Tag Archives: television

Kitchens of the Future

Posted on August 1, 2011 by natalia.tatishvili

I found on YouTube  a 1956 GM promotional film “Design for dreaming” aimed for the upper-middle class as well as upper class. This film shows us how manufacturers were targeting and selling to only that specific target market. This promotional film is amazing, almost futuristic with specific goal to sell “dream life” to females that can afford it. I was surprised how technologically advanced the “dream kitchen” was in the film. The movie starts with a  white female all dolled up singing around about how she wants to get a break like all men do as she enters this “dream kitchen” and she is about to bake cake. She begins to sing about how she has never  seen a  kitchen like this one and gets into the details by showing how easy is to press different buttons and everything gets done for you. After she finished putting ingredients in the different futuristic appliances she leaves the kitchen and sings “Tic Tock Tic Tock, free to have fun around the clock”. This shows us how manufacturers were focused onto not only selling appliances but the benefits that came with this kitchen such as: free time for leisure activities.

The lady leaves the kitchen and changes her clothes a few times in outfits for tennis, golf and swimming.  The point is to show that, while her cake is baking she has time to do all these activities, after she comes back home her cake is magically ready. I found this film unrealistic even for our times, although maybe it is real in upper classes but I doubt that. In conclusion, this film proves that in 1950’s manufacturers were mainly concerned with female consumers that had enough disposable income, specifically white upper-middle class. I believe, this film is a perfect example of everything we have read in the class about the consumers of the postwar era and the target market before the influence of newly emerged “middle-class” that changed the way manufacturers segmented target audience.

 

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Consumerism and Pop Culture

Posted on July 31, 2011 by ryhan

Pop culture is a very dynamic entity, it decides what’s cool, what’s lame and has the ability to tell people what to buy therefore can be the deciding factor in the financial decisions multi billionaires make. It’s also something that will inevitably change over and over again throughout time. I always wonder who is it really that controls pop culture, because it isn’t something tangible, we can’t hold it in our hands or ask it what the next cool thing is going to be. Pop culture is simply formed of ideas that are shared and filtered through word of mouth and whatever means of communication exist in that period of time whether it be the telephone, written mail, magazines, newspapers, e-mails, etc. Then those ideas get filtered again and picked up by the consumers, whichever idea becomes the most popular will have the most invested, time, interest, and money therefore becoming “cool.”

What was cool in the 50’s and 60’s may not be cool these days, marketing strategies were different, morals were different, ideals were different, and the climate of pop culture was different. It’s amazing to see that there were such blatantly bias/racist advertisements in the past decades of the United States until someone presented the idea that let’s get the most money out of EVERYONE possible no matter what race, or social class, let’s just make some money. I don’t mean to sound like an old man after all I’m only in my early 20’s but back when I was a kid the main consumer demographic was at the age of 18-30 years old. Nowadays it seems like with this new tween wave of consumerism the main demographic is ages 9-12, which is considerably smaller and since when did children have such influence over the financial industry anyway because let’s face it, what’s “cool” is what is going to be making money anyway. I don’t know where this came from and I’m not a big fan of it, but I don’t wish it gone from existence I just would like a reason to all this successful tween consumerism being thrown in my face every time I turn on the television. Again I’ll just chalk it up to the ever changing entity of pop culture and what was cool and okay to do back then is different now. I posted a YouTube video of an old Jell-O commercial that seems questionable if it were on the air today but again this is pop culture in the 1960’s for you guys. It can be considered a stereotypical and offensive commercial to people so I’m just putting that out there for anyone who clicks the YouTube video.

Take Care,

Ryhan Ahmad

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