2/14 Paragraph Development

Products, that is consumer products, have a significant role in society. According to Grant McCracken, they are responsible for carrying and communicating cultural meaning (Douglas and Isherwood 1978; Sahlin 1976). In advertising, the goal is to expand consumer goods throughout the "social world", to help promote these products; advertisers, designers, directors, and even consumers encourage the progression of "cultural meaning". Geertz described cultural meaning as, "the Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgement, and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against a social and natural background (Quinn and Strauss 1997)."