Adorable by Design: The Business of Cuteness

The main goals of this C2 ESL lesson plan are for students to:

• – practice new advanced vocabulary on the topic of marketing and psychological aspects of business;
• – improve reading comprehension to talk about how cuteness can be used to sway buying decisions as presented in authentic English texts;
• – discuss whether marketing products with the use of psychological tricks is ethical.

In this C2 lesson, students will explore how companies strategically exploit cuteness for profit.

Warm-up:

To get students going and ready for the lesson they will be asked to read a short text on how cuteness can be a big business and share their opinion on the matter. To evoke more natural responses the students will be asked to share any experiences they might have had with cuteness being used in a sales scenario. This ensures the lesson is started with an authentic discussion that sets the stage for the rest of the exercises.

Video:

The students will watch an authentic video “Why do you want to squeeze cute things?” and choose which of the statements were mentioned in the video. This part of the lesson requires the students to show understanding of a fast-paced video honing their fluency in the use of English.

Reading:

The learners will read three separate authentic texts “How Hello Kitty helped post-WWII Japan conquer the world”, “What is ‘Cuteness’ and How Can We Sell It?”, and “The code for cuteness”.

Each of the texts will have a follow-up activity such as answering a broad question about the main message of the text or filling in blanks in sentences based on what the students read.

Discussion:

The students will discuss a case study of how cuteness can be used as marketing strategies and share their opinion on the topic.