ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the concept of brand culture as a lens for analyzing the lifestyling of television. Television's shift from mass medium to a multichannel and increasingly interactive cultural environment can be traced to deregulatory telecommunication policies and the commercial development of cable, satellite and digital media technologies. The breakup of the major networks' hold on television has paralleled the fragmentation of consumer culture writ large. While some television programming was always geared to "segments within the mass audience", it was difficult to target viewers conceived as specialized lifestyle clusters with a mass medium. Psychographic market research, known as "Values, Attitudes and Lifestyles" (VALS) to the industry, is widely used to pinpoint niche audiences and match differentiated brands of television with advertisers and products. Maureen Ryan traces the lifestyling of US television to the launch of the Food Network and Home and Garden Television (HGTV) in the early 1990's.
