A Media Studies Perspective on Marketing, Identity, and Building Something Meaningful
I remember sitting in a lecture hall at UC Berkeley during my second year, listening to a professor break down a fast food commercial frame by frame. Not the jingle, not the price promotion, not the product itself. The lighting. The casting choices. The specific emotional cues embedded in a thirty second clip most people watch without thinking twice.
I remember leaning forward in my seat thinking, "I will never watch an advertisement the same way again."
That moment didn't just change how I saw marketing. It changed how I saw everything.
I'm Jeremy Melodious. I grew up Vietnamese American in Garden Grove, California, studied Media Studies at UC Berkeley, and today I work full time in digital commerce while building a personal brand, creating content, making music, and thinking constantly about how identity, storytelling, and human psychology intersect online. On the surface those things might look scattered. But for me they've always been pointing in the same direction.
This is the post where I explain why.
What Studying Media Studies at UC Berkeley Actually Taught Me
When most people hear "Media Studies" they picture social media management or film criticism. What I actually encountered at Berkeley was something much more unsettling and much more useful.
I learned that media is not passive. It doesn't just reflect culture. It constructs it.
Every advertisement is engineering desire. Every viral trend is satisfying a psychological need that already existed but needed a vessel. Every influencer aesthetic is communicating an identity that a specific audience wants to borrow or belong to. Every algorithmically curated feed is a personalized environment designed to keep you emotionally engaged long enough to see one more thing.
None of it is accidental. All of it is constructed through intentional psychological framing, most of it invisible to people who haven't been taught to look for it.
That realization changes how you move through the world permanently. And honestly it made me both more skeptical and more intentional at the same time. Skeptical of narratives I hadn't examined. Intentional about the ones I chose to build for myself.
That perspective still shapes everything I do today, from how I write posts for my perspectives blog to how I think about building Shopify experiences for the creators and brands I work with through my Elite Shopify Store Builder service.
If you've read pieces like who I am as Jeremy Melodious or my story, you already have a sense of how much of my thinking revolves around identity, intention, and what it means to build something genuine. This blog is really the academic and philosophical foundation underneath all of that.
Being a First-Generation Vietnamese American Student
There's a specific kind of quiet pressure that comes with being the first person in your family to navigate higher education in America, and I don't think it ever fully goes away.
You're not just trying to succeed for yourself. You're translating an entirely unfamiliar system for people you love while simultaneously trying to survive inside it. You're watching your parents work in ways that most people around you at a place like Berkeley will never fully understand, and you're carrying that awareness into every room you walk into.
Growing up in Garden Grove, Vietnamese culture was everywhere. It was in the food, the language switching mid-sentence at dinner, the expectations that didn't need to be spoken out loud because they were already understood. Sacrifice wasn't dramatic in our household. It was just Tuesday. You worked hard quietly. You kept moving. You appreciated opportunity because you understood exactly what it cost to create it.
I didn't fully recognize how much that shaped me until I started studying consumer psychology and brand behavior at Berkeley and realized the frameworks I was learning in class were things my family had lived instinctively for decades. Understanding what matters, communicating value clearly, building trust through consistent action rather than big promises. That's not a marketing strategy in Vietnamese immigrant households. That's just how you live.
Over time I realized that perspective became one of my biggest advantages in understanding branding, not as a system for manipulating people, but as a system for communicating genuine identity clearly enough that the right people can find you and trust you.
Marketing Is Perception Architecture, Not Advertising
One of the biggest misconceptions people carry about marketing is that it's fundamentally about selling products. It isn't. At its deepest level marketing is perception architecture.
It shapes what people believe matters. It influences trust, desire, social identity, emotional connection, and cultural relevance. Every brand is essentially answering the same set of invisible questions for its audience: What does this person want to become? What version of themselves are they trying to move toward? What belonging are they searching for?
At Berkeley I started understanding marketing as something closer to applied philosophy than applied sales. And that shift in framing changed everything about how I approach it practically.
Today when I'm building Shopify experiences, writing content, analyzing trends, or thinking about how to position a creator's brand, I'm constantly thinking about emotional positioning. Not "what does this page sell" but "what does this page make someone feel about themselves when they land on it."
That's also why I find viral internet culture genuinely fascinating rather than just professionally relevant. When I wrote about the Low Cortisol Dance and Ai Dua Em Ve, I wasn't just analyzing a TikTok trend. I was analyzing why millions of people felt emotionally pulled toward a piece of content that asked almost nothing of them. What need was it meeting? What were people giving themselves permission to feel by engaging with it? Those are media studies questions applied in real time, and I find them endlessly interesting.
The same thing happened when I wrote about the Dirty Laundry Dance and the Viral Back Cracking Challenge. Different content, same underlying question: why did this particular thing make people feel something worth sharing?
