Reviews for College Business Math

The average rating for College Business Math based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-02-07 00:00:00 Danielle Way Laird’s book should be of pressing interest to anyone who wants to use advertisements to argue a historical point. I would go so far as to say that we should always have some awareness of the commercial underpinnings of other textual sources like newspapers and magazines, which have relied on advertising to a great degree for their funding. Through this light, we see that media history is inextricably intertwined with advertising history, especially since the 19th century. This wonderful book traces the major shifts in advertising practice from about 1850 to about 1920. Laird identifies three major phases of advertising. In the first phase, advertisements were largely controlled by owner-manufacturers. These owners created ads that reflected their own personal values and interests, almost completely ignoring the tastes and desires of consumers. They elevated the act of production, in part because they wanted to show that material success did not come at the expense of spiritual quality. After around 1890, these practices began to shift along with business practices themselves. Continuous process machinery made products more abundant than ever before, and manufacturers began to worry about how to move the product efficiently. These same processes that created economies of abundance made those same products far more similar to one another than before. Consequently, advertisers invented the trademark to differentiate their products and argue for their superiority. Laird calls this specialization in advertising. Finally, by around 1910, advertisers increasingly appealed to consumers. Advertisers themselves needed to prove their worth, so they presented themselves as communication experts acting between manufacturers and consumers. They also began to propose methods with scientific trappings to determine the success of their various methods. By the end of the period Laird describes, advertisers began actually taking credit for business progress by creating consumer desire. Moreover, this new consumer desire could be equated with increasing morality on the part of consumers—the desire to be cleaner, more beautiful, more efficient, etc. In this way, advertisers displaced the “Victorian compromise” or the tension between material and spiritual motivations by collapsing one onto the other in the name of progress. Most importantly advertisers, through their struggle to gain recognition, importance, and financial stability transformed the discourse around progress from a production-centered ethos to a consumption centered one. Laird notes in her conclusion that “Marketing and advertising specialists rarely attributed consumer demand to products’ features or consumers’ capabilities to recognize them (376).” Advertisers took the credit for progress, completely ignoring any active role for the consumer. They were clearly deluded and self-important on this fact, but this only goes to show the systematic and long-standing disdain for consumers throughout all the phases of advertising history. This book isn’t the most thrilling read, but it’s a really important one for anyone who wants to use this sort of evidence in a careful way.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-07-12 00:00:00 Dif Sincre What a detailed overview of a publishing company! I found the conclusion to be particularly enlightening and useful for conceptualizing the period overall.