Culture and Consumption II: Markets, Meaning, and Brand Management

Front Cover
Indiana University Press, 2005 - Business & Economics - 226 pages
A follow-up to Grant McCracken's groundbreaking Culture and Consumption, this new book trades the usual platitudes about the consumer society for a more detailed, exacting anthropological treatment. Each section of the book pairs a brief essay with an academic article. The essay is designed for a quick, provocative glimpse of the topic; the article provides a deeper anthropological treatment. The book opens with a broadside against the now thoroughly conventionalized attack on the consumer culture. Essays follow on homes, cars, people, and social mobility; celebrities, consumerism, and self-invention; museums and the power of objects; the anthropology of advertising; and marketing, meaning management, and value. Like McCracken's previous volume, this new book is an engaging, informative, and eye-opening foray into modern consumer culture. several books, including Culture and Consumption (IUP, 1988), Big Hair, and Transformation.

From inside the book

Contents

INTRODUCTION
1
Living in the Material World
3
On Oprah
6
HOMES
17
The Drew Bledsoe Paradox The Mysterious Home Economics of Homo economicus
19
Homeyness A Cultural Account of One Constellation of Consumer Goods and Meanings
22
AUTOMOBILES
49
Calling Grease
51
MUSEUMS
117
The Strange Power of Uncle Meyers Wallet
119
Culture and culture at the Royal Ontario Museum An Anthropological Approach to a Marketing Problem
122
ADVERTISING
159
Taking Madison Avenue by Storm
161
Advertising Meaning versus Information
162
MARKETING
171
Sarah Zupko Meet Mrs Woolworth
173

When Cars Could Fly Raymond Loewy John Kenneth Galbraith and the 1954 Buick
53
CELEBRITIES
91
Marilyn Monroe Inventor of Blondness
93
Who Is the Celebrity Endorser? Cultural Foundations of the Endorsement Process
97
MeaningManagement An Anthropological Approach to the Creation of Value
175
Bibliography
193
Index
221
Copyright

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Page 201 - Remembering the Future: The New York World's Fair From 1939 to 1964 iNew York: Rizzoli, 19891, 32-35.
Page 211 - Comparing the Purchasing Power of Money in the United States (or Colonies) from 1665 to Any Other Year Including the Present," Economic History Services, 2001, URL: http://www.eh.net/ hmit/ppowerusd/.

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