Building a Personal Brand While Working Full Time
I want to be honest about something I don't talk about enough.
Building a personal brand while working full time is genuinely hard, and most of the content you see online about it leaves out the part where it's ten o'clock on a Tuesday night and you're tired from work and you still have a blog post to finish and a video to edit and you do it anyway not because you feel inspired but because you decided this matters and that decision has to be stronger than your mood on any given night.
I've been that person more times than I can count.
What saved me wasn't motivation. Motivation is unreliable. What saved me was structure. Treating my digital presence not as a hobby I return to when I feel creative, but as a long-term body of work that I show up for consistently regardless of how I feel that day.
Everything I build connects back to the same core: my blog hub, my music on Spotify, my videos, my 1:1 sessions, my songwriting guidance, my Shopify work. None of those things exist separately. They're all expressions of the same identity, and that coherence is what makes a personal brand feel real rather than assembled.
I wrote more about the philosophy behind consistency and daily intention in my piece on world peace, kindness, and choosing a better energy, which sounds like a big topic but really comes down to something simple: small repeated actions shape who you become far more than occasional large efforts do.
Identity Is Built, Not Found
One of the most liberating things I internalized through both Media Studies and lived experience is this: identity is not something you discover. It's something you construct through repeated action over time.
I see people waiting to feel confident before they act confidently. Waiting to feel like a creator before they start creating. Waiting to feel like a musician before they release music. But confidence almost never precedes action. It follows it, usually after many uncomfortable repetitions of doing the thing before you feel ready.
The same is true for discipline, creative voice, communication skills, emotional intelligence, and self-expression. You become what you repeatedly reinforce, and the version of yourself you're moving toward is being built or abandoned in the small choices you make every single day.
That idea shows up constantly in how I approach content. I'm not trying to perform a version of myself online. I'm trying to document a version of myself that's actually being built in real life. The difference between those two things is everything, and audiences can feel it even when they can't articulate exactly what they're sensing.
People are exhausted by manufactured perfection. They want substance. They want perspective that feels lived in. They want to feel like the person on the other side of the screen is actually someone, not just a content strategy with a face attached to it.
That's the entire reason I create the way I do across Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Threads.
Why Physical Movement Keeps My Mind Clear
Something I've learned through building all of this while working full time is that your physical state and your creative state are not separate systems. They're the same system.
I can feel the difference in my thinking on days when I've moved my body versus days when I've spent eight hours at a screen and then tried to create something in the evening. The quality of the ideas is different. The clarity is different. The emotional steadiness that makes it possible to sit down and actually finish something rather than just stare at it is different.
Dance has always been a part of how I process things, not just as performance but as a way of staying connected to physical presence in a life that increasingly happens on screens. I wrote about what movement actually means to my identity in how dance shaped my life, my energy, and who I am today, and that piece gets at something I think a lot of creators overlook. Your body is part of your creative instrument. Taking care of it isn't separate from the work. It's foundational to it.
The Bigger Picture of What I'm Actually Building
If you zoom out on everything I'm doing, ecommerce, content creation, music, blogs, fashion, marketing analysis, it might look like a lot of different things happening at once. But from where I'm standing it's always been one thing.
I'm building a body of communication.
Berkeley gave me the analytical framework for understanding how media shapes human perception. My Vietnamese American upbringing gave me a perspective on discipline, gratitude, and quiet resilience that I couldn't have learned in any classroom. Digital commerce gave me practical systems for turning identity into something discoverable and lasting. And content creation gave me a platform to integrate all of it in public, in real time, in a voice that's actually mine.
That's why I create across formats. The blog hub, the music, the videos, the pop culture commentary, the marketing insights. They're not separate projects. They're different surfaces of the same ongoing conversation about identity, expression, and what it means to build something meaningful in a world where attention is the most competed-for resource that exists.
Final Thoughts
If UC Berkeley and Media Studies taught me one lasting thing it's that the people who understand storytelling will always have an advantage in the modern world. Not because storytelling is manipulation, but because story is how human beings make sense of everything. Including themselves.
Marketing at its highest level isn't selling. Branding at its highest level isn't aesthetics. Content at its highest level isn't entertainment. They're all systems of human communication, and the more intentionally you understand those systems, the more intentionally you can shape your own life inside them.
I'm still building. Still learning. Still figuring out what this all becomes. But I know it's going somewhere real because the foundation underneath it is real. That's the only thing I've ever really cared about getting right.
You can explore everything I'm building at jeremymelodious.com or go deeper through the marketing insights blog. If you want to work together directly, my 1:1 sessions are where that starts.
Follow along on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Threads, Pinterest, and Reddit.
— Jeremy Melodious
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