Construction Advertising And Domestic Middle Class Consciousness

Nowadays symbolic consumption becomes a critical means to gain adequate social prominence. As a booming industry in consumer goods, automobile is a perfect example for symbolic consumption in China in recent years. Consumers consider vehicle as an impartible part to social prestige. Since the Chinese government repealed the ban on private automobile purchasing in1990s, the market for automobile has been flourishing and is fulfilled by vehicles in almost every kind, every grade and every style. Car that best reflects today’s society as a social class spending power and desire of sensitive goods are carefully packaged carefully advertisers to be able to wake up the middle class socially constructed symbolic symbol.Functions of mass medium are no longer limited to broadcasting information but, more importantly, extended to framing public institutions and social norms for class identification and self-recognition. Therefore, aiming consumers in a certain social class, advertising agency offers services dedicated to creating, planning and handling advertisement upon preferences and expectations for targeted consumers’class. Thus, we can employ backward induction on this chain of logic to recover the social status that targeted social classes think they deserve.Targeting on advertisements for automobile in a period of five consecutive years in Southern Weekly, which is regarded as a magazine for the elite class or, in western economics’term, the middle class in China, this research paper is trying to find the social recognition and expectation for the middle class in modern China by analyzing symbolic setups in those advertisements.