5)'If anything is central to the creation and maintenance of a Essay

5)'If anything is central to the creation and maintenance of a unified Chinese culture, it is the standardization of ritual.' (Watson) Discuss - Essay Example Further research into how the Chinese have been able to create and maintain a unified culture has provided varying results. According to James Watson and Evelyn Rawski’s book Death Ritual in Late Imperial and Modern China, the creation and maintenance of a unified Chinese culture were enabled by the standardization of rituals. The following study will provide evidence to justify this statement by evaluating several depictions of ancient and modern Chinese culture. Watson and Rawski (1988, p. 4) define [Chinese] cultural unification as the acceptance and adherence to set ritual routines by ordinary citizens. Standardization on its part, was the way in which these cultures were made known, proper and acceptable. They further reveal that standardization, which contributed to cultural unification, was in most cases voluntarily taken up by citizens without the use of force. As such, any Chinese aspects seen in the world today are by-products of the ancient processes of ritual standardization. Ritual in Watson and Rawski’s case is defined an active process of transforming something from one state into another wherein â€Å"something† could refer to things, people, or other beings. Again, rituals have a transformative power (4). Funerals had a uniform structure of rites that were practiced all over China, and particularly during the Late Imperial Era. Although it is not widely practiced in China today, some areas such as Hong Kong and Taiwan still practice them. Watson and Rawski (1988, p.7) state that the rites were standardized and practiced all over China, and they in turn played the role of â€Å"cultural† cement that bound the Chinese community together. In standardizing burial rituals, the Chinese believed that in death, the body and soul should not be allowed to separate before a ritual was done. It was said that if this happened, the community would experience some form of disaster. Again, they standardized the belief that death should not separate couples

Lectures review Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Lectures review - Essay Example Moreover, it has also been learnt from the study that brands are categorised into different categories including personal brands, cool brands, kids branding, nation brands and super brands among others. In this regard, according to brand managers, the brand is more than an entity which creates certain amount of awareness, prominence and reputation in the market. Brands play a very important role in the consumer life. Through the brands, customers can easily know about the products which they can purchase. Moreover, brands help the customers to reduce search cost along with helping them to identify the quality. Similarly, brands are very much an important factor for the organisations. It helps the companies to influence the customers and to generate the desired level of revenue. In today’s scenario, brand has emerged as the key term for any organisation. In this world, everything can be branded and branding is helpful for the company to reside in the minds of the customers. In the present scenario, from beer to vacuum cleaners everything can be branded and one of the top branded products is Coca-Cola in the current day context (Slade, 2013). Moreover, from the related study it is observed that according to American Marketing Association, brands and brand management is a tangible symbol that can differentiate from one organisation’s product to another. The main principle of brand management is to recognise strong consumer awareness about the brand. Moreover, brands are emotive to symbolize a promise and generate the uniqueness of idea. Similarly, brand is made distinctive by its positioning, relative to the competition and builds its personality through its images (Slade, 2013). It is further observed from the study that the notion of brand positioning signifies the manipulation of every element of the marketing mix to the segmented audience. In this regard, personality branding is the unique combination of functional attributes and values which hel ps the target audience to identify a company’s strategies. In this scenario, it has been learnt that brand image is the overall impression and the unique set of associations communicated to the public. Moreover, brand awareness refers to the consumer’s ability to recognise the brand under different conditions. Brand positioning facilitates to segment the market as per the consumers’ needs and wants. With the aid of a key focus on brand positioning and awareness, in the global arena McDonald’s, Davis Milling Co and Leo Burnett among others have evolved to be regarded as top brands in the present day context. Moreover, a few of the organisations follow certain key influences of the brand positioning and personality. Brand positioning helps these organisations to identify the competing products and attributes that define the product space. Brand positioning also helps to collect information from a sample of customers about their perception of each of the pro ducts regarding certain relevant attributes. It is also learnt that brand personality follows the five-scale-factor. These factors include sincere, exciting, competent, sophisticated and rugged. In brand personality scale, sincere signifies the brand that is down to earth, honest, wholesome and cheerful about its customers and manufacturers, for example, Kodak and Hyundai. Furthermore, the exciting scale means that the