1. Kerin, Roger A., and Steven W. Hartley. Marketing: The Core. McGraw-Hill LLC, 2022.

Background: This textbook goes over everything related to marketing and covers every aspect of how businesses are started and run. From the basics like what marketing is, how companies use marketing to run their business, and how people use marketing in their everyday lives, this textbook emphasizes that without marketing, your business will not exist. Marketing is not only selling products and services to customers, it also includes product development, pricing items, distributing items, and many more.

How I Used It: I used this textbook to learn about why businesses exist and the goals and expectations that are set for them. I learned that businesses have a main goal of generating a profit with the products and services that they put out, which explains why they use shame advertising to generate as many profits as possible. I also learned that they have something called social responsibility, which is the businesses job to always do good for society. I used this in my rebuttal argument because those who are aware of this concept might deny that companies would purposely shame their customers, when this is not the case. 

2.Learning, Lumen. “Principles of Marketing.” Lumen, 2015,

Background: This article goes over everything you need to know about advertising. It goes over how companies develop advertisements as well as the different kinds of advertisements. They also go over the different kinds of purposes of advertisements when promoting a product or service 

How I Used It: I used this website to further my knowledge and understanding about advertising. I wanted to gain more information about why companies use advertisements as well as different kinds of advertisements in order to sell products to consumers. Specifically, I wanted to learn more about why companies use shame advertising, and why it works. I learned that companies use an emotional appeal, which is what shame advertising is, to target customers’ emotions through their conscious and subconscious and that emotional appeals are extremely powerful. 

3.Linardon, Dr Jake. “Body Image Statistics 2022: 47+ Shocking Facts & Stats.” Break Binge Eating, Break Binge Eating, 27 Feb. 2022

Background: Dr. Jake Linardon is a Research Fellow and Lecturer of Psychology at Deakin University, Melbourne Australia. His area of studies is the causes, consequences, and treatments for eating disorders. This article takes data from countries around the world about how both genders deal with negative body image issues. He created an article to educate people on causes of negative body image, statistics on body image, and ways to use social media in a safe way in order to protect your self esteem. 

How I Used It: I used this article to gather information on just how much of a problem body image is in today’s society. I learned that the media has one of the biggest impacts on how people view their own bodies, there are many statistics and facts that state that many teenagers wish to be as skinny and thin as the women they view on the advertisements and will go to extreme lengths to achieve it. Shame advertisements contribute a great deal to this problem, which proves even more how effective they really are, and why companies need to stop using them. It was also helpful to learn why negative self esteem was such a bad thing.

4. Fenty, Robyn. “About Fenty Beauty: Fenty Beauty.” Fenty Beauty + Fenty Skin, Kendo Publishings, 2017,

Background: Robyn Fenty aka Rhianna a famous singer in America created her own beauty brand, she wanted to create products that did well on all skin tones and types. Her inspiration came from wanting everyone to be included in feeling beautiful. She has created products with a vast range of shades that feel lightweight on the skin as well as look good on everyone, with an affordable price. 

How I Used It: I used this example of Fenty Beauty to show a brand that prides itself on being inclusive. Fenty Beauty is a huge success not only because of Rhianna, but because people love how the products work on everyone. Fenty Beauty has been named the best invention of 2017 and the number 1 most inclusive brand. I used this as an example of how an inclusive brand is extremely successful in the customers eye, and they did it without using advertisements to shame their customers, but instead lift them up. 

5.University College London. (2017, October 24). Self-esteem is mapped in the human brain. ScienceDaily. Retrieved April 20, 2022,

Background: A team of researchers from the University College London developed an “equation” to show how self esteem is mapped out in the brain, and how it is shaped based on what other people think of us. The study found that based on what other people think of you, combined with how you think others will think of you, can determine your overall self esteem. 

How I Used It: I used this article with the equation that they came up with to gain more information on why people are so affected by shame advertising. When people believe that they look good, and then there are advertisements telling them that they are not, it automatically lowers their self esteem. This article was extremely helpful in gaining information on how exactly self esteem is mapped out in the brain and what causes someone to have low self esteem

6.Pan, Zhendong. “How Do Gender Stereotypes Solidify Body Image in Social Media Advertisements?” 2021 International Conference on Education Innovation, Economics Management and Social Sciences , 2021

Background: This article goes over how social media pushes the beauty standard for women especially to look fair skinned, young, thin, and tall. The article goes over how those who fit this body type are popularized by the media because of how celebrities and influencers both look like. When in reality, most of the women out there do not look like the women shown in advertisements, and because of this they begin to think they are not beautiful.  

How I Used It: I used this article to learn more about how the media portrays gender stereotypes about how a woman should look in order to sell to them. The article explains that cosmetic companies use these beauty standards to their advantage to try and convince women that they are ugly if they do not fit into what society pushes on them. 

7.Magazine, Smithsonian. “How Advertisers Convinced Americans They Smelled Bad.” Smithsonian.com, Smithsonian Institution, 2 Aug. 2012,

Background: This article is about the first example of shame advertising, a highschool girl who has her own deodorant business where deodorant was not widely used back then as it is now. She used shame advertising by explaining how if you as a woman smell bad, then everyone around you will be talking about it including men. 

How I Used It: I used the example of the advertisement to show how shame advertising happens on purpose, Edna Murphey purposely told women that they smelled bad so that they would buy their deodorant. After the advertisement hit the papers sales for deodorant grew tremendously. I included this in my paper to show why companies use shame advertising because it works, it gets into the minds of the consumers to convince them that there is something wrong with them, when there isn’t.  

8.Staff, the Premerger Notification Office. “L’Oréal Settles FTC Charges Alleging Deceptive Advertising for Anti-Aging Cosmetics.” Federal Trade Commission, 3 July 2014,

Background: The FTC wrote this article about a banned L’Oreal advertisement for their Youth Code products that claimed to rearrange the consumers DNA in order to “boost youth proteins.” The product also claims to improve overall skin quality by making you look younger, implying that skin quality equals looking younger

How I Used It: 

9.Beauty in Mind: The Effects of Physical Attractiveness on …

Background: This study  is about how people who are more attractive have advantages that those who are not attractive don’t. It was found that people who are more attractive, with lower BMI genuinely have lower stress levels and levels of depression. They also are able to win more arguments or more likely to be hired for a job

How I Used It: I used this article to show the reasons why people aim to be more attractive in their lives. If people who are more attractive get all of these benefits, then those who are less attractive want to make themselves more attractive so they are able to also get the benefits. I used information from this article to figure out more why companies use shame advertising with the main goal of being attractive. More specifically what being attractive can give the consumer

10. Association Between the Use of Social Media and Photograph Editing Applications, Self-esteem, and Cosmetic Surgery Acceptance- https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/articlepdf/2736534/jamafacial_chen_2019_oi_190014.pdf

Background: This article explains how the use of social media and photoshop encourages people to want to change their appearance more. Apps like snapchat and instagram that use a lot of filters make people feel insecure about the way that they look, and those people are more likely to get plastic surgery.

How I Used It: I used this article to get more information on how filters and photoshop affect one’s self esteem. Companies know that photoshop affects the views this much which is why they purposely use it in their advertisements to drive down consumers self esteem, so the need for a companies product increases.