Department of Advertising

Materialism

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

As this web site develops, in the space below we will provide a bibliography of articles and books relevant to this topic. To the extent practical, bibliographic references will be annotated.

Anyone interested in submitting additional bibliographic material for this reference page, or for any of the others at this site, is welcome to send such material via e-mail to jef@mail.utexas.edu. Please type the references in the same format as is used here, and keep the annotations to a few sentences.

  1. Russell W. Belk and Wendy J. Bryce (1985). Materialism and Individual Determinism in U.S. and Japanese Print and Television Advertising. Advances in Consumer Research, 12: 568-72.

    Extending previous research by Belk and Pollay , this study examines cross- cultural trends in materialism and individual determinism as displayed in magazine and television advertising in the U.S. and Japan since World War II. The data for the U.S. magazine ads analyzed in the previous study are compared with a sample of Japanese ads obtained from the three largest circulation Japanese magazines. Television advertising for both countries is studied for the year 1984 with a sample of 203 U.S. commercials and 191 Japanese commercials. Results show that advertisements of the two countries are overall comparable in the level of materialism with Japanese advertising surpassing the U.S. advertising in some occasions. It is also indicated that U.S. ads tend to stress actively changing the environment rather than adapting to it and such tendency is stronger in print than in television advertising.

  2. Russell W. Belk and Richard W. Pollay (1984). Materialism and Magazine Advertising During the Twentieth Century. Advances in Consumer Research, 12: 394-98.

    A content analysis is conducted with 411 ads portraying the interior or exterior of a home to determine the trend in materialistic traits of magazine advertising appearing in the first eight decades of the twentieth century. Results indicate an increased use of materialistic themes and a decrease in the use of utilitarian appeals during this centrury.

© 1995, 1996, 1997 Jef I. Richards
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