English Literature Playboy in America Research Paper

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The detail that Playboy did grow so far, so fast is the evidence to the Playboy product. it's far easier to generate a product to meet consumers' existing wants than it is to make an apparent need to meet the business objectives of an existing product. Second, it's an instance of the authority of a strong brand champion, Hugh Hefner, playing the role of noticeable brand supporter since the brand's commencement. The remarkable part of the story is not only that Playboy endured the decade but did so with rehabilitated hope for the future. A great deal of Playboy's renovation in the 1980's came from the new CEO, Christie Hefner, and new focal point on what the Playboy brand was initially meant to symbolize when it was first initiated. A rehabilitated focus in the 1980's would breathe new life into the brand in the 1990's and 2000's that no one could have projected (Gunelius, 2009).

At this time augmented attention was being placed on Playboy magazine. The flagship product for the brand was still the number one men's magazine in the world, in spite of circulation declining to less than four million copies per month by the mid-80's. Playboy Enterprises refocused on the brand's force from the magazine and looked for ways to leverage that brand equity to reconstruct the company. The magazine was slighter than it had been a decade earlier, but it was still lucrative. The aim in the mid-80's was to find ways to make the magazine and the Playboy brand pertinent again. The key to achievement became finding ways to reconstruct the brand after the harm that had been done to it the previous years (Gunelius, 2009).

When the 1980's began, Playboy magazine had been struggling with redefining its role within the men's magazine market. Competitive assaults from hard care pornographic publications such as Penthouse and Hustler in the late 1970's had caused Playboy to follow a reactionary policy, and rather than leading the industry as the pioneer brand, Playboy altered its policy to struggle with the brand challenges. The policy backfired, all differentiation was lost, and Playboy customers were perplexed. The new focal point on the magazine in the 1980's meant the content needed to be refurbished to distinguish the brand from rivals, but consumer expectations for the brand still desired to be met. The right balance has to be established between pornography and content in order to relocate Playboy as an all-purpose interest men's magazine (Gunelius, 2009).

Much of the features found on the pages of Playboy in the early 1980's would continue the same such as interviews, stories, pop culture articles, and articles written from a strong liberal point-of-view supporting personal freedoms. On the other hand, in order to keep the magazine pertinent to the new cohort of customers, Playboy was refurbished in the middle of the decade. Readers found less political articles and more service and lifestyle bits, similar to the layout of the original Playboy magazine of the1950's. Articles focused on cooking, clothes, decorating and so on in order to appeal to the altering male demographic that were now made up of a mounting number of divorced men and men who chose to get married later in life. The magazine wanted to appeal to new viewers of twenty to thirty something, young urban professionals.

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This audience was distinguished by a stronger interest in materialism than politics. They were economically safe, often put off getting married and having children until later in life, and they were concerned in further economic advancement. The audience was a natural match for the recently revamped Playboy magazine (Gunelius, 2009).

At the same time, steps were taken to make the magazine emerge to be of a higher quality than those available by competitors. A new staple free format was initiated in order to give the magazine a high end look, and more articles were written that talked about business, finance achievement and Corporate America. Images and articles about businessmen and businesswomen could be found on the pages of the magazine. Playboy was relocated as a publication that supported marriage, relationships and love as being able to coexist with work and sex. The magazine focused on men and women living together, working together, loving together and playing together. The Playboy brand became a comprehensive association brand again, and customers reacted optimistically to the change (Gunelius, 2009).

Hefner has materialized as a serious shaper of, and reporter on, modern American Values. Within a few years of opening the magazine on a shoestring Hefner became a serious, significant stature in modern culture. Yet the question of how and why the publisher of a risque men's magazine was able to acquire such power and even status, has puzzled many observers. Understanding comes with the recognition that over the last half century Hefner has played a main role in altering American values, thoughts and outlooks. From the start, his venture was about more than dirty pictures and more than a girlie magazine. It was a historical force of momentous scope (Watts, 2008).

Most clearly, Hefner and Playboy served as an indicator gauging the forces of historical alterations in America over a half century. In the 1950's, the magazine replicated hip, urban displeasure with the heavy conformism of the Eisenhower era as it critiqued middleclass suburbanism, the Beat Generation, and the Cold War movement against communism. In the 1960's, Hefner assisted to fan the flames of the civil rights movement, the antiwar campaign, the countercultural revolt, and the up-and-coming feminist fight. In the 1970's, Playboy personified both the me generation and the economic contractions of the era, while the 1980's saw it become a thwart for, and target of, the Regan Revolution (Watts, 2008).

Back in December 1953, the 27-year-old Hugh Hefner made available the first Playboy Magazine in Chicago, and the American scheme of values, God, family and work, got jumbled up forever. There was no competition for Playboy or for its creator. At the head of the company was a man whose way of life inspired men's fantasies just as much as the magazine itself. Hugh Hefner is a hedonist, symbol of virile machismo and the most well-known playboy in the world. No other magazine has had such an impact on American and Americanized culture as the glossy Playboy from Chicago (the Story of Playboy, 2009).

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