media: marketing

Yesterday NPR reported that Wisconsin is considering repealing its ban on margarine in private businesses and public buildings. What is that all about!? This old post offers some great historical context.

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Grass fed cows tend to produce milk that, when made into butter, has a slightly yellow color.  When margarine was invented as a butter substitute and they began producing it for U.S. consumption in the late 1880s, one marketing problem was its color.  The vegetable-based product has a clear, white-ish color and looks something like lard; many people found it unappetizing.  So the margarine people wanted to dye margarine yellow.

The dairy industry rightly saw margarine as a threat and they lobbied politicians both to outright ban margarine or to ban dying it to look like butter.  The federal government imposed a two cent per pound tax on the product in The Margarine Act of 1886 (the tax was quintupled in 1902).  Many states, especially dairy states, made dying margarine illegal (e.g., New York, New Jersey, and Maryland).  By 1902, “32 states and 80% of the U.S. population lived under margarine color bans.”

The ad below is for “Golden Yellow” margarine and specifies that it is “ready to spread” in 26 states (more text transcribed below):

In some states, margarine manufacturers would sell margarine in plastic bags with a small bead of dye that the buyer had to knead into the spread (“Color-Kwik bags”).  This practice continued through World War II. If you judge by this ad, it was quite a good time:

Over time, as supply and demand for butter and margarine ebbed and flowed alongside federal rules and penalizing taxes on margarine, the popularity of each ebbed and flowed too.  Then, in 1950, margarine was apparently the “the talk of the country” and President Truman put an end to the oppression of margarine, in part because the National Association of Margarine Manufacturers had begun to build enough power to compete with dairy associations.  Wisconsin, the cheese state, was the last anti-margarine state hold out (till 1967), but it continued to forbid margarine in public places (unless requested; as of Sept. 2011).

By 1957, sales of margarine exceeded those of butter. Margarine still outsells butter today. And, in a bizarre reversal, butter manufacturers now regularly dye butter yellow.

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All that said, here is an excerpt from Audre Lorde’s The Uses of the Erotic in which she uses the bead of dye in the bag of margarine as a metaphor for sexuality:

During World War II, we bought sealed plastic packets of white, uncolored margarine, with a tiny, intense pellet of yellow colloring perched like a topaz just inside the clear skin of the bag.  We would leave the margarine out for a while to soften, and then we would pinch the little pellet to break it inside the bag, releasing the rich yellowness into the soft pale mass of margarine.  Then taking it carefully between our fingers, we would knead it gently back and forth, over and over, until the color had spread throughout the whole pound bag of margarine, thoroughly coloring it.

I find the erotic such a kernel within myself.  When released from its intense and constrained pellet, it flows through and colors my life with a kind of energy that heightens and sensitizes and strengthens all my experience.

Sources: Vintage Ads, Found in Mom’s Basement, Britannica, Margarine.org, and FoodReference.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Cross-posted at Jezebel.

Sometimes marketing is so absurd that I am tied into knots trying to understand how an advertisement could possibly have been made and set loose into the world.  Like this ad for Zappos, sent in by Cheryl S., that claims it sells jeans in “fits for every body type”:

Are they actually mocking us?  Do they really think we are so stupid as to not find the text and visuals in this ad laughably mis-matched?  Are they trying to offend all people outside of this “range” of body types so that they don’t wear their clothes?  I just… I don’t know.

UPDATE! Business Insider featured the ad above and included another example:

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Carni K sent in an interesting story about Kellogg’s, the cereal company. Kellogg’s is suing the Maya Archaeology Institute (MAI), a non-profit Guatemalan organization aimed at protecting the local history, culture, and natural environment. Why? It uses a toucan in its logo.

For those of you who did not spend your youth eating highly sugared empty carbohydrates for breakfast, the toucan (specifically, Toucan Sam) is the mascot of Kellogg’s Froot Loops. The toucan is also a large-billed colorful bird indigenous to Central and South America, the Caribbean, and southern Florida.

While this sort of cultural cannibalism is certainly common in American culture, it is a bold move nonetheless for Kellogg’s to not only appropriate the toucan, but to claim that no one else has a right to represent the toucan.  Dr. Francisco Estrada-Belli puts it this way: “This is a bit like the Washington Redskins claiming trademark infringement against the National Congress of American Indians.”

And therein lies the problem: who is allowed to claim the symbolic use of this bird—an indigenous Guatemalan organization or a company that makes cereal and other convenience foods marketed to children and families?

