I'm trying to come up with a dissertation title but I'm stuck :(

Hi, I'm at university studying business studies and I'm trying to come up with a dissertation title but I'm stuck :(. I want to talk about brand image and ethnic consumers in either the food, hair or possibly music industry ( I know this very vague). Do you have any suggestions?

The marketing of certain products is a great topic. Hair products are usually incredibly targeted. Beauty magazines for white women (usually mislabeled with a term like mainstream or some other inaccurate generic) like Vogue, Elle, or Marie Claire, will occasionally put women of color on the cover, but rarely include advertising for products that aren't for caucasian hair types, with women of the Asian and African Diasporas completely excluded.

As an additional subject area, you could examine their "soft" marketing. By soft marketing, I mean the 'advice' columns where the products of their major advertisers just happen to be the proffered solution or where readers write in to share that product X (conveniently featured in a major ad 4 pages later) is just the best.

You could look at the percentage ads that are explicitly white, implicitly white, or specifically ethic, and then make a comparison between their full color ads and the soft marketing. You might find that "ethnic" advertising is mostly for show, with fewer full content discussions, or you might find the reverse, or they might be about equal. Another possible comparison would be whether issues with WOC on the cover were more likely to have specific content for ethnic products.

THAT would be a lot of research into white magazines and might give you a rage stroke however. You could apply similar tactics to magazines devoted to ethnic women. If you could obtain older issues of magazines like Shades or Essence, you could examine the nature of their advertising across time, and look at percentage devoted to hair versus makeup versus weight loss.

Whew. OK. Even if you don't like those ideas, hopefully they helped you think of something.