The other day, I was watching Real Housewives of New Jersey and they mentioned "Keeping up with the Joneses". This made me think about my advertising class because this term was first used in the 1950s. Basically, it was the idea that American families had a social standard to live up to. They could do this through purchasing power (with the new credit cards!), meaning that people were now buying things that they didn't necessarily need, but would buy it anyway because "everyone" else had it. This reinforced conformity and the social pressures to be the same: marriage, religion, family, etc. It was interesting to me that on a reality show aired 60 years later, there was still this idea of "buying" a lifestyle. Advertising, I believe, reinforces this for some people.
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