongly with products or services they consume. There are loads of criticisms thrown upon consumer culture but we quote Don Slater (1997) as he introduced his book, Consumer Culture and Modernity, “there is nothing trivial about consumer culture – though arguments that it reduces social life to a trivial materialism have been common currency for several centuries. Rather, the great issue about consumer culture is the way in which it connects up central questions about how we should or want to live with questions about how society is organised – and does so at the level of everyday life: the material and symbolic structure of the places we live in and how we live in them; the food we eat and clothes we wear; the scarcities and inequities we suffer; the activities open to us in our ‘free time’; the unfree nature of much of our time… Consumer culture is largely mundane, yet that mundanity is where we live and breathe, and increasingly so as we sense that the public sphere of life has become a consumable spectacle that is ever more remote as a sphere of direct action.” It is his argument that consumption is always a cultural process and that consumer culture is unique and specific. Some sociologists refer to consumer culture as a form of material culture – a study of human activity, particularly that of the person-thing relationships. Celia Lury is one of these sociologists who believe that such mindset would differentiate consumer culture to consumption. This is helpful “because it implies that the material and the cultural are always combined in specific relationships.” (Lury, 1996) Drawing from this notion, Lury proposed that consumer culture is in fact a development of “material culture that has emerged in Euro-American societies during the second half of the twentieth century.” (Lury, 1996) In the contemporary times, the consumer culture has been flourishing and the media is in the pinnacle of it. Lury (1996) expounds on this subject in her book, Consumer Culture, where she pointed several factors that shape consumer culture. These factors underscore the importance of magazine publishing as a catalyst in marketing and consumption. These are: 1. circulation of commodities; 2. changes in the interrelationship of different systems of production and consumption or regimes of value; 3. independence of practices of consumption from those of production, and the growing power and authority that this gives consumers; and 4. consumption or use of cultural objects or goods. We take this opportunity to specifically highlight the fourth factor, for magazine publishing comes in as a cultural object with an irreducible role in the life of those who use and patronize it. One is reminded by Paul du Gay (1997) who introduced the concept of “cultural economy and that our society is “hybrid’. “The economic is a crucial domain of existence in modern societies, and it too is thoroughly saturated with culture.” (du Gay, 1997) According to him, cultural goods continue to saturate the market, and “that they are deliberately inscribed with particular meanings and associations as they are produced and circulated in a conscious attempt to generate desire.” (du Gay, 1997) Let us analyze Thorstein Veblen’s (1899) now-common concepts of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure and further illustrate the point. Conspicuous consumption according to Veblen is the waste of money to display a higher status than others. For example, he said that instead of using a cheaper and, sometimes, better-crafted kitchen utensils, people have taken to using silver-made ones. On one hand, Veblen’s definition of conspicuous leisure is that waste of time by people to give them higher status. He cited the concept of the “gentleman,” who studies such things as philosophy and fine arts, which have no economic value in themselves. We see modern examples of this concepts when people shop for certain brands and shop in some stores who are perceived as “high class” than others although they can hardly afford it. In doing so, people think they are increasing their respectability and raising their level in the social hierarchy. There is a famous research called Middletown Studies by Robert Staughton Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd (1929) which detailed how poor families are willing to forego basic necessities such as food and clothing just to maintain a certain level of conspicuous consumption. M. J. Lee (1993) reinforced Veblen’s concepts noting that “today’s consumer society represents a greatly impoverished way of life. This sense of impoverishment appears to stem from the commodity-form.” He stated that from a commodity’s production to its exchange, it passes to the realm of everyday life and in the process, the commodity has been transformed “from a commodity for consumption to an object of consumption [where] the commodity is itself transformed from an ideal use-value and imagined meaning into the material and symbolic object of lived experience.” (Lee, p. 25) Magazine publishing, as a form a media industry which is anchored in consumerism, is largely responsible for this phenomenon in the Western societies. The “development of a range of media institutions… the processes of production, storage and circulation have been transformed in certain ways. These processes have been caught up in a series of institutional developments which are characteristic of the modern era. By virtue of these developments, symbolic forms have been produced and reproduced on an ever-expanding scale; they have been turned into commodities which can be bought and sold on a market; they have become accessible to individuals who are widely dispersed in space and time. In a profound and irreversible way, the development of the media has transformed the nature of symbolic production and exchange in the modern world.”