Mark Abram: Influential Sociological Study Of Youth Culture

Advertising to Youth Consumerism
Mark Abram’s book “The Teenage Consumer,” was the first influential sociological study of youth culture. Abrams was a market researcher and his book was an empirical survey of a new consumer group that had emerged in the 1950’s. This new consumer group was commonly referred as ‘youth culture,’ which was associated with working class males. Abrams suggested that youth culture developed in the 50’s as a result of the wealth of the decade. Abrams focused his research on the working class and not middle class youth. Therefore young people had relatively large disposable incomes, thus they spend it on leisure goods and activities such as coffee and milk bars, fashion clothes and hairstyles, cosmetics, Rock and
The same can be said for men’s products. The underlying message conveys that one has to use a particular product in order to attract the opposite sex. This can be seen in most ads for cosmetics, perfumes, clothes and or accessories. Thus advertising can be viewed as an attempt to manipulate potential customers into buying their product(s). Ads are therefore seen as tempting a particular audience into buying a certain product or service, specially to look like or have a product that will allow the individual to say “I use product x look at me.” We can see that advertisers don’t realize that they are actually stereotyping genders based on masculine and feminine. People nowadays are so caught up on how they look and what they own, resulting in many people to judge a person based on the products they appear with. Advertising today shows models that are generally young men and women. These models are usually tall, good looking and in the case of the men usually physically fit. In the case of a woman she is often depicted having long hair and for the most part is white. This gives the impression that one must look like this in order to appreciate the product. The basic concept of today’s ads displayed is masculine, buff, young male models and tall, thin beautiful women displayed in various poses intended to attract a particular portion of the population. As a result this will affect the potential consumer, especially the youth because they are considered to be in the adjusting stage where they are still determining who they really are. By seeing these ads they may think that they have to look like ‘them’ in order to be pretty/handsome while having the ability to attract the opposite