StudyQA — Master: Consumption, Culture and Marketing

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Description Contents Requirements

This newly launched MA in Consumption, Culture & Marketing is an interdisciplinary masters programme that draws together content and teaching from the subject areas of marketing and sociology. The programme explores claims that our contemporary world can be best understood as a consumer society and a brand culture and explores how marketing and consumerism increasingly define our experiences, social relationships and civic infrastructure. As such we seek to analyse marketing behaviour with a view to better understand how it functions as a determinative mode of production and mediation whose influence reaches well beyond spheres of consumer behaviour and marketing management and into the realms of politics, culture and the environment.

You will study three core units and and three elective units (one in Marketing and one in Sociology) over the first two terms. In the third term you will complete a dissertation.

Core course units:

Consumers & Brands

You will explore current ideas within marketing and consumption scholarship and practice regarding one of the most centrally important aspects of contemporary commercial and cultural practice; how consumers consume brands. As the centrality of brands to commercial practice and everyday living becomes increasingly evident, there is a strong focus on critical engagement, and an eclectic view of branding and consumption theory, incorporating current thinking on the strategic management of brands, consumer behaviour and its role within general marketing practice is adopted. In addition, recent theoretical formulations concerning brand culture and consumer culture and, accordingly, how personal experiences, relationships, identities are partly organised and mediated by the consumption of brands and their immanence in a constantly evolving symbolic order are also examined. As such, there is a particular emphasis upon how people, as consumers, encounter and consume these brands so the focus of the module is on the lived experiences of consuming brand and these theoretical perspectives add extra dimensions to conventional branding and consumption modules.

Sociology of Consumption

You will receive an introduction to the theoretical analysis of consumption in modern society. The aim being to critically examine the development of consumption and consumerism in society, to introduce you to foundational sociological ideas and arguments concerning the role of culture in promoting a sense of belonging and identity-formation and finally to explore how consumerism and cultural production are socially-contingent, shaped by historical conditions and political-economic arrangements.

Consumption Research Methods

You will examine key methodological debates in management research, and the methods and techniques of qualitative data gathering and analysis. There are three elements to this course unit. The first examines competing perspectives on research methodology, the relationship between theory and method in research design and the nature of validation and reliability in the research process. The second introduces the student to the ethical issues involved in research, and the main elements of the research planning process. The third investigates the techniques and methods that are commonly deployed by qualitative researchers in the management and broader social science fields. The course is particularly appropriate for students who intend to pursue research-related careers in both academic and non-academic settings.

Dissertation

By the end of the dissertation, students should be able to plan and manage a project; define the aims of this project; identify the data sources and methods appropriate to conduct the project; identify the potential pitfalls to conducting such projects; execute the dissertation plan; and construct an effective argument with the dissertation.

Elective course units

Children and Consumption

There is a growing body of literature into children and consumption. Located within the theoretical literature and empirical research into patterns of consumption, you will draw upon theories of consumption and consumer culture. A range of theorists will be studied including Marx and commodity fetishism, Veblen and conspicuous consumption, Marcuses critical theory, Baudrillard and consumer society and Bourdieu and cultural capital. Such theories will be located within wider debates into conceptualizations of children and childhood, commercial enculturation, and exploitation and empowerment.

Consumption, Markets & Culture

You will gain the skills and knowledge to understand the interactions that occur between the market, consumers and the marketplace. The focus centres on how particular manifestations of culture are constituted, maintained and transformed by broader forces such as cultural narratives, myths, ideologies & grounded in specific socioeconomic circumstances and marketplace systems. Working with popular texts such as The McDonaldization of Society by George Ritzer as well as with complex theoretical concepts including Consumer Culture Theory, Symbolic Consumption and the Production of Culture, this module will provide students with an intellectually and historically grounded ability to understand the broader socio-cultural issues relevant to marketing practice in the 21st century.

Crime and Consumerism There has been a recent resurgence of interest in consumerist society within Criminology, particularly amongst the British school of Cultural Criminology. This new focus is prescient: the 2011 London riots were characterised, amongst other things, by a distinctively consumerist acquisitiveness. You will explore the connections between consumerism and crime alongside the rich theoretical work of Cultural Criminology (including Jack Katz, Mike Presdee, Keith Heyward, and Jeff Ferrell). In addition, the relationship between gang cultures and consumerism, the marketing of deviance, and consumerism as a motivation for crime will be studied.

