Aspirations and Applications: Analyzing Consumer Card Application Web Sites.

The aim of this dissertation is to examine a previously unstudied text – consumer card application web sites, which are aimed at disparate, competing consumer groups. Consumer card application web sites promote prepaid, secured, or traditional cards. These web sites serve as a starting point for the consumer’s online brand experience and initiate what the companies intend will be an active engagement between the consumer and the brand (Bart, Shankar, Sultan, & Urban, 2005). These web sites are framed to broadly communicate what the advertisers perceive are shared interests among a diverse target market. Within the promotional text, these web sites also address disparate audiences with distinct interests. Examining these web sites offers the opportunity to identify the aspirations the advertisers perceive are relevant to a fractured consumer market. Using aspiration as a lens, this study also seeks to understand how the American dream is encapsulated and enabled through these lender frames. This study uses Gamson and Modigliani’s (1989) approach to frame analysis to identify the broad frames used within and across the three card categories in order to understand how the advertisers seek to persuade a disparate target market. The frame analysis is followed by a discourse analysis, which seeks to drill deeper into the promotional material. Both the frame and discourse analyses identify fractured target markets whose interests were amalgamated based on their assumed participation in the mainstream banking and credit scoring systems. The results of this dissertation include a confirmation of the greatening socioeconomic divide in which consumer choice and limitations are increasingly defined by the larger financial infrastructures. This dissertation contributes both theoretically and practically to the study of advertising frames as well the examination of the promotional materials that proceed online applications for financial products.