Ken's Corner: American Ideals

Lately we have been talking about Americans and how to market towards them specifically based on their ideals. These ideals include achievement, success, activity, efficiency, practicality, progress, material comfort, individualism, humanitarianism, and youthfulness. As I was sitting there and listening to all of these concepts, I thought to myself: “These could not all be driving me as a person, could they?”

Achievement and success, I feel are the two ideas that I feel are the go-to when people think of what Americans idolize. We have this hustle culture where we will sacrifice anything at the sake of being successful and powerful. Along these lines comes progress, where we constantly need to be improving upon ourselves. These I feel end up working to our detriment in the long run. I am an artist, and I love creating. However, the pressure to constantly be creating leads to burn out which makes it so hard to do what I love. I tow this line of being either considered lazy or burning myself out that it makes it so hard to improve upon my existing skill set.

I do also find myself valuing my youthfulness greatly. For me, this manifests itself in my love of skincare. I grew up hating the way I looked because I struggled a lot with acne. I would try all of these homemade remedies or these really elaborate skincare routines, but nothing would seem to work for me. All these companies would market their acne products and I would try all of them in hopes one would work because something else American society values highly in women is beauty. Coming to find out the remedy to my acne problems was simply limiting the amount of products I used and making sure their ingredient lists were simple. Now my skincare routine is only 4 steps in the morning and 3 steps at night.

Finally, I think I do fall into the trap of individualism. Theoretically I know that in trying to be an individual, I make myself just like other people in my generation. However, I do find myself finding new ways to stand out from the crowd in quiet ways. For me this mostly has to do with my appearance. I will try new things with my hair. I wear novelty earrings that I know lots of other people do not have. I like to go thrifting with my friends because I know that I will find new and unique pieces that other people most likely will not have. Some of this behavior is subconscious at this point, but there did use to be deep intention in the way that I presented myself because it was a way for people to remember who I was. This was especially important for someone like me who is more introverted and quieter in social settings I am unfamiliar with.

Overall, I find it interesting how we chose to define ourselves as Americans and what that means in terms of advertising. I think in the future I would like to learn more about the ideals that define people in other places as well.