Social Class

"the overall rank of people in society; people who are grouped within the same social class are approximately equal in terms of their social standing, occupations and lifestyles" Soloman 2006

Social class is a very important topic to understand, as it is very important to the lives of most people in society. It is often difficult to tell which class a person is in, as this can be measured in a number of different ways. There are two major definitions of class, these are called objective and subjective definitions.

Objective definitions of class focus on things that can be measured about a person's life, such as their occupation (job).Occupation is a good example of an objective definition of class.

Subjective definitions of class focus on things that can not be measured, such as the social class that a person thinks they are in. For example, a person with a lot of money may still consider themselves working class. They may live in a working class area and have working class friends. In other words the class that a person thinks they are in, is likely to affect the way they act.

Measuring Social Class in Great Britain

Today social class is established largely according to occupation, and for many years, British marketers have used the grading system below. It has been widely used to group consumers, whether for research or for analysing media readership.

A – upper middle class - Higher managerial, administrative or professional
B - middle class - Intermediate managerial, administrative or professional
C1 – lower middle class - Supervisory or clerical, junior managerial, administrative or professional
C2 – skilled working class - Skilled manual workers
D – working class - Semi-skilled and unskilled manual workers
E – lower class - State pensioners or widows, casual or low grade workers

Soloman 2006 states that in many animal species, a social organization develops whereby the most assertive or aggressive animals exert control over other and have the first pick of food, living space and even mating partners. People are not at all different from this, we have developed a natural 'pecking order' where we are ranked in terms of our standing in society.

In our lecture on social class we were given the task of creating a mood board of a particular class. My group were given middle class which I found a hard class to categorise as there is upper middle, middle and lower middle to cover. Due to this I found it hard to complete this task in the lecture but have had another go and this is what I have found.

Middle Class

These mood board are of working class and upper class and were put together in the lecture by the other groups.

Working Class

Upper Class

We discovered that classes are quite difficult to define in terms of products and someone who fits into the working class category can still enjoy the luxuries in life so marketers still need to target all classes with high class products. Its the same with less expensive and luxurious items, the middle classes will still purchase these items if they are marketed in the correct way.