Tybout & Carpenter:

When I was reading this article I couldn’t help linking it to my paper subject: Sex and the City. As I explained on this weblog, I’m going to research how Sex and the City creates a lifestyle. My main question will be how the official Sex and the City webpage complements the serial on television in advertising a lifestyle. Tybout and Carpenter talk in this article about image brands. I’m wondering if you can call Sex and the City a brand?

            Sex and the City is very popular, mostly because of the fashion in the show. Everything Carrie, the main character, wears, becomes a big hit. A lot of girls and woman want to dress like Carrie. So, in the magazines (at least here in the Netherlands) you can see what Carrie wears and how you can make your own Carrie-combination by buying clothes in the Carrie-style at H&M. So, in a simple way you can copy the style of the Sex and the City girls and in that way copy the image.

            Tybout and Carpenter say in their article on page 89: “For example, driving a Sports Utility Vehicle (SUV) may allow soccer moms and dads to express their desire for an adventurous lifestyle even though they never leave the streets of suburbia.” I think that works the same in the case of Sex and the City. I think that there are a lot of girls, maybe even women, I don’t know, who want to look like Carrie, because when they look like her, they get the feeling that they are a girl from the ‘city’; a girl who knows what is fashion, who is always in the places-to-be, who has luck with men. Of course, it doesn’t work that way, but I think that they feel for a minute glamorous.

            The girls from Sex and the City always wear the hottest things in fashion, but always in the style of their character. I’ll implement some pictures to show you which styles belong to which character: (okay, having a fight with my computer, so no pictures)

Carrie always wears the weirdest combinations, but she can’t go without here stilettos. Samantha’s style can be characterized as provocatively. Miranda’s style is that of the businesswoman. Charlotte always dresses in a classic way. Maybe you can say that each of these for characters is a brand on its own. In my group of friends, it’s not unusual to say ‘you look so Carrie today’ (or another character). Yeah, I think the girls became a bit of a fashion brand.

Dafermos:

In this article Dafermos raises the question whether blogging-for-money is possible or not. What do I think?

            What makes a weblog so characteristic is that there are opinions, doesn’t matter about what.  If a blogger is really interested in the opinion of his readers, I think that weblog has a change to become a discussion board. Of course, when a blogger is hired by a company, that blogger has an (hidden) agenda; promoting the product. In that case, the weblog would only work if the blogger is truly interested in what people think about the product. I think that when a blogger focuses too much on advertising the product, a lot of readers will seen stop visiting the blog. So, blogging-for-money is only possible if the blogger is really interested in the opinion from his readers.