Fear, Risk and Consumption For Ulrich Beck I am afraid has become the motto for the risk society. Fear has been a vital element of the systematic way of dealing with hazards and insecurities induced and introduced by modernization itself (Beck, 1992 21). Bauman in his analyses of post modernity and consumerism argues that that a shift has occurred in the second half of the twentieth century in developed societies from a society of producers to a society of consumers. This structured consumption is inextricably linked and often based in fear, although the nature of fear itself has changed. Modernity has also transformed in nature from solid to liquid. Liquid fear is all pervasive, diffuse and harder to identify. You will examine the relationship between fear and consumption and also analyze the impact of media representations of fear. The industries and products which are based on the creation of fear will also be considered.

Marketing Communications

You will examine the principal means of marketing communications advertising, promotion, public relations, direct marketing and sales teams, discussing its techniques, strategies and the means by which these approaches interact with each other and the benefits they give both to consumers, organisations and other stakeholders. Within this, it also intends to focus on the use of marketing communication channels such as print media, radio and television, and digital media such as the internet and mobile telephones and social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

You will gain an understanding of the contemporary media environment and how this impacts on marketers efforts to communicate with stakeholders. Attention will be paid here to the radical shifts which have taken place in the media environment over the last two decades due to digitalisation and media and audience fragmentation, and the response of marketing communication to this.

You will examine how marketing communications interacts with, affects and is affected by other elements in the marketing process such as research, strategy, segmentation and positioning, branding, product development, distribution and new product development. An important theme that will be examined is how should communication change when dealing with different segments and entering different markets (particularly overseas) with different communication cultures. Communication theory will be applied and discussed and how this can be used by marketers when developing integrated marketing communications strategies and programmes.

Marketing, Society and Technology

You will gain an introduction to the theoretical analysis of macromarketing at the intersection of marketing, markets, and society, to provide students with an overview of the context in which macromarketing discourse is embedded in, to introduce you to selected challenges and typical responses arising from the theoretical analysis of macromarketing, to critically examine the roles of business and the state and finally to explore how technology, and digital innovation in particular is used to promote a market-driven ideology within society.

Social Identities

You will analyze the practice of consumption within more general strategies of social self-definition, both on an individual and a group basis. The change from industrial to post-industrial society saw increased emphasis on consumption as a vehicle through which identities are made and re-shaped. Nonetheless, social divisions such as age, ethnicity, gender and social class arguably remain important in relation to access to financial and cultural resources and experiences of consumption. You will critically engage with sociological debates concerning the relationship between social identities and consumption. You will be invited to consider, for example, how the experience of being a man or a woman is influenced by consumption. The notion of culture as continually constructed in socially differentiated practice will also be explored.

Youth Culture and the Making of Modern Consumer Society

Since the creation of the teenager in the USA in the 1920s as a new market for age related goods and services, the young have been crucial in the development of modern consumer capitalism. The formation of youth cultures and sub-cultures from the 1950s onwards made youth at the centre of the creative industries. Beyond being consumers and style generators that are appropriated and sold back to a wider market, the young are also the creators and producers of culture and the artefacts of those cultures making them both consumers and producers. Youth culture in the form of style, fashion, music, film, games etc., has become central to the sell and structure of contemporary capitalism.

On completion of the programme graduates will have:

* Considered a wide range of theoretical issues relating to contemporary lives that form the basis of marketing practice.
* This knowledge may be useful for a career in marketing professions however the primary motivation for students should be the desire to understand.
* An opportunity to pursue a research career; or use their studies to augment and progress their current careers in fields such as marketing, education, health and social care, journalism, development, social policy and politics.

* UK Upper Second Class Honours degree (2:1) or equivalent in a subject that demonstrates a wider interest in matters of humanities and social science. * Relevant professional qualifications and relevant experience in an associated area will be considered. * IELTS score of 6.5 with 6.5 in writing for non-native English speaking applicants. English Language Requirements IELTS band: 6.5 TOEFL iBT® test: 88 IMPORTANT NOTE: Since April 2014 the ETS tests (including TOEFL and TOEIC) are no longer accepted for Tier 4 visa applications to the United Kingdom. The university might still accept these tests to admit you to the university, but if you require a Tier 4 visa to enter the UK and begin your degree programme, these tests will not be sufficient to obtain your Visa. The IELTS test is most widely accepted by universities and is also accepted for Tier 4 visas to the UK- learn more.