To me, this brings up another question: what gives any of us the right to use the toucan at all? While cultural representations of animals may not directly harm animals, and have been central in human cultures for tens of thousands of years, they can contribute to a particular perception of those same animals. And animal advocates know that perception then shapes treatment. If we perceive an animal to be dumb or trivial, for example, then that animal may not seem worthy of our concern.

Many types of toucans, for example, are endangered. Of the more than 40 species making up their family, 35 are included on the International Union for Conservation of Nature red list, meaning that they are either endangered, threatened, or otherwise subject to concern.  Their troubled status comes not from people hunting or eating them, but from the increasing levels of habitat destruction in the tropical regions in which they live… which brings us back to the Maya Archaeology Institute.

The organization’s mission includes protecting Guatemala’s rainforests, including the animals and plants that live there. Kellogg’s, on the other hand, has made the toucan into a funny bird whose large nose lets him sniff out Froot Loops wherever they are hiding.

Who should have the right to represent the toucan?  Anyone?

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Margo DeMello has a PhD in cultural anthropology and teaches anthropology, cultural studies, and sociology at Central New Mexico Community College. Her research areas include body modification and adornment and human-animal studies.

If you would like to write a post for Sociological Images, please see our Guidelines for Guest Bloggers.

In a previous post I discussed data showing the growing income inequality in the U.S.: the middle class is shrinking, the poor are getting poorer, and the rich are getting richer. It turns out that corporations understand what is happening and they are responding.  In brief, they are letting go of the middle class as a market and restructuring their offerings to appeal to the top and bottom of the income distribution.

Below the jump (warning, it automatically starts playing with sound) is an enlightening five minute discussion of this new business strategy on Daily Ticker video:

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Victoria and Paul (a sociologist from the University of Turku, Finland) sent in an ad for a woman’s guitar that nicely illustrates the way that we unnecessarily gender size difference.  The Daisy Rock ad specifies that the guitar is “lighter weight,” with a “slimmer neck,” and designed exclusively for women:

On the one hand, this guitar may be great for women who are on the smaller side.  In that sense, a smaller guitar may make it easier for more women to play guitar.

On the other hand, size is only related to gender, it’s not synonymous with gender.  There are women who are built in such a way as to make a traditional guitar perfect.  And there are men on the smaller side who may also benefit from a guitar built for slighter frames. The mistake is to suggest that small = female and large = male.  In contrast to this girl-only company, one that simply offered guitars in different sizes would be embracing of both women and the 1/2 of guys on the smaller side of the bell curve.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

You know, if we just stopped gendering things in the first place, we wouldn’t have to bend over backwards to get our products sold to the other 50% of humanity.  Case in point…

Lucia M.M. sent in this effort to sell wine to the Monday night football crowd:

Meanwhile, seven of our Readers sent in the new female-branded beer “chick beer” (“just 97 calories and 3.5 carbs”):

Another reader tipped us off that Molson is in on the game too with it’s girly pink brand, Animee:

See also a long list of gendered/sexualized foodstuffs and other things that are gendered for no conceivable reason.

UPDATE: Several readers suggested that the Monday Night Football wine may actually be aimed at women who like football.  There are lots of them.

Thanks to our readers for the submission!: Yvette, Kirsten O’N., Jayna T., Amanda S., Rosemary McM., Caitlin C., Andrew P., Tom Megginson (of Work that Matters), and Kjerstin G. (for About-Face).

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

This seems like a good time to reiterate a simple truth: It can be art/fashion/satire/cutting edge etc. and… and and and it can be offensive, trivializing, and triggering.

Eight readers sent in links to an ad for a hair salon called Fluid. The salon, which has a history of using “shocking” ads (like this one after the Gulf oil spill), is attracting criticism for an ad featuring a woman being offered jewelry by a man; she appears to have a black eye.  Six more sent in a link to a Glee star, Heather Morris, in a photoshoot by Tyler Shields, also with a black eye.

Responding to the criticism, Fluid said it was being “cutting-edge,” “satirical,” “high fashion,” and “editorial,” and “artistic.”  It doesn’t matter what you call it, what tradition it references, or whether you’re trying to get a reaction; your product is still part of a wider cultural context.  Accordingly, you may get called out for being insensitive to other people’s pain. In which case, probably best not to call the critics hypocrites and suggest that there are bigger problems in the world than the trivialization of domestic violence.  Or go right ahead, I guess.

Thanks to Eric S., Kristina V., YetAnotherGirl, Dave S., Caitlin R., @CreativeTweets, Meghan H., Dave S., Judith B., Olivia G., Alexis W., Theresa W., and an anonymous reader for the tips!

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Let’s analyze this one to death, shall we?  Comments are open…

It’s after the jump because you can see a woman naked from the waist up.

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