This is one of my favorite documentaries from the PBS show Frontline. It's about how MTV and other corporations obsessively market themselves to teens consumers. When the teens find out that they are being manipulated into buying something they usually shun the product and call it "uncool". Corporations then go back and re-brand themselves into something else trendy and re-market their products until once again teens uncover their strategy. Branding and marketing gets more and more subversive with each cycle.
I think that this technique works well will the Frankfurt school's theory of media manipulation of culture to fuel capitalism. It also fits well with the Cultural Studies approach of media encoding/decoding. In this case the process is dynamic: producers encode a marketable commodity, teens decode the commodity by consuming it, and then producers recode the same commodity to make it look fresh and appetizing after it has gone out of style.
The first few lines of this video frame how corporations think about their potential consumers in that, “They want to be cool. They are impressionable and they have the cash.” It is quite clear that corporations are primarily interested in increasing their profits, rather than acknowledging if their products will have a positive or negative influence on teenagers. They make an effort to “understand” teenagers, but their motivations are self-seeking. While teenagers have the active choice about what messages and products they buy into, corporations also feed off of teenagers’ vulnerability to conform to current trends in order to gain acceptance from peers. I would like to hear feedback from some teenagers to examine what effects fashion trends have on forming their identity and acceptance from others.
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