(Thompson, 1996; 1) We see further manifestation of the transformative effect of magazine publishing over society in such phenomenon as the empowerment of women in the consumer culture and how it dealt the final blow on the concept of publishing as a “gentlemanly” profession. Peiss (1998) in a lecture entitled, American Women and the Making of Modern Consumer Culture, stressed that “the self-conscious identification of women with consumerism… was distinctive, linked to the growing sense of consumption involved not only in the purchase of goods but an entire way of life.” She referred to the coding of consumption as a female pursuit and is considered to be a productive, not like what popular notions allude to as frivolous or wasteful. History tells us that it was the woman consumer who responded first and more enthusiastically to the new consumer economy. It has long been established, for example, that the past American woman was the quintessential consumer with how she bought, bartered and used goods. Thus it is not surprising that the publications fostered a female culture of consumption, which eventually led to the recognition of the importance of the women’s role in marketing. As years passed, middle-class women became newly defined segment of the market. It was Bernice Kanner in her book, How to Reach the Hearts and Mind of Today’s Most Coveted Consumer – Women, who put it best: “The implication of that realization have transformed the marketing world and, by extension, our cultural landscape.” It is interesting how magazines and self-help books actually dictate these powerful consumers what, where, when, how and why to buy! Consider: Today women comprise 51 percent of the US population and according to Kanner (2004, p.5), they control $6 trillion in buying power annually. She referred to the statistics compiled by Women’s Entertainment Network, finally concluding that “all told, women make 88 percent of the retail purchases in America.” Wasn’t it the legendary adman David Ogilvy who said that “The consumer is not a moron. She’s your wife.” Niche Publishing The advent of market segmentation produced a trend in magazine publishing called niche-market publication. As opposed to the Fordist mass-market publications, whose target readership encompasses all kinds of people, niche-market publications caters to a select few – a particular group of customers, which are loyal and, thus, a dependable market. The niche-market publications’ aim to target the sense of identity among their target audience has been very successful and has been a major force in the development of lifestyle branding (which will have to be tackled in the preceding paragraphs). Cherryl Woodard teaches us that “most new publications today are designed to address a very targeted audience, at least in part because its easier and cheaper to understand their needs than it is to reach a mass audience. Also, many niche customers spend more money per capita than the general reading population, and so they have the potential to support a much more profitable publishing business. Finally, many advertisers like to reach readers who match a specific demographic profile (accountants, librarians or swimmers, for example), so niche publishers can usually charge higher per reader advertising rates than can their mass market counterparts. For example, Architectural Digest has a more affluent audience than Good Housekeeping, so they charge much more for their ads.” So how does a magazine publication target their audience and eventually form an identity? Identity Identity formation starts with lifestyle branding. If a magazine has selected its audience, it then pursues the kind of branding that will make potential reader identify. Let’s take for example Esquire magazine. It is marketed as men’s magazine and its identity is successfully crafted as that of both avant-garde and refined. If you are an Esquire subscriber, you must feel identified with the kind of lifestyle that the magazine represents. It is worth noting that your lifestyle need not necessarily be avant-garde nor refined for what’s important is you aspire for that kind of lifestyle. This is no different with the lifestyle branding of Polo Ralph Lauren. Its identity is based on the upper-class country club, while its stores bare more than a hint of luxury with its rich wood paneling. Ralph Lauren’s merchandising and advertising strategy is peppered with photographs of wealthy people. The idea is that when one buys a Ralph Lauren, there is a promise of a lifestyle not unlike what its brand represents. For magazine publishing, thematic contents and style is important in this aspect to initiate, build and maintain that “identity-relationship” with an audience. Such relationship, according to Woodard, is always built on trust and predictability. For example, she takes us to the “Talk of the Town” section of the New Yorker Magazine which “is always located in the same place and written in the same slightly irreverent tongue-in-cheek style readers have come to expect.” Also, in creating a lifestyle brand, D. B. Holt (2004) provides us an insight with these words: “people identify strongly with cultural icons and often rely on these symbols in their everyday