Age

After listening to the wiki about age subcultures and cohorts, I started to think about how things have changed in my life.  I feel like age cohorts used to be a lot stronger when you were young.  This could be because of schooling or it could even have a big part of how your parents controlled who you hung out with growing up.

I feel like a little bit of both could have influenced us hanging out with kids of similar ages, and in turn end up having similar experiences and memories.

When we were young schooling kept us pretty separated into age groups because of the grade we were in but as we got older we started taking classes with younger or older people and started mingling with other age groups much more often.  Also sports could have a big effect on this especially in the high school age when you start playing with everyone within a 4 year age span.

And now that I am in college I find myself getting along and hanging out with kids who are substantially older than me and also kids who are a couple years younger than me.  I suppose all of our interests sort of "peaked" and we can get a long with a larger variety of age groups.

Groups

When it comes to determining what kind of "group" I associate myself with, things start to get a little complicated.  I seem to be someone who can usually get along with and at least accept pretty much anyone.  Some people look at my personality as friendly and fun to hang out with but there are others that think I am too nice and I need to have better judgement or be more "picky" of who I hang out with.

The types of people that I hang out with can fit into almost any category.  Sometimes I am ridiculed by some of my friends for hanging out with others.

This problem most often occurs when I am friends with two people who dont get along together and when I try to hang out with both of them it ends up backfiring on everyone and none of us end up seeing each other.

My friends arent necessarily different because of what they directly consume or purchase but more along the lines of activities that they are interested in which in turn eventually dictates what they may or not consume in the overall picture.

Brand Personality

Until today I never really thought of my products as having their own "personality".  But now that I think about it, there are a lot at attributes that I can see some of my most prized possessions having.

One example of this is giving some of my equipment images of useful reliable friends.  Now that I think about it I consider my skis to be my "companions" out on the mountain. When it is just me and them flying down the hill dodging obstacles and getting me safely to the bottom.  Another one of these is I used to think of my football cleats and pads as "protectors" that would help me stay safe and play well out on the field.

Also now that I sit back and think about giving certain products personalities,  these certain products tend to be some of my most prized possessions and I use them more often then any other products that I own.

Exposure to everything

Now that I look back on being exposed to advertisements, I have realized that everywhere I look there is an advertisement for some type of product or a promotion for a certain company.

I dont realize it right away but the images or sounds stick in my head.  If I see catch a glimpse of an ad one, I wont realize it until I see the product or service that was being advertised again a few days later and I feel like Ive seen it before and it makes me think back to what the advertisement was.

I think this has a huge part to do with subliminal perception.  The stimulus of these particular ads is just below my level of awareness to the point where I dont realize it right away but I still remember it and recognize the company or product at a later time.

This is almost a scary thought of how observant our brains really are.  They must be working overtime to take in all of these advertisements.....

Image credit  :  http://glowstik.ca/too_much_advertising.jpg

Sex Role Identities in todays world

After hearing the Wikis about gender-bending products and androgyny, I started to realize that a lot of ads today are more targeted towards people who possess both masculine and feminine traits.  There has been an increasing number of these and I have started to notice more and more men for example wearing tight pants and make-up.

These advertisements must be very convincing or maybe these people are confused on their sex or they might find this style attractive (cause there is no way they think those clothes are comfortable).

I guess Ive never really been into the emo or gothic ways.  I mean Ive never even stepped foot into a hot topic store in my life.

NEEDS

During this past week I have been paying much more attention to what I actually need in my life and what I have due to a want that I had at one point.  I always have thought of myself as a pretty low maintenance person and Im not always out buying new things because they are popular or I like the way it looks.  But the more thinking I did about what is actually needed in order to survive (in todays day), it soon came to my attention that I do in fact have quite a few things that I dont need.  As I acquired all of these objects I came to the conclusion that they must have been something that I wanted at a certain point in time and I no longer use or I dont use it as often anymore.  It was fairly simple for  me to pick out was a "need" and what I wanted at one time.  The things that I "need" are things that I use on an every day basis or at least a few times a week.

After thinking back on the reading in the book I realized that in today day and age we need much more than just food, shelter, and water to "survive".  I say this because yeah sure we could actually survive with these very basic items but I feel like there are a lot of people out there that think they would die if someone took their smartphone away from them.

I think the same goes for other objects like computers, cars(or transportation), and even forms of entertainment like video games and television.  These things are not needs at all, they are wants that we as humans have become very dependent on as technology has advanced within the last decade.

Emotions and Advertisements

After doing the writing assignment in class last week about using emotions as a tool in advertisements, I really started to notice how certain commercial or ads make me feel.  One commercial that really stood out to me as an attempt to use emotions to catch consumer's attention was an ad during the super bowl yesterday.  It was the Coke commercials with the polar bears.  I think this could grab people's emotions because they were going for the "cute and cuddly" image during these ads.

Aside from TV commercials there are some pretty frightening billboards along the sides of the freeways nowadays.  The ads that really hit my emotions and gross me out are the Meth billboards.  They are just all around disturbing and really hit the nail on the head when it comes to scaring someone out of trying Meth or anything like that