Advantages and disadvantages of on-line shopping Dissertation

Advantages and disadvantages of on-line shopping - Dissertation Example Branding might cause a person to shop on-line because that person is looking for specific brands that might not be available in stores. On the other hand, branding might work to encourage people to shop high street shops, because these shops do a more effective job of branding then do on-line stores. Therefore, it is necessary to examine what branding is. Branding began with the modern age. Modern consumption is also driven by the choices that were being offered in modern society, choices that were not offered in earlier societies, before mass production of goods became the norm. This mass production had a side effect as well, one that would influence the post-modern individual’s obsession with labels and designers – branding became essential, as there were so many goods flooding the market, that companies needed to distinguish their goods from the multitude of other goods that were coming into existence. According to Naomi Klein, this led to competitive branding and, u ltimately, to the rise of designer labels, such as Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren. Because brands are essentially the same – Coke is not really that much different from Pepsi, Reebok is not much different than Nike, Apples are not appreciably different from PCs – companies must find a way to differentiate themselves from their competitors. Goldman & Papson argue that this has led to a rather cluttered landscape for the world of advertising, as each brand tries to get a leg up on their competitors by branding themselves as somehow different from the rest. One way is by attacking and counterattacking – such as when MCI named AT&T in their advertisements for friends and family, thereby gaining market share away from AT&T, AT&T went on the defensive, deriding MCI's friends and family program as a â€Å"manipulator of personal relations† because the program involved giving MCI a person's information without that person's knowledge. Another way is by showing wha t a product is not – such as when Pringle's potato chips transposed an image of their light chip with that of a guy eating greasy chips that dripped on his shirt (Goldman & Pappas, 1996). Because brands have a hard time saying that their product is better than the other guys, they instead seek to raise their symbolic image value – LL Bean's flannel shirts may be the same in quality as Wal-Mart's, but the image of wearing an LL Bean's shirt makes the value more than Wal-Mart. It is all about the image that has been carefully cultivated in the advertisements for these brands, where the product and the image coming together is known as a â€Å"commodity sign†. This is what is meant when somebody says that one is â€Å"paying for the name† (Goldman & Pappas, 1996). Identity became a construct of consumption, in that people, both men and women, started using consumption not as a way to express one's identity, but to construct it - â€Å"brands are how we figu re out who we are.†(Kacen, 2000). This reflects the fluidity of an individual's identity, and reflects that gender identity is also a fluid concept, as opposed to a fixed attribute (Kacen, 2000). Part of this was made possible by the Nikes and Tommy Hilfigers of the world who are not just selling products, but the image that their brand connotes. Therefore, mere manufacturing has been replaced by marketing (Klein, 2000). Price discounting may to differentiate one’s brand from other brands because of the problem of brand similarity. There is some indication that price discounting may actually hurt a store’s image and the brand image, and that it might not build sales (Grewal et al., 1998). Therefore, whether or not it actually works depends on other factors. One factor is known as the perceived discount. According

What do you understand by the phrase 'moral panic' Please Essay - 1

What do you understand by the phrase 'moral panic' Please refer to at least one contemporary example which illustrates how the media can be said to be responsible for creating moral panics - Essay Example ese institutions majorly use literature among the very many medium that exist to pass down morals from one generation to another.Going through the human history of literature, plenty of fictional stories, for example, the Goosebumps (Blaine, 2008). These stories served as an avenue of entertainment but also as a source of morals because they informed, improved, and instructed their readership or audience (Butts, 2006), for example, the novels by Dickens Charles, over the years have been a great source of morality. This is because Charles Dickens has extensively written on the various social and economic ills that face the society. Charles Dickens, in his book, David Copperfield talks extensively on the economic and social ills of the society (Dickens, 1899). In children’s literature, the concept of morality is widely depicted. For instance in storytelling, teachers are always concerned with the morality of the story. Literature has been widely used for purposes of explaining and imparting the concepts of morality in an individual (Butts, 2006). The concept of morality is more common in the literature of children. Literature books and stories are therefore a great source of moral teachings. Panic on the other hand is the sudden feeling of fear that is usually very great at particular instances that it replaces reasonable thinking with overwhelming agitation as well as anxiety (clarke, 2002). Panic might be experienced by an individual or get experienced by a group of people all at once at times referred to as panic of the mass or mass panic (Kenneth, 2006). Panic dates back, way back, and man over the years has deduced means of using panic to his advantage. It is believed that men used panic during the pre-historic period to hunt animals for food (Clarke, 2006). For example, pre-historic man would make weird sounds by blowing horns and would use this to direct herds to cliff edges and the animals would jump to their deaths or cripple themselves making it easy