life. Icons serve as society’s foundational compass points… With modern mass communication… we increasingly inhabit a world in which the circulation of cultural icons has become a central economic activity.” Since a lifestyle brand must embody the values and aspirations of a group or culture, it is a must for a magazine to seek to speak to the core identity of its customers by using cultural icons or, as some have achieved, by turning itself into a cultural icon. Magazine and Advertising It has been said in advertising that emotional appeal is one of the most effective ways to persuade consumers to buy commodities. Advertising experts, as what Holt (2004) observed, like to think that brands are psychological phenomenon which stems from the perceptions of individual consumers. This is one big reason why magazine publications have been very important avenues for advertising outfits in their campaigns. It is the magazine, particularly niche-market publications, which provides a face and personality to their consumers. Gilbert A Churchill (1988, p. 185-186) underscores how marketers are interested in personality for it helps in shaping the way “consumers and others behave in the marketing process.” That is why today there is a synergy between magazine publishing and the advertising industry that one cannot be imagined without the other. As a matter of fact, people don’t exclusively look to magazines for reading articles anymore. They turn to magazines for the latest trends and commodities available and, of course, review about them. If one is to critique a contemporary magazine, one cannot mistake the layout which Kathy Peiss (1998) mentioned as something that reinforces the reader’s identity as a consumer. In reading, for instance, you will notice that readers are forced to turn to pages where advertisements are placed. “Ads for cornflakes or baking soda were strategically placed next to cooking columns… Even short stories [and magazine articles] reinforced consumerism by frequently mentioning brand names, describing clothing styles, and stressing the household comfort possible through the purchase of goods.” (Peiss, 1998, p. 3) This is where the “fetishization” of goods, which Marx constantly referred to, come into play. Media Culture It is very important to note that magazine publishing is part of an industry – the communication media. In his book called, Media Culture: Cultural Studies, Identity and Politics Between the Modern and Postmodern, Douglas Kellner (1998, p. 16) said that the contemporary communication media “is a largely commercial form of culture, produced for profit, and disseminated in the form of commodities.” The consequences of these commercialization and commodification are what bind the magazine publishing to consumer culture. To quote Kellner: “ production for profit means that executives of the culture industries attempt to produce artifacts that will be popular, that will sell… In many cases, this means production of lowest common denominator artifacts that will not offend mass audiences and that will attract a maximum of customers. But precisely the need to sell their artifacts means that the products of the culture industries must resonate to social experience… which may shock, break with conventions, contain social critique, or articulate current ideas that may be the product of progressive social movements.” As mentioned earlier, magazine publishing is an arena and an intermediary in the interrelationship within a robust capitalist economy. We also see the significance as magazines; collectively keep the cultural symbols alive – symbols which they help create. It was Holt who emphasized that these symbols come to represent a particular kind of story – an identity myth – that consumers use to address their own identity desires and anxieties. They “have extraordinary value because they carry a heavy symbolic load for their most enthusiastic consumers.” And this shapes consumer culture more than any other. References Abrahamson, David, (1996). Magazine-Made America: The Cultural Transformation of the Postwar Periodical, Hampton Press Incorporated du Gay, Paul, (1997). Production of Culture/Cultures of Production, Sage Publications Ltd., p. 5 Churchill, Gilbert A., (1988). Basic Marketing Research, The Dryden Press, p. 185-186 Holt, D. B., (2004) How Brands Become Icons: The Principle of Cultural Branding, Harvard Business School Press Kanner, Bernice, (2004). Pocketbook Power: How to Reach the Hearts and Minds of Todays Most Coveted Consumer - Women, McGraw-Hill (1 edition), p. 5 Kellner, Douglas, (1995). Media Culture: Cultural Studies, Identity and Politics Between the Modern and Postmodern, Roetledge, 1st edition Lee, M.J. (ed) (1993). Consumer Culture Reborn: The Cultural Politics of Consumption, p. 25 Lury, Celia, Consumer Culture, Rutgers University Press (1996) Peiss, Kathy, (1998). American Women and the Making of Modern Consumer Culture. Retrieved March 20, 2006, from http://www.albany.edu/jmmh/vol1no1/peiss-text.html Robert Staughton Lynd, (1929). Middletown: A study in American culture, Harcourt, Brace Slater, Don, (1997). Consumer Culture and modernity, Polity Press (1997) Thompson, John B., (1996). The Media and Modernity: A Social Theory of the Media, Stanford University Press Thornstein, Veblen, (1994) Theory of the Leisure Class (reprint), Dover Publication Woodward, Cherryl. How to Make Newsletters and Magazines that Will Last. Retrieved March 19, 2006, from http://www.publishingbiz.com/html/article_pub_success.html Read More