This essay examines women’s makeup practices and cultural tension between inner and outer constructs of beauty in the United States. Ethnographic research reveals competing discourses of beauty in ...the embodied experience of women, compared to images of beauty as promoted in advertising by the cosmetic industry. While the discourse of women’s embodied experience emphasizes inner worth and connecting internal and external self, cosmetic advertising focuses on physical appearance and critical gaze of self and others. Women incorporate advertising discourses, not yielding to them or resisting them, but rather transforming them to suit their needs in using makeup products for creating confidence and preparing themselves for engagement in the world. At the same time, paradoxical adherence to advertising discourse indicates that gender inequality remains an ideological force in our society. Processes of ritualization produce and legitimize hierarchies of power in society. In this way, women’s relationships to their bodies, commoditized products, and makeup practices are transformative as they are paradoxical.
Social critics and scholars have disparaged advertising for its role in negatively influencing social relations in American society. This paper suggests the contrary. Advertising can potentially ...reflect positive social relations among people, enhance social bonds, and ideally, inspire positive value exchange between consumers and producers. To support this argument, the case study presented here offers qualitative research that investigated consumer home use of a prepared soup brand. Ethnographic research led to insights into the creative use of soup among women and the joyful connections it fostered among family members eating prepared meals together. The positive value of consumer–brand relationships discovered by qualitative research, ultimately helped produce a successful advertising campaign that reflected positive social bonds among consumers.
Creativity in the kitchen is a normal part of everyday life in US homes. This article explores improvisation by mothers in home cooking as exemplary of the creative process. Western analyses of ...creativity have typically examined innovation after-the-fact, and showed how something innovative constitutes something novel that is discontinuous with the past. This is reading creativity “backward” in terms of outcomes. We provide a “forward” reading of creativity that examines the conditions and constraints which give rise to improvisation. This offers insight into cooking as a form of personal and social creativity that is grounded in the familiar, and infused with cultural values of self-expression and pleasing the family. This article thus discusses how improvisation is shaped by individual agency and social structure. Creative behavior is limited yet inspired by the material, social and symbolic constraints of the context in which it occurs, including in this case the broader context of the politics of food. Our forward reading of creative cooking practices indicates how cultural production leads to social change through the mediation of agency and structure.
Travel photos inform and inspire consumers by conveying a first-hand destination experience. Despite the proliferation of consumer-generated travel photos in online travel review sites, ...deconstructing the effects of photos on consumer engagement remains a challenge to the tourism industry. We provide a framework to process and interpret various photographic elements on user engagement using deep learning algorithms. We posit that a photo can invoke consumers’ subjective interpretations of photos representing authentic, creative, or emotional dimensions of the destination experience. A structured crowdsourced categorization process was deployed to measure the interpretive dimensions of the photos. The objects in photographs are identified using a novel deep learning algorithm for controls. We use narrative framing concepts to theorize their influence on user engagement in an online travel review site setting. Relevant three sets of hypotheses are tested using a large dataset of photo-based travel reviews sampled between 2012 and 2014. A negative zero-inflated binomial regression is used to estimate the effect of subjective interpretation of photos on user engagement, accounting for overdispersed excess zeros associated with count outcomes. Results support the hypotheses. The additional analyses explore other plausible influential attributes to user engagements to complement our main findings. We discuss the theoretical contributions to the online-image-persuasion stream of research and practical implications for online tourist review sites.
Examining theory and practice, Advertising and Anthropology is a lively and important contribution to the study of organizational culture, consumption practices, marketing to consumers and the ...production of creativity in corporate settings. The chapters reflect the authors' extensive lived experienced as professionals in the advertising business and marketing research industry. Essays analyze internal agency and client meetings, competitive pressures and professional relationships and include multiple case studies. The authors describe the structure, function and process of advertising agency work, the mediation and formation of creativity, the centrality of human interactions in agency work, the production of consumer insights and industry ethics. Throughout the book, the authors offer concrete advice for practitioners.Advertising and Anthropology is written by anthropologists for anthropologists as well as students and scholars interested in advertising and related industries such as marketing, marketing research and design.
All major US sports are high in superstitions because motivation to win is high and the game outcome is uncertain; athletes purportedly engage in superstitious behavior to reduce anxiety, build ...individual confidence and cope with uncertainty. Sports is also a male domain, where men traditionally display individual, masculine achievement. We observe magic rituals practiced in a women’s college softball team not as a means to overcome anxiety or display individual prowess, but as a way to blend creative individuality into the unity of the social whole, which manifests as a social narrative of the team. We analyze individual and team magic in two forms –institutionalized magic and individual superstitions – which build idiosyncratic behavior into a collective team dynamic. As such, this essay shows how women use magical power collaboratively. Women on a college softball team partake in practical work and magic, such that participating in magic through empathy and sensing one another creates team identity, allowing the reimagination of forms and outcomes.
In this article, I aim to contribute to the ongoing discussion on the changing public role of anthropology by exploring the rise of branded ethnographic practices in consumer research. I argue that a ...juncture in the "New Economy"—the conjoining of corporate interest in branding, technology, and consumers, with vast social changes—may explain the rapid growth of ethnography for consumer research and predict its future direction. An analysis of branded Propaganda from ethnographic vendors that claim their technology-enhanced methods innovate "classic" anthropological practices discloses the way corporations employ technologically mediated means to focus on the reflexive seif in consumer research. In this analysis, I reveal that technological methodologies are central to the production of branded ethnographic practices, as forms of branding and technology legitimate consumer-corporate flows of interaction. The conclusion raises awareness to the ways in which modern branding practices reconstruct anthropology in public discourse.
Technology enchants our lives by appropriating subjective gaps in human uncertainty and desire with objective results, thus incorporating a sense of wonder and closeness in much of what we do. It ...does this because technology is no longer cold and rational, but warm and aesthetically pleasing in the many devices we use; it performs magically by engaging us sensorially, creating new realities, and bridges objective facts with subjective assumptions in data analysis. As such, it unites and empowers the uncertainties of our social world.
Magic is alive in advertising industries through the organized assemblages of magicians, formulas and rites that perform magically. Creatives (the magicians) employ mystic formulas in creative ...processes and in rites of awards ceremonies and business pitches, where they transform ephemeral ideas into broad marketing campaigns. Transformative ideas are esteemed as agency assets and celebrated of creatives in their names, but are also disseminated as essential tools for building economic value and maintaining client relationships. As such, advertising presents a paradoxical system of exchange which overlays political strategies of power and authority. Advertisers are both producers and distributors of ideas that transform culture but which also sustain practices of status and power that play a major role in reproducing